Football Players & Fighter Jets

“… to win in battle a pilot needs to operate at a faster tempo than his enemy. It suggests that he must stay one of two steps ahead of his adversary; he must operate inside his adversary’s time scale.”

– Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

When I read this in 2002 it confirmed everything that I had been working on for the previous 20 years.  If I could get my players to play faster it did make a difference.  It wasn’t just me; it was seen in other arenas of intense competition.  

In sports, we were always looking for an advantage.  Whereat one time being faster was the cutting edge.   Soon bigger and faster soon trumped that.  What was the next evolution of the game?  It was moving fast but more importantly, it was moving fast while controlling each progression of movement.  From the get-off to the collision, to the release, to the body angle, to the ability to accelerate while changing direction.  These were the “fast transient” that Boyd had described in his briefings.

Not only did we take fast athletes and made them faster, but we made them quicker, more explosive, and more powerful, all the while making them more streamlined.  We didn’t just work this once in a while, but every single day of our training calendar.  Our workout time limits were 100 minutes.  A group would start at 6:00 am and would train movement for 60 - 70 minutes.  Then they would go into the weight room and use our training program to get “strong enough” to play and dominate their positional requirements.  

Remember I said we “streamlined” our athletes.  No longer were we looking for the big thick hulking refrigerators.  We did not want any of our athletes to carry more weight than they needed.  Two things excess body mass, whether it be fat or muscle, does is slow an athlete’s potential speed and will cause an athlete’s conditioning to be compromised.  The concept of being “Strong Enough” was based on watching our athletes who did not have overwhelming physical strength, consistently beat opponents who were supposedly lifting most of the athletic complex at their respective school.