Should Football Players Still Train Max Speed During the Season?
Football season is almost here.
Excitement is building. Practices are ramping up. Friday nights are around the corner.
But every year, we see the same mistake.
The moment the season starts, athletes stop training.
The weight room gets abandoned. Sprint work disappears. Speed training becomes nothing more than running routes, chasing ball carriers, or surviving another tough practice.
Athletes assume that’s enough.
It isn’t.
If you want to play your best football in Week 10—not just Week 1—you need to continue training during the season. That doesn’t mean crushing yourself with brutal workouts. It means maintaining the physical qualities that made you explosive in the first place.
One of the most important qualities?
Max speed!
Training doesn’t stop just because the season starts. The training just changes. Check out our previous article on how to transition from off season to in season training.
Practice Is Not Speed Training
One of the biggest misconceptions in football is that practices and games naturally maintain an athlete’s speed.
On the surface, that sounds logical.
After all, football involves sprinting.
The problem is that playing football and training speed are two completely different things.
Practice is chaotic. Athletes are reacting, changing direction, wearing pads, avoiding contact, and often accumulating fatigue. The goal of practice is learning schemes, executing plays, and preparing to win games.
Speed training has a completely different objective.
A max speed session is intentional. Athletes are fresh enough to produce high-quality sprint mechanics, reach near top velocity, recover fully between reps, and expose the nervous system to outputs it simply doesn’t receive during a typical football practice.
Games and practices are stressors.
Speed sessions are performance builders.
When athletes eliminate speed training, they slowly lose one of the qualities that separates great football players from average ones.
If You Don’t Sprint Fast, You Stop Being Fast
Speed is one of the fastest physical qualities to decline when it isn’t trained.
Strength can often be maintained with relatively low volume.
Power can be preserved with a few explosive lifts.
Top speed is different.
Your nervous system needs regular exposure to high velocities to maintain the coordination, stiffness, timing, and force production required to sprint at your highest level.
Think about it this way.
You wouldn’t expect to maintain a 400-pound squat if you never touched heavy weights for three months.
So why would you expect to maintain elite sprinting ability if you never intentionally sprint near maximum speed?
The athletes who stay explosive throughout the season are usually the ones who continue exposing their bodies to quality sprinting.
Speed Training Can Help Keep You Healthier
One of the biggest reasons we continue max speed work during the season isn’t just performance.
It’s injury prevention.
Hamstring injuries happen most often during high-speed running.
Ironically, many athletes avoid sprinting in training because they’re afraid of pulling a hamstring.
Unfortunately, avoiding sprinting often creates the exact problem they’re trying to prevent.
Your hamstrings must be conditioned to tolerate the enormous forces produced during maximal sprinting. Regular exposure to controlled high-speed running helps prepare the muscles, tendons, and nervous system for those demands instead of asking them to suddenly handle them on Friday night.
A recent peer-reviewed study published in Sports Health (2025) examined the effects of maximal sprint exposures on hamstring injury risk factors. The researchers concluded that monitoring and appropriately programming maximal sprinting is an important component of preparing athletes for the demands of competition rather than avoiding sprinting altogether.
Another 2025 prospective study following 126 elite football players found that sprint mechanics during maximal velocity running were associated with future hamstring injury risk. Athletes who consistently develop and maintain efficient sprint mechanics place themselves in a better position to stay healthy throughout the season.
Simply put:
Your body becomes more resilient to sprinting by sprinting.
Better Speed Means Better Football
The performance benefits are obvious.
Every position in football benefits from speed.
Receivers create separation.
Defensive backs recover on deep balls.
Running backs hit the second level faster.
Linebackers close space quicker.
Quarterbacks escape pressure.
Even offensive and defensive linemen rely on explosive first steps and rapid acceleration.
The fastest athletes aren’t just genetically gifted.
They consistently train qualities that others neglect.
Maintaining one dedicated speed session each week can help preserve your acceleration, top speed, coordination, and explosive power while preventing the gradual decline many athletes experience halfway through the season.
Instead of getting slower every week, you’re maintaining the qualities that make you dangerous.
What Does In-Season Speed Training Look Like?
The good news?
It doesn’t take much.
One quality speed session each week is often enough to maintain high-level sprint performance during the season.
A simple session might include:
- Dynamic speed warm-up
- Sprint mechanics drills
- 4-8 maximal sprints of 20-40 yards with full recovery
- 2-4 flying sprints or build-up sprints reaching near maximum velocity
- A small amount of explosive plyometric work
That’s it.
The goal isn’t conditioning or exhaustion.
The goal is producing the highest quality speed possible while keeping overall fatigue low.
When programmed correctly, athletes finish feeling faster. Not destroyed.
The Athletes Who Keep Training Separate Themselves
Every season, two types of football players emerge.
The first group stops training once games begin.
They become more fatigued, slower, and less explosive as the weeks go on.
The second group continues to train intelligently.
They maintain their strength, continue exposing their bodies to high-speed sprinting, and they stay explosive deeper into the season while building a stronger athletic foundation for the future.
Guess which group usually finishes the year playing their best football.
Final Thoughts
Football season shouldn’t be the time you stop developing.
It should be the time you become more intentional with your training.
The athletes who continue speed training throughout the season give themselves the best opportunity to stay explosive, reduce injury risk, and continue improving year after year.
Don’t settle for simply surviving the season.
Train to dominate it.
Ready to Stay Fast All Season?
Our Football Performance System takes the guesswork out of both off-season and in-season training. Every workout is designed to help football athletes maintain elite speed, explosive power, strength, and durability without interfering with practices or games.
If you’re serious about becoming a faster, healthier, and more explosive football player this season, join FPS today to dominate the same in week 10 as you do week 1.
