Strength and speed are two of the most important physical qualities an athlete can develop, but they don’t exist in isolation. A soccer player may need to accelerate past a defender, a basketball player has to create force quickly to get off the floor, and a football player may need to sprint, stop, change direction and absorb contact within a matter of seconds. In each case, performance depends on a combination of strength, power, coordination and movement skill.
That’s why effective athletic training isn’t just about lifting heavier weights or running more sprints. The goal is to help an athlete produce force, produce it quickly and then use it efficiently in the movements their sport demands.
For young athletes especially, that process should be gradual. Strength and speed training can be both safe and valuable for children and teenagers when it is properly coached and appropriate for their level of development. The American Academy of Pediatrics supports resistance training for young athletes when technique, supervision and sensible progression are emphasized.
Why Strength and Speed Training Work Together
Strength gives an athlete the ability to produce force. That shows up in almost every sport, whether they’re accelerating out of a starting position, jumping, holding their ground against another player or slowing their body down before changing direction.
Developing strength doesn’t necessarily mean trying to build as much muscle as possible. For younger athletes in particular, a lot of early strength development comes from learning how to move well and use the muscles they already have more effectively. Squats, lunges, hip hinges, push-ups, pull-ups, rows, carries and core exercises can all have a place in a youth training program. As athletes become more experienced, appropriately coached resistance training can be added and progressed.
Strength also helps set the foundation for power. The two terms are sometimes treated as though they mean the same thing, but there is an important difference: strength is about how much force an athlete can produce, while power is about how quickly they can produce it.
Think about jumping for a volleyball block or exploding toward the basket. The athlete doesn’t have several seconds to gradually generate force. They need it immediately.
That’s why well-designed athletic programs often combine traditional strength exercises with explosive movements such as jumps, bounds, medicine-ball throws and sprints. Research continues to support that approach. A 2025 review of adolescent team-sport athletes found that both strength and plyometric training improved measures including acceleration, sprint speed, jumping and change-of-direction performance.
The key is not simply doing more exercises. It’s choosing exercises that make sense for the athlete and progressing them appropriately.
If You Want to Get Faster, You Have to Practice Running Fast
Strength training can support speed, but it can’t completely replace sprinting.
Athletes who want to improve acceleration and running speed need opportunities to actually sprint at high intensity. For most field and court sports, short-distance acceleration is particularly important. A player often has only a few yards to reach a loose ball, create separation or close down an opponent.
That means speed training may include short bursts of 5, 10 or 20 yards, sometimes from different starting positions. More advanced athletes may also use resisted sprinting with sleds or other tools. A 2025 systematic review of resisted sprint training found that both resisted and unresisted sprint training improved sprint performance, with resisted work showing particular value for short-distance acceleration.
One of the most common mistakes, though, is turning every speed workout into conditioning.
If an athlete is supposed to be training maximum speed but receives almost no rest between repetitions, their sprints eventually get slower. At that point, they’re practicing how to run while fatigued rather than practicing how to move as fast as possible.
There is a place for conditioning, of course. Athletes need to be prepared for the energy demands of their sport. But conditioning, strength and speed don’t always need to be trained in exactly the same way. Sometimes a productive speed workout consists of only a handful of very fast repetitions with plenty of recovery in between.
Speed Isn’t Just Running in a Straight Line
Very few athletes compete by sprinting straight ahead with no one around them.
They stop, cut, shuffle, react and change direction constantly. That makes deceleration and change-of-direction ability just as important as straight-line speed for many sports.
This is also where the word “agility” gets used loosely. A pre-planned cone drill is really testing change of direction because the athlete already knows where they’re going. True agility includes a reaction. A soccer player responds to an opponent’s movement. A basketball defender reacts to the ball handler. A receiver changes course based on what’s happening during the play.
Both types of training are useful. Athletes need to learn the physical mechanics of slowing down and changing direction before they can do it efficiently in a chaotic game environment.
Good training might therefore include acceleration, controlled stopping, lateral movement, cutting from both sides and drills that require the athlete to respond to another player or an external cue.
This is one reason agility ladders deserve a little perspective. They’re common in youth training and can be useful for coordination, rhythm or a warm-up, but moving your feet quickly through a ladder isn’t the same as becoming faster or more agile during competition. A systematic review of agility-ladder training found that the available evidence was too limited to support many of the broad performance claims often made about ladder drills.
They’re a tool, not a complete speed program.
Explosive Training Has a Place Too
Plyometric exercises can help bridge the gap between strength and sport-specific explosiveness. Depending on the athlete’s age and experience, that could mean basic squat jumps, broad jumps and lateral bounds or more advanced reactive jumps and hops.
But the landing matters just as much as the jump.
Before worrying about how high an athlete can get off the ground, a coach should be paying attention to whether they can land under control, absorb force and maintain good positioning through the hips, knees and ankles. Those foundational skills become especially important as exercises get faster or more demanding.
A 2026 systematic review of adolescent team-sport athletes found that plyometric training improved jumping, sprinting and change-of-direction performance. Interestingly, the research also suggests that simply adding more and more jumps isn’t necessarily the answer. Quality and programming still matter.
For a young athlete, five well-executed jumps can be more valuable than 30 sloppy ones performed while exhausted.
Youth Athletes Don’t Need to Train Like Adults
Parents sometimes hear “strength training” and picture a middle school athlete maxing out a barbell. That isn’t what good youth strength and conditioning should look like.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association emphasizes long-term athletic development, including fundamental movement skills, strength, motor control and physical literacy. The AAP similarly recommends considering an athlete’s training experience and movement competency when progressing resistance rather than relying on age alone.
A beginner might spend time learning how to squat, hinge, land and accelerate correctly before significant resistance is ever added. Another teenager who has trained consistently with good coaching for several years may be ready for a much more advanced program.
The athlete’s sport matters too. A swimmer doesn’t have exactly the same needs as a soccer player, and a volleyball player’s training shouldn’t look identical to a distance runner’s. Even two athletes on the same team may have different priorities. One might already be fast but need more strength. Another might be strong but struggle to accelerate or change direction efficiently.
That’s where individualized programming becomes more important than simply following a list of “best exercises.”
More Training Isn’t Always Better Training
Strength and speed work also have to fit into everything else an athlete is already doing.
A young athlete may have team practices, games, tournaments, school physical education and other sports throughout the week. Adding three more intense workouts to an already packed schedule doesn’t automatically lead to better results.
Coaches and parents should look at the full training load. Hard sessions need to be balanced with recovery, adequate sleep and actual time away from demanding exercise.
The same goes for individual workouts. Athletes don’t have to finish every session completely exhausted for it to have been productive. In fact, exhaustion can work against the goal if it causes sprint speed to drop or lifting technique to break down.
A well-balanced training session might begin with a dynamic warm-up, move into short sprints or explosive work while the athlete is fresh, and then include strength exercises. Change-of-direction or reactive work can be added depending on the athlete’s sport and the purpose of that day’s session.
Not every workout has to include everything.
The Goal Is Better Performance, Not a Harder Workout
It’s easy to judge training by how sore an athlete feels afterward or how difficult the workout looked.
Those aren’t necessarily the best measures of success.
A good program should eventually show up where it matters: faster acceleration, better jumping ability, more strength, improved body control, stronger changes of direction and greater confidence in the movements the athlete’s sport requires.
Those changes take time. They also require consistency and training that matches the athlete rather than simply copying what someone else is doing.
For young athletes, the best programs usually aren’t the flashiest ones. They’re the ones that build good movement habits, gradually increase the challenge and leave enough room for the athlete to recover and continue playing the sport they enjoy.
Find Strength and Speed Training Near You
Individual coaching can be helpful for athletes who want to work on a specific part of their physical development or aren’t sure where to focus.
Athletes Untapped connects athletes with private strength and speed coaches who can tailor training around the athlete’s sport, experience and goals. That might mean working on acceleration, jumping, strength, change of direction or simply developing a stronger overall athletic foundation.
The goal isn’t to train harder just for the sake of training harder. It’s to figure out what will actually help that athlete perform better.
