Sam Portland - Speed Coach

One of the easiest traps to fall into as a performance coach is continuing to improve something simply because you can.

This is real data from an 18-year-old hockey player I’ve been working with.

Over roughly six weeks:

Standing broad jump:

2.54m → 2.78m → 2.77m

Around a 9% improvement.

3-fold broad jump:

7.29m → 7.87m → 9.14m

Around a 25% improvement.

That final 3-fold result is exceptionally high, so I’ll reproduce it before treating it as an established benchmark.

Now here’s the interesting bit.

He’s already got a substantial general strength base.

His horizontal power has clearly developed.

So what do we do?

Keep pushing the numbers?

Try to get the broad jump to 3 metres?

Make him even stronger?

Add more plyometrics?

We could.

And I think that’s where coaches can accidentally become trapped by their own testing.

Because when a KPI improves, we’re naturally incentivised to keep chasing it.

It’s working.

The athlete is getting better.

Why stop?

But the purpose of testing isn’t to create an endless collection of PRs.

It’s to help you decide what deserves training.

Eventually a quality moves from:

DEVELOP

to

MAINTAIN.

And your attention moves somewhere else.

For this athlete, I’m increasingly interested in what happens downstream.

Can we take the force-production qualities we’ve developed and transfer them into acceleration?

Can we transfer them into skating speed?

Can we integrate them into hockey actions?

Can he actually solve sporting problems faster?

That’s the progression I’ve always thought about as:

GENERAL → SPECIFIC → SPECIAL → TACTICAL

The numbers don’t have to stop improving.

But eventually improving the number stops being the priority.

Good testing tells you what to develop.

Great interpretation tells you when to move on.

Want help making more efficient decisions with your data comment "system" for my performance coach operating system.

If an exercise isn’t producing the result you expected, don’t immediately replace the exercise.

Change the constraint first.

This is something I use constantly in speed development.

An athlete isn’t projecting properly in acceleration.

The instinct is:

Find another drill.

But the drill might not be the problem.

Change the constraint.

Add resistance.

Change the start.

Manipulate distance.

Change the task.

Change the intent.

Alter the environment.

Then observe what happens.

Because sometimes the athlete doesn’t need another exercise.

They need the same problem presented differently.

I think exercise libraries have accidentally taught coaches to solve every problem through selection.

Exercise isn’t working?

Find another.

But good coaching often involves manipulating the variables within the intervention before abandoning it.

That’s a very different programming philosophy.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve built so much of my speed work around progressions and classifications rather than exercise libraries.

ACCELERATION IS STRENGTH TRAINING.

It’s just not done with a barbell.

And once you understand that, the way you programme speed starts to change.

Traditionally we’ve separated the two:

Strength = gym.

Speed = field.

So when an athlete needs to produce more force?

We make them stronger.

Squat.

Deadlift.

Split squat.

Add load.

And hope some of that new strength eventually appears when they sprint.

But acceleration doesn’t care about your back squat.

It cares whether you can apply force:

In the right direction.
At the right time.
At the required velocity.

Think about acceleration.

Overcome inertia.

Project the centre of mass.

Produce horizontal force.

Apply it through increasingly shorter ground contacts.

Repeat as velocity increases.

That’s strength.

But it’s a very specific expression of strength.

Which is why athletes can keep getting stronger in the gym…

While their acceleration barely changes.

Adaptation ≠ Transfer.

Maybe they genuinely lack general force capacity.

Get stronger.

But maybe they already have plenty.

Maybe they can’t convert it quickly enough.

Maybe force direction is the problem.

Maybe projection is poor.

Maybe their first two steps are ineffective.

Different problem.

Different adaptation.

Different intervention.

That’s why I don’t start with:

“What strength exercise should I use?”

I start with:

“What is limiting this athlete’s ability to accelerate?”

That’s the process I’ve gone deep into inside my new Sports Speed — Acceleration Manual.

Not another collection of sprint drills.

A system for assessing, understanding and programming acceleration for team-sport athletes.

I’ve just opened the pre-order.

And everyone who pre-orders also gets access to an archived BTS Acceleration Masterclass from one of my live seminars.

Want the pre-order link?

Comment ACCELERATION and I’ll send it over.

Coaches love adding training.

But adaptation doesn’t reward you for how much work you wrote on the programme.

Think about two programmes.

Programme A

8 exercises.

Lots of volume.

Athlete exhausted.

Coach feels productive.

Programme B

4 interventions.

Each targets a defined adaptation.

Volume controlled.

Outcome measured.

Which is the better programme?

You can’t answer that by counting exercises.

That’s the problem.

Coaching has a strange tendency to reward visible work.

More exercises.

More sets.

More testing.

More complexity.

But athletes don’t adapt to how impressive the spreadsheet looks.

They adapt to the dose.

So the question isn’t:

“How much training can I fit in?”

It’s:

“What’s the minimum effective dose required to create the adaptation I want?”

That distinction becomes especially important when you’re working with team-sport athletes who already have enormous competing demands.

It’s one of the reasons my programming has generally become simpler as my coaching has become more sophisticated.

The better you get at coaching, the easier it is to accidentally build yourself a job you can’t escape from.

It normally starts positively.

You get better.

More athletes trust you.

Your diary fills up.

Your income increases.

So naturally, you keep doing the thing that worked:

More clients = more money.

Until eventually you hit capacity.

There are only so many sessions you can coach.

Only so many hours in the week.

And suddenly the business you built to create freedom starts demanding more of your time just to maintain the same income.

That’s the Time for Money Trap.

The problem isn’t that 1-to-1 coaching is bad.

I still coach 1-to-1.

The problem is when your time is the only thing your business knows how to monetise.

Eventually, your business needs other layers:

Systems.

Products.

Group delivery.

Recurring revenue.

Intellectual property.

Offers that aren’t entirely dependent on you being physically present.

Not because everyone needs to “scale.”

But because your time will always be limited. Your value doesn’t have to be.

And for a lot of good coaches, that’s the difference between simply earning money from coaching and actually building a sustainable coaching career.

If you want to learn how to build a successful coaching business that doesn’t steal your life, comment BLUEPRINT and I’ll send you the process I’ve taught to well over 100 coaches in the last 12 months.

Ask them how they’d develop speed.

Five methods.

Ask about strength.

Seven options.

Ask about conditioning.

Three competing models.

They’re knowledgeable.

That’s not the problem.

The problem appears when they have to choose.

Because every new method creates another possible answer.

So the internal conversation becomes:

Could I do this?

Or this?

What about this?

I saw someone else doing that…

Maybe I should change this…

And eventually knowledge creates decision friction.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that expertise isn’t demonstrated by how many options you can produce.

It’s demonstrated by how quickly you can eliminate the wrong ones.

The developing coach asks:

“What could I do?”

The experienced coach asks:

“What does this athlete actually need?”

Those questions produce completely different programmes.

I got this message after a call with a coach recently.

And I think it highlights something I’ve become increasingly interested in with coach development.

Sometimes you don’t need more information.

You need somewhere to take the information you already have.

A real athlete.

A real programme.

A decision you’re struggling with.

Something in your environment that doesn’t quite make sense.

And then have somebody help you pull it apart.

What are we actually trying to solve?

What evidence do we have?

What are we assuming?

What options do we have?

What happens next?

That’s very different from watching another course.

Because the objective isn’t for me to give you the answer.

It’s to help you build a decision process that eventually doesn’t require me.

And I’ve noticed that sometimes 15 minutes spent working through a real problem can create more clarity than another few hours consuming information.

That’s increasingly how I want to approach coach development.

Less information for information’s sake.

More conversations that help good coaches make better decisions.