 Whether you call it soccer or football, today we're going to talk about how to run faster, how to get faster, and how to increase your speed so you can be more effective on the field. Couple things before we start this video. Number one, it's really windy out here. I do have my microphone on and I hope it's going to do the job, but if you're having trouble hearing what I'm saying because of the wind, just click that closed caption or subtitle video on this, subtitle link on this video and it will give you the text for the words that I'm saying so you can follow along. Number two, I'm really sick. I can't even talk. I sound a bit ridiculous, but I was actually trying to do this video by myself yesterday and I couldn't breathe and talk at the same time, okay? But I was training one of the players that I trained today, Marco, so he's going to help me with the demonstration and I'm going to talk while he demonstrates what I want you guys to focus on. Now, before we get into exactly how you're going to get faster, I want to say if you've ever been told that speed is all about genetics and you can't do anything to improve your speed, that's absolute BS. Anyone who's ever told you that is either misinformed themselves or they're just holding you back because they don't want to see you get faster than them. So believe me, if you follow this advice, you can improve and you will become faster. So to get faster, I've broken it down into four areas. Number one we're going to talk about is your mentality, like always. Number two is your technique, your running or sprinting technique. Number three is the muscle memory, triggering or training your muscles to trigger faster with more power. And number four is developing strength and power. We'll go into more detail about all those things, but those are the four things that are going to help you become a faster player. So the first thing we're going to talk about is mentality and what I mean by that is if you want to become faster, you actually have to learn to push yourself faster with your mind. So before we get into techniques, before we get into all these drills that are going to increase your speed, you will become faster instantly by learning to push yourself with your mind. What do I mean by that? I mean, every time you go to sprint, you have to be trying to push your body faster with your mind. I know it sounds a little bit weird, but I want you to play with it because most of us don't understand actually how fast we can go. So if you can learn to, every time you do a sprint, whether you're practicing by yourself, when you're in the game, in the heat of the moment, try to push yourself faster, push your limbs faster, push your arms faster, push your legs faster, drive forward with more intensity by pushing yourself mentally. Okay? And before we get into all those other things, I just wanted to touch on that before we go. Because if you can make that change right away, just try trying to push yourself faster. You will become faster. Now we're going to talk about sprinting techniques. So if you can make these three changes to your sprinting technique that I'm going to talk about today, you will feel a lot faster, but it's not going to come right away. The first time you do it, it's going to feel awkward. But if you keep doing it, keep building on it, keep thinking about how this may be more effective for me and keep adding it every time you sprint, then you're going to see the results. It's all about consistency. It's all about working with these ideas. Okay? So Marco's going to demonstrate a couple of sprints for us. The first thing I want you to think about when you're sprinting is staying lower to the ground. Most of us are sprinting and just hold on for it, Marco. Most of us are sprinting and we're up here. It's tough to generate power, especially when you're starting. If you want to accelerate quicker, get lower to the ground. So you want to stay lower to the ground for your first couple of strides, and you want to think about having your upper body in front of your lower body. If I'm sprinting like this, it's tough to get speed. If I'm sprinting like this, my forward momentum will make me go faster. So demonstrate one for us, Marco. Go ahead. Get lower to the ground. Push, push, push, push, push, push. So that didn't come back. You can see his body, his upper body is forward, and I want you to do one more like that. I want you to try to stay even lower to the ground, okay? Lower to the ground. Start lower, lower, lower, lower. Good. So everything is going forward. Everything pumping hard, going forward, forward momentum, keeping lower to the ground. He can generate more power. Next time you're at the field, just feel your leg when you're down here. It's strong. There's more power. If I'm up here, I can't generate as much power. So stay lower to the ground, especially when you're starting. Okay. Second thing I want you to think about is actually generating more power with your strides, especially those first couple strides. So when you're planting your foot, don't just pick your foot up and keep running. Don't just pick your foot up. Actually think about putting your cleats in the ground and pushing yourself forward. Okay? Make those first, especially four strides, really powerful. Okay? So Marco is really good at that. He's going to demonstrate one more time. First thing again, he's staying low. Now he's pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, good. And you can see the power in each stride, really pumping, pushing himself forward. So think about actually with your cleats, the balls of your feet, grabbing the ground and pushing it behind you. You will generate more power and you will run quicker. The last thing I want to talk about with technique is your arm movement. Okay? So a lot of us, we run like weird, especially younger kids, they run like weird, something like this, one arm does this, one arm does that. Okay? You want to think about going forward, cheek to cheek. So my face cheek to my butt cheek. Okay? It should be something like that. You don't want to do like super big, but something in there nice and comfortable, but what I want to talk about is the power in those strides. The harder you pump your arms, the faster your legs will have to go to keep up and you'll generate more speed because you're producing more forward momentum. If I'm running like this, this is lateral movement. Okay? I'm slowing myself down. But if I can pump everything forward, nice and hard, you're going to generate more speed. Okay? Marco, do one more for us. It's really low. Grab that ground. Pull those arms. Pull those arms. Good. Okay? You can see the power in his arm. Good. So finally, what I want to say is on technique, I'm actually going to add a link in the description of this video and it's a documentary on sprinting technique. Now the documentary is actually in French. So unless you speak French, you're not going to be able to understand anything. But what I want you to look at is there's some slow motion of Olympic sprinters and how they run. Okay? If you can just watch sprinters and learn from them, you're going to have a lot better of idea of how to run properly and how to generate more speed when you're playing soccer. Let's quickly recap what we've gone through. So number one, you've got the right mentality. You're always trying to push yourself harder and faster and you believe that you can become faster. Next, you've focused on improving your technique. So those three things, three main things we talked about, you want to try to do those every time you sprint, you're going to be faster. Third thing we're going to talk about is training your legs or training your body, training your muscles to trigger faster. Most of us get out to the field and we try to sprint and we feel like weak. There's no power in our legs. Well, that's because you haven't trained your legs to trigger that quickly. If you look at Olympic sprinters or football players even running backs, okay, they're always working on these quick feet drills and explosive sprints. So if you want to become faster at sprinting, you actually have to practice sprinting and you have to build the muscle memory in your legs so it remembers every time you get on the field and you try to sprint, you do it quickly. You do it with power. You do it with explosiveness. Okay, so first thing you should be practicing is just sprinting. Okay, so Marco's just going to do one sprint. He's going to come from a stand still at the ground. Yep. Okay. So he's going to start down here. And he, so for example, you would just do about 30 yards, Marco, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, quick. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Good. Okay. So you could just practice that and I recommend you practice your starts because that's really where your speed starts. It's easy to keep yourself going fast. It's harder to get yourself going fast. So if you can become really good at starts, then you're going to have a lot of speed in the long run for those long distance sprints. Okay. So what I would recommend is you can practice just starts. Do like 10 repetitions a day in a week. You will feel a lot faster, a lot faster. You will feel a lot more comfortable sprinting. Some other stuff you can do, for example, ladders. I'm sure you've worked on ladders before, but just like pushing yourself in the sprints, you need to push yourself in the ladders. Okay. So Marco is going to do zigzag, quick feet, quick feet, quick feet. His arms are going, his feet are quick. Boom. And then after the ladder, I always like to end with a sprint. Okay. Always convert it to a game situation, explosive speed. So what do you do if you don't have a ladder? Well, you can do the exact same drills. And if you need ladder drills, just go to my channel and search ladder agility drills. And you'll get a video with a bunch of different exercises. If you don't have a ladder, no problem. Marco, why don't you do the exact same exercise without a ladder? Good. Quick feet, quick feet, quick feet. Once it gets out, boom, explode, explode, explode. Good. Okay. Always pushing yourself. All those things we talked about, technique, forward, forward momentum, get your upper body ahead of your lower body, powerful strides, really pushing that ground behind you, pumping the arms nice and hard. Okay. So if you want to become faster, you actually have to practice running faster. You have to actually practice moving your feet faster. If you do that on a consistent basis, you will become a faster player. Finally, if you want to become faster, you have to develop stronger, more powerful legs. Now, I've seen lots of people saying on comments or in some of my group discussions that lifting weights is bad. It's going to make you slow. That is not true. If you're playing soccer every day and you're practicing sprinting, working on these techniques that we talked about before, and you're lifting weights, you're going to become faster. Why? Your legs are going to become stronger and more powerful so they can produce more power. When it's time to push off the ground and accelerate yourself forward, you'll be able to generate more power and you'll be able to run faster. So anyone who's ever told you that is lying to you or they're just too lazy to put in the work themselves and they don't want to see you get faster than them. So if you want to develop strong legs, Marco, come on up for me. So first of all, before you get into weights, you should be comfortable with your body weight. Okay, and especially if you're younger, let's say like 12 years old and you want to start developing strong legs, it's not too early to start. Just start with body weight exercise. So Marco, come here first. So a couple of things you can do. Squats, basic squats. So all these exercises, think about keeping your chest up and your butt down. So shoulder width on your stance. Good, just show me a couple of squats, okay? So his chest stays up, his butt goes down and he's going down slow. Every time he comes up, he wants you to push with a little bit of what I like to call controlled power. So you're working on that boom, explosive motion. Boom, explosive motion. Okay, let's see a couple of lunges you can just step. Go ahead, just step. Good, and step back and go again. Okay, again, chest up, butt down, just developing stronger legs. You could do things like a single leg deadlift to develop hamstring strength. So just like that, just place the camera on one leg, slight bend, going down and coming up, okay? And you should be researching these types of exercises, proper technique on the internet before you're getting out there and doing it by yourself so you have a better idea. Okay, once you become comfortable with your body weight, then you can move into weights. So I just kicked Marco's butt yesterday, his legs are a bit sore, but we're going to have them do this. So why don't you just hold this quick? And can you press that, put that up above your neck? Good, push. Okay, so once you become comfortable, you want to start using weights. It's going to challenge you more, spread your feet. Good, show me a couple of squats, butt down, chest up. Good, and ease into it. Good, do about three, go a bit lower each time, okay? So again, going down slow, nice and controlled, coming up strong, okay? Good, why don't you just turn and do, I want you to start right here, just lunge across the screen. Turn and go backwards this way. Yep, lunge that way, okay? So you need to start with a weight that you're comfortable with. I don't want you to have a big ego, get in there and think that you're super mad, okay? Start low, focus on the proper technique, and then you'll develop the strength, okay? So again, I'll do another video on proper technique. Mark, why don't you put the weight down for me? Okay, you can also do power moves, like cleans or clean and jerks, okay? So like Olympic lifts, these are really good for building strong, powerful legs, but again, chest up, butt down, okay? Clean, just like there, I'm catching the weight and back down. Little more explosive movement, or clean and jerk. You've seen that sort of thing, okay? But these are all moves that you can do. You can also do things like plyometrics, like squat jumps. Mark will come in here and do a couple of squat jumps for us. Just do three squat jumps for me. Okay, so he's squatting down, really low, jumping up, as soon as he lands, back down, good. Okay, all about good technique, good. Just do a couple of lunge jumps. So when the lunge stands, power, power, okay? Trying to get off the ground, generating power, okay? But if you want to become faster, you have to be willing to put in this hard work that most people don't want to do to make your legs stronger, more powerful, and that's going to help you run fast. Let's recap quickly before you leave. Number one, mentality. Always try to push yourself faster. Believe that you can become faster if you put in the work. Number two, your technique. Think about those three things we really touched on. Staying lower to the ground, getting that forward momentum, your upper body in front of your lower body, pushing the ground with more powerful strides, actually pushing the ground behind you and pushing yourself forward. And finally, number three, pumping your arms. Nice and straight, not across your body, but getting power from your arms rather than just your legs. Third thing we talked about is building the muscle memory in your legs, training yourself to trigger faster. So quicker feet, quicker acceleration, quicker movement. If you want to get faster, if you want to be faster at sprinting, well, you actually have to practice sprinting. I know that seems like a silly thing to say, but most of us want to become faster, but we haven't practiced sprints ever in our life unless we were forced to by our coach. So if you want to become faster, put in that work. Then finally, developing stronger, more powerful legs by doing strength exercises, plyometrics, or lifting weights. And remember, start small and then build your way up. So what do you do now? Well, I want you to start with a very basic thing. I want you to do three times a week. I want you to do three sets of 10 squats. If you think you're ready for weight, then you can start with weight. But I want you to do three sets of 10 squats, and I want you to do 10 sprints, 40-yard sprints. That's all I want you to do. If you do that three times a week, give yourself one day of rest in between, but do that three times a week, three sets of 10 squats, and 10 sets of 30 to 40-yard sprints, really focusing on acceleration, I guarantee in one week you will feel a lot faster. Thank you for checking out this video. Please like, comment, share this video on social media. Please give me a quick thumbs up and comment below if you have any questions. Just let me know, I'd love to clear it up for you. Thank you very much for watching this video on how to get faster, how to run faster, and how to increase your speed for soccer or football. Talk to you real soon.