Strength is the quality that we all chase consistently.

It’s easy to train, easy to measure and easy to improve.

But does it actually lead to improved sprint performance?

That’s the question that athletes ask me weekly.

What can I do in the gym to get faster?

And whilst early improvements in strength will be likely to improve your acceleration and sprint speed.

After you’ve achieved your newbie gains, any further enhancements are much harder to get from traditional strength training.

Stiffness & reactivity though?

There’s a quality that is not trained nearly as often or consistently as general strength.

It’s equally as easy to train.

But perhaps it’s more difficult to measure for the general gym goer.

So therefore they find it much more difficult to measure their progress whilst attempting to develop it.

And for that reason, they don’t often train it.

However, if I were asked by a team-sport athlete which quality would be more likely to improve their sprint speed and power on the field.

I would almost certainly opt for stiffness and reactivity.

And the reason for that is, that they likely already have a significant training age when it comes to traditional strength training.

They’ve likely already improved their ability to generate maximal force.

And that general force production is what we typically are training with traditional strength training.

However, it is not always our maximal force production that is holding us back from getting faster as we gain experience as an athlete.

Often adult athletes with a background in strength training are pretty strong.

But their ability to generate that force quickly and transmit it into the ground could definitely improve.

It’s an underdeveloped quality and it’s probably their best bang for buck if they want to improve their speed.

They can maintain the same level of strength and improve their stiffness and the likelihood that they will get faster will be very high.

They’ll be able to use more elastic qualities and get off the ground much more quickly if they can develop it.

And as a result they’ll likely be much more efficient at “bouncing” off the ground as well, thus conserving more energy for their subsequent efforts.

And that’s not to say that strength isn’t important.

It’s just to say that we often bias strength when thinking about what we’re doing in our strength & conditioning.

I mean it’s easy to do so.

It’s in the name.

But there are many more physical qualities that are relevant to athletic performance that we fail to train with the same level of diligence.

And those qualities are just as important.

So if I was tasked with hanging my hat on one quality over another to make my team-sport  athletes faster.

With an inexperienced athlete I’d probably choose strength.

And with a more experienced athlete I’d probably choose stiffness.

That doesn’t mean I’d work on each of those qualities in isolation.

What it does mean is that I would place more emphasis on developing that quality over others.

At least for their current block of training.

In order to be fast we must be able to co-ordinate repetitive high-force ground-contacts in a short amount of time.

So part of that is relevant to force.

Part of that is relevant to time.

And part of that is relevant to co-ordination.

It’s a combination of each of those actions that leads to an athlete being fast.

So each of them needs to be given some level of focus.

And the amount of focus we give to each of them is dependent on the athlete that we have in front of us.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

In order to achieve the best possible outcome with each individual client…

Their training should be specific to them and the current gaps in their athletic profile.

Not strength over stiffness or stiffness over strength.

But strength or stiffness at different times in their athletic development journey.