Kevin Mulcahy, TMC Performance Coaching

Three profiles. One ratio. This is the whole classification.

Speed Reserve Ratio is top speed in metres per second divided by MAS converted to metres per second. That
is it.

At or below 1.70 you are an aerobic profile. Endurance dominant, big engine, and the gap is at the top end.

Between 1.71 and 1.90 you are hybrid. Balanced at both ends, and this is where most field sport athletes land.
Above 1.90 you are a speed profile.

Real top end, smaller aerobic engine, and the engine is what limits you when the game gets repeated.

A note on the bands, because people ask. The original thresholds come from eight hundred metre running
research. I use a wider hybrid band than the source, because sub elite field sport is not eight hundred metre
running, and the wider band catches genuinely balanced athletes correctly rather than pushing them to an extreme they do not belong in.

That is my applied call, not the literature’s.

Knowing the band is not the point.

What you do differently on Tuesday because of the band is the point.

That is next week.

Profile Finder in the bio. Save this one.

This is where the framework stops being theory and becomes cones on grass.

One prescription. Fifteen seconds at fifteen percent of the speed reserve. Same session, three athletes.

The aerobic player runs to seventy three metres. The hybrid to seventy one. The sprint profile to sixty five.

Eight metres of spread off one instruction, and that spread is the entire point. The percentage equalises the effort.

The cone individualises the distance.

Set a flat seventy metres for everyone and you have cooked one player and under worked another, in the same rep, on the same whistle.

The maths is one line. Target speed equals MAS plus the percentage of the reserve. Distance equals target speed times the seconds.

Profile Finder in the bio. Save this for setting up your next session.

Every conditioning session written as a percentage of MAS has this problem inside it.

120% MAS sounds like one intensity. Run it across a real squad and it is three.

For an aerobic profile it is 32% into their speed reserve, which is close to repeated sprint territory mechanically.
For a sprint profile it is 15%, which is a warm up relative to what they can do.

The number on the whiteboard was identical. The training effect was not close.

This is the entire reason the Anaerobic Speed Reserve exists as a construct.

Above 100% MAS you prescribe as a percentage of the reserve, not a percentage of MAS, because only the reserve is individual.

Sandford, Laursen and Buchheit, 2021, if you want the source.

Profile your squad free, link in bio.

Save this for the next time you write a session.

Build the engine through the muscle, not the lungs. A sprint-profile session for the off-season.

Here’s the problem with a sprint profile: the aerobic engine is the weakness, but send a fast-twitch athlete out to grind long intervals and you blunt the very thing that makes them dangerous. They don’t tolerate it, and they don’t need it. Get them repeating what they are good at and like, a lot.

Build THEIR capacity , not a textbook capacity.

So you build the engine a different way. Repeated sprints, short and sharp, then dense lower-body strength and a barbell circuit on tight rest. The aerobic work comes through the muscle and the repeated efforts, not through slow miles. And off-season, with no game to protect, is exactly when you bank the lower-body strength that keeps them robust once the season starts.

Does this mean they’ll run around endlessly like the atomic animals? Or those gazelle type hybrids? Of course not. But they’ll be able to sprint around and be explosive and make more game breaking plays than they do now. We need piano lifters and piano players, these players tend to be the piano players. You don’t learn the piano by practicing violin.

Read the trace: clean sprint spikes early, the weapon expressed on full quality. Then a lower, controlled band through the strength and circuit work.

Controlled accumulation, never a lung-busting grind.