Back when coaches like me had to buy DVDs  to learn the latest cutting edge speed drills I remember watching with excitement in 2003 as I devoured DVD series such as those from Martin Rooney and Bill Parisi of Parisi speed school (see below).

 

R – rhythm

U – unnecessary movements or asymmetry

N – neural type (explosive or not)

 

G – ground reaction force (reactive or not)

R – leg recovery

E – eccentric control (do they stay stiff or not)

A – arm action

T – timing

 

I still remember that acronym to this day!  But as much as I liked it, this didn’t quite go far enough for me to give my athletes objective feedback on what they were doing well and what they needed to do better in order to sprint faster and/or move more efficiently.  Fast forward 20 years and in 2023 I made the decision to partner with Speedworks, a Loughborough based coaching company specialising in sprinting and headed up by renown coach Jonas Dodoo.

 

 

You can here more about Jonas and Speedworks here and here

 

Through Jonas’ early experience as a coach under the mentorship of Dan Pfaff he quickly understood the importance of observation skills when watching your athletes move/sprint.  And so coaching eye was something that was really hammered down very early for Jonas. And by accident, he realized that coaching eye was something that everyone wanted to learn from him.

 

I first learnt about Jonas’ attempts to quantify sprint performance objectively with his launch of the Binary app during the Pandemic.  Jonas said at the time:

“My expectations are probably based on my bias. This is what I think good movement looks like and fast speed looks like. And I think over the past five years I’ve been able to take a step back from my bias or at least combine my bias with reality, with real data, with real numbers and actually maybe close the line between what I perceived them to be able to do and what they actually do. A long winded way of describing it.”

 

When APA came onboard, Jonas had already upgraded and found a new partner in Vuemotion so now what happens is APA submit the video of the 10m sprint and 10-0-5 COD to Vuemotion who use AI to analyse the kinematic features of the runs and then Speedworks interprets the data with their own algorithm and set of KPIs based on Jonas’ years of experience.  What comes out the other end is a report.

 

Linear Speed Report

At APA I made the decision that even though we work in tennis where you rarely accelerate for more than a few steps, it is important for our athletes to learn to sprint properly.  So when we talk about acceleration, we’ve got to be careful that we’re not setting a goal for a 10 metre time and encouraging a technique and a strategy that gets us there fast, but puts us in a bad position.

 

I want balanced athletes that have a robust running technique allowing for individual style (same as we say about their tennis technique) and puts them in an efficient position.  For tennis this is mostly about learning to be an efficient mover per se and I can’t think of anything better than sprinting to develop your ability to work at 100% effort without wasting unnecessary energy.  For other sports it might be about putting you in the optimum position at 10m to make a decision, such as in team sports. And you also need to be an efficient position to keep getting faster in a linear sport. 

 

APA have used timing gates for years and it certainly helps to give objective data on the time of the run but it doesn’t tell you anything about the strategy used to achieve that time.

 

So let’s take a look at the latest Linear Speed report released by Speedworks in 2025 (V5)

 

 

These reports display key information including key performance outputs and overall speed score, followed by step characteristics and the athlete’s PSR score.  You can listen to Jonas explain the report at the end of this section.  But just a couple of clarification points for me first.

 

1. The Speed Score – is a composite of Performance outcome (meaning split time and peak velocity) AND process aka strategy (PSR scores).  You might be expecting that the goal is to get 100 in everything.  In fact, as we are looking for an optimum running technique we find that a more balanced spread of ability across the factors is preferred, so a Speed Score of “70” is actually optimum.  It is colour coded so RED is typically below 40, yellow is around 50-60 and GREEN is typically 70 and above.
2. Split times – At APA we only do a 10m sprint but you can see that if you submit a 20m sprint Speedworks will break down the run into a 0-10m and a 10-20m analyse.

 

The colour coding is simple for coaches to clearly see where the athlete excels and where they need to improve.

 

 

There are now 7 parts to the overall report – PERFORMANCE – Step characteristics – Running Economy – Step to Step – Underpinning – Rehab – Historical

 

Here is a screenshot of Running Economy

 

Here is a screenshot of Step to Step

 

As practitioners that may be working in different departments such as biomechanics, strength & conditioning, medical, and coaching there is sure to be one page that peeks your interest.  I personally tend to focus on the Performance and Running economy pages.

 

One thing I’ll add below is a guide that Speedworks have sent me to help understand the different aspects of the athlete’s PSR strategy in more detail.  Remember, Green is Good.  The more closer to Red the more this is a weakness.

 

Here is Jonas explaining the full report:

 

 

Athlete Example at APA

Let’s look an example of one of our junior athletes

 

 

I’ve chosen this athlete because he is one of the only athletes I have videoed (and we have now videoed over 50 athletes) who has some of the characteristics of running technique that we might hope to see in an athlete who has a technique that will allow them to keep getting faster beyond 10m.

 

From experience, most of our tennis athletes are PROJECTION dominant, meaning they displace their hips really well but this ends up looking like overstriding so they don’t have a good leg recovery and as a result their SWITCHING and REACTIVITY is compromised.

 

 

Sprint performance is all about combinations. And neither is it about maximizing your stride length, neither it is about maximizing your stride frequency. It’s about finding this optimal because of the fact that our limbs don’t work in isolation, energy transfers through our pelvis to each limb. So it’s not about getting the most out of the pushing leg and getting a massive toe off distance and making a massive shape because if you do that, what you may end up doing is not having any pretension in your swing leg that’s in front. 

 

And this is typically what we see in tennis players because they want to make a massive shape to reach for the wide ball as this ensures they have the best chance of making contact with the ball even if they are on the full stretch.  Contact point with the ball is a non negotiable.  This means they will often times negotiate on other things such as pretension, as the objective isn’t to keep getting faster beyond 10m in most cases.

 

His report findings

His name has been hidden for anonymity reasons.  But I can say that this is a 10 year old boy and his scores are being compared to “Junior Athletes,” which for Speedworks is 13-16 year olds.  Academy would be 16-18 years old.

 

I’m working with Speedworks to help provide benchmarks for our athletes but considering he is 10 years old and is being compared to 13 year old and above boys you can see he is an exceptional athlete.  What this report will hopefully highlight is that his outcome in terms of Split time might be “39” indicated by the colour Orange/red but his strategy (Economy score) of how he achieves that time is optimal  “73” indicated by the colour Green.

 

This tells me that as he gets bigger and stronger and catches up the older boys in terms of limb length he will surely be one of our fastest athletes as well in terms of split time, provided he continues to optimise his step characteristics through growth and maturation.  No pressure team!

 

Performance 

 

Step characteristics

 

At APA one of our key performance indicators (KPIs) is the ability to get up to “Game speed” as quickly as possible – the acceleration potential to get up to 6 m/s by the third step (Step 3).  You can see that the athlete gets up to 4.7 m/s which is a YELLOW/Orange colour, indicating that as he goes through the 10m run step velocity performance relative to the junior benchmark is going down a little bit with each step.

 

Running Economy

 

 

This is an example of what we mean at APA by a “balanced” athlete.  I don’t mean that in the literal sense of being able to keep his balance.  I mean that he has a optimal blend of PROJECTION – SWITCHING – REACTIVITY.

 

If you remember earlier, there are a few variables which are coloured BLUE if they are too high.  For Acceleration these are:

• Air time
• Trunk angle
• Hip height

 

The blue in the above photo shows that the athlete can be even more efficient if he lowers his trunk (blue triangle on left hand side), and lowers his hips (blue arrow pointing down on the right hand side).  If you check back to the Step Characteristics photo, you will see that Air Time is scored “36” so we want lower air time at the start so he can spend more time pushing the floor away.

 

Summary:

The reports are a terrific way for us as coaches to confirm our bias in terms of what we think we are observing in the athlete’s sprint performance.  Sometimes it can be quite obvious what the areas are that need to be worked on but as you go up the ranks and start working with a group of “fast athletes” who all seem to look good at first glance, I can assure you that having this objective feedback is essential, especially if you are like me and someone who doesn’t specialise in coaching track & field on a day to day basis.

 

In the next blog I will take you through the COD report!

 

Hope you have found this article useful.

 

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