“Speed & Power is Only Genetic” Myth Debunked - STOP Your Limiting Beliefs
Speed & power is absolutely trainable but is cursed with a reputation of being considered an entirely genetic gift. I will explain why this idea is false so you don’t limit yourself and your potential
Contents:
Why People Think Speed is Hardly Changeable
Genetics affect everything - not just speed
“Speed potential is observable at a young age”
Why Speed “Appears” to be More Genetically Determined Than It Is
Difficulty measuring progress
Talent Selection
Training Methods
Lack of Access to Knowledge
How to Begin Adding Speed & Power Training Into your Regimen + Programs
A prevailing idea in fitness training is that while muscle, strength, endurance, and body composition are all able to be changed significantly with proper training over time, speed however, is almost entirely genetic.
This is both an incorrect & harmful Idea to perpetuate in the way that it’s presented.
I’m going to go over several realities regarding this topic and explain why this is a myth while also describing how this belief has come into place – followed by what you should do if your physical speed is a weak point for you.
Let’s first cover “why“ people believe this idea in the first place, expose the gaps in logic, and follow up with what this means for you and your athletic potential.
Why do People Believe Speed is Largely Unchangeable?
Each factor will be explained piece by piece (in no particular order) but all of them compound and promote each other, creating a cycle of perpetuating beliefs that hold everyone back from their human potential as well as lowers their fitness related self-care regarding health and youth/longevity.
Genetics Affect Everything
Make no mistake, in no way shape or form will I ever tell you that genetics are not a factor. Genetics literally affect every single thing about you, including your personality & mind.
So to say that your genetics regarding speed or talent in any area doesn’t make a difference would be foolish.
But the sentiment here is that just like strength, muscle, endurance & skills - speed & explosiveness can be improved significantly as well, despite common claims that “speed & power is only a genetic gift”. It is asinine to think this one quality that remains immutable.
We will go over why this *seems* to be the case for many at first glance & provide insight into how you can train accordingly in the rest of this post.
Speed is the most fatigue sensitive quality
This chart demonstrates the rate of diminishment of training qualities for average athletes:
*Note: the “retention” scale refers to how many days (give or take) a quality can be ignored before it begins to slowly degrade. Ex. 15+-5 = ~10-20 days
Top speed can decline quickly if not exposed to an athlete at least once a week. This doesn’t mean that training high speed movements less than once a week is something for the average person to panic about – and as long as someone sprints at high speeds 2 to 3 times a month general health and athletic practice should be fairly stable for health and longevity - but it is important to understand that due to speeds neural emphasis frequent exposure is required, which many will struggle with for multiple reasons.
Not only is the lack of frequency a major factor that prevents people from building or maintaining speed in power but fatigue from other forms of training will affect the rate at which you can produce force more easily than the total amount of force you can produce.
For reference, it is when you have performed several repetitions and are nearing failure that the barbell begins to slow down when training. You are still producing enough force/strength to move the bar through the range of motion but you no longer can do it with the same speed.
This not only applies within a session but also throughout weeks and months of training, where the accumulation of fatigue, stress, lack of recovery/sleep etc will more quickly and heavily impact speed and coordination (and all other “neural” athletic components). Thus productive speed and power training will also require smarter recovery protocols, adequate nutrition and lifestyle factors + Intelligent program design. All of which can easily falter greatly with a casual athlete and this lead to limited improvement Intelligent program design. All of which can easily falter greatly with a casual athlete and this lead to limited improvement.
“Fast people are fast when they are young”
Talent is usually spotted in youth. This is because if you have real talent it will be quickly noticeable, and if that talent is genetic (which is usually what talent refers to) then it will supposedly express itself when an individual is a child.
This isn’t necessarily true for several reasons:
• many aspects of an individual genuinely don’t begin to express themselves to their highest degree until young adulthood. This is absolutely true for physical qualities in particular. Often those who are short or small in comparison to their peers in their youth grow much larger by their 20s. This is also important to note because “height” isn’t the only thing that is really changing but rather the physical structure of your bones, tendons, musculature and nervous system has developed immensely as well.
• it’s a very common occurrence for someone to feel they were quite fast in gym class in elementary school and then were surpassed by several peers past age 10 to 15. (This is part of the reason why specialization in a sport is not recommended and “recruitment assumptions” are largely meaningless until someone is approximately post-puberty)
• it is not always the case that traits expressed in a child are “natural talent“/genetic. Part of the reason this is assumed – which isn’t entirely illogical – is because a child has had literally less time developing in the environment and therefore is more of a raw mass of moldable potential. This can result in adults not accounting for the exposure of a child to developmental behaviors and potential nuances between one child to another‘s exposure and approach to physical activity that can make a profound difference in a short amount of time in some cases (especially when a child’s body is developing so rapidly over the course of a year between ages 5 and 12.)
It is rare that “athletically gifted“ youth athletes do not spend a tremendous amount of their time playing outside, challenging themselves, and regularly exposing themselves to efforts of maximum speed, coordination, and endurance.
We can all point out the individual that “never practices“ but dominates – however this is disproportionately athletes that have true immutable advantages for particular sport activities such as height/natural size, or you are truly looking at the exception to the rule, which almost always misses the point in the discussion like this.
Even then, it is often underestimated how much time over the course of their life that an individual who is “talented” has actually spent challenging themselves in a variety of athletic activities. It is also worth noting that time spent “playing outside” is not necessarily the same/equal between all children and people. The temperament and behaviors of the kids who naturally practice sport in their youth can vary greatly with subtleties that make a massive difference in their development.
A child who is excited by real challenges, and seeks to push themselves with increasingly difficult but achievable tasks and is perseverant in the face of struggle or discomfort is going to get a lot more out of there natural activity than the child who “plays outside“ but doesn’t intuitively apply as much effort, doesn’t innovate challenges, gets “tired easy“ or quits when there is struggle, and focuses more on the things he is “good at“ and wants to beat their most beatable peers rather than improve themselves and enjoy the process.
A child that spends 10 more minutes a day shooting a basketball may accumulate 30 to 50+ more practice repetitions every day. Over the course of 1 to 2 years, one child has practiced their shot 10 to 20,000 times more than another with a small behavioral change that seems unimportant in the moment.
(This applies to exposure to high-speed movements → sprints, jumps, drops from heights {i.e. jungle gym/tree}, throwing, & wrestling. These movements done with high impulse stress the body greatly and during a child’s development will have a massive impact on their tendon, bone, muscle/neural development. Especially between ages 5-12)
It is easy to pass off the two children as getting “equal practice time“ but the quality of their natural play and practice is immensely different and over the course of years, adds up immensely.
It’s also important to note that athletic development from youth is one of those things that is truly decades in the making – there are very few other categories of performance in life start as early and are pursued as long. And thus some “young person” (15-25 years old) is presumed to be entirely the product of genetic talent when really, they are already a product of 10-20+ years of physical training being accumulated even if much of it was not formally organized.
Speed training isn’t popular
General fitness and muscle building is what 99% of people in the general population train for and it is rare that anyone trains with intention to sprint faster or jump higher by comparison.
The only ones that do are usually very young in their training for a specific sport & for a short period of time as well as usually being specifically selected for it.
This leads to an extremely small sample size of people even attempting to make speed changes.
Largely ineffective/poorly understood/coached
Out of those that do train for speed/power, it’s extremely ineffective or very poorly done in the majority of cases. Due to its lack of demand this also leads to a lack of individuals with quality knowledge on the subject.
The vast majority of people who ever train for speed in their life are disproportionately high school athletes being coached by a teacher or someone’s dad with sometimes zero productive experience.
To contrast this with general population fitness & muscle building again, building mass is more common knowledge because of the demand and resulting number of people who become experts in the subject and spread fairly effective information. This is absent for speed & power work.
Even WITH greater “common knowledge” on muscle building, it is extremely common to see people struggle or fail to make strength/muscle gains despite training due to poor programming and other variables - this should be even more common with those “training for speed/power” yet, unlike with strength training, it is assumed genes are the issue and not terrible training/other factors.
Difficult to measure and thus witness results which promote enthusiasm and persevering training
On top of this, training for a quality like speed is far less visual or as easily apparent as fitness goals such as muscle building. You cannot see speed increases in the mirror or on the scale.
Even significant increases in sprint speed or jump height can be difficult to notice without a specific measuring tool as a substantial increase is still only a matter of inches/fractions of a second.
These increases are absolutely significant in terms of overall performance in many cases but the feeling of a trainee easily witnessing the fruits of their labor and thus remaining consistent on their effective training program is more difficult.
For example, shaving off 0.35 seconds on your 40-yard dash would be a massive improvement, however, to the naked eye, 0.35 seconds is still just a small fraction of second and thus not as eye catching as someone adding 20lbs of muscle mass or losing 50lbs of fat.
Sprint speed is multifactorial which can make gains in some of the elements take longer than in other fitness pursuits which dampens the perceived results of your program/effectiveness of training
Becoming a faster athlete also has more factors at play and is a slightly more advanced quality than basic hypertrophy or aerobic endurance training. This leads to its improvements sometimes being more complex to achieve and also often come slower as a result of multiple factors needing to be addressed and also the nature of advanced nervous system adaptations being slower to develop.
Those that are selected for some type of coaching in sports to get faster are only training for 1 to 4 years in most cases anyway and it is usually not year-round and often done poorly/not adhered to strictly by a young athlete.
Out of the few people who ever do train for speed in their life it is rarely for more than 1 to 4 years and even then, it is hardly year-round they are training and most athletes only practice during a short season of a few months.
You would never look at a bodybuilder who is trained for 3 months with poor coaching and only moderate effort and claim genetics have hindered them from being very muscular. It would be easily understood that more time with quality training & recovery will be necessary to see a true significant change.
Looking at an athlete and the gains that they would make while training for four months out of the year with subpar coaching and effort and then assuming that that is the maximum genetic potential that a person can achieve is obviously completely crazy once it’s put in perspective.
“Talent” is selected for and it’s absence is selected against
Talent and genetics are real, and some people will be born or develop at an early age the structures that give them an advantage in certain activities. Even though the athlete’s body is not done developing and many can make profound physical changes in their frame and structure (as well as the brain) after age 14, those that already were the fastest in their class are selected to play speed positions/sports.
After age 14, those that already were the fastest in their class are selected to play speed positions/sports and those that weren’t our discouraged. They are thus denied access to the exposure of training and athletic development or speed (which is already subpar at that level in most cases) and mentally believe that speed is something they can never have because it was something they were told they didn’t have at ~14.
This means that the only athlete to even end up attempting to get significantly faster are those who are already talented at an early age and the only ones who will get serious coaching are the elite of the elite that get college scholarships.
Average athletes and people never once give it a real shot or get a chance - i.e. 1-2 years of *quality* training at a minimum.
This process of selecting for talent at age 13 to 15 is productive when coaches are training teams that need to be good each season for track/football and are not invested in helping the average person get better but rather get short term wins and yearly college recruits. However, people conflate an effective recruiting method/mindset for coaches interested in hiring those who will have an immediate/quick return on investment with the idea that an individual interested in their long-term development has no potential as a physical specimen.
While an average untrained 16-year-old may not necessarily become truly elite by their 18th birthday to play at the division 1 or 2 school, they certainly could make serious changes and absolutely could transform in 4-5 years+ if it was personally worth it to them.
Those passionate for their personal progress and love the idea of reaching their potential should be unburdened by time limits & other people’s self-interest. (Not to mention there are plenty of competitive amateur leagues one can satisfy their competitive drive through)
Training higher-level athletes is not the same as training lower-level athletes
It should also be noted that due to the “stages of athletic development”, (video lecture here) training with your foundations in place is different than building the foundation for those not as naturally gifted or who didn’t develop them very early.
This also results in the emphasis of general sprint training knowledge + experience to come from making “good athletes great” and less of it on how to turn “poor/average athletes good”.
This really is a significant difference because I believe part of what creates a lack of results in speed training is trying to install intermediate to advanced “software” on athletes that have yet to develop the hardware. And thus people’s takeaways are that this training is only worth it for those who are “genetically talented“ versus understanding that a young middle/high school athlete might need to emphasize different modalities of training than what college and Olympic track teams are doing.
Limiting Beliefs & Coaching Myths
All of this leads to a belief system that pervades the fitness sphere that speed & power work is not valuable or worth anyone’s time. This perpetuates the aforementioned issues above and harms the population by stomping on someone’s hope to achieve better things as well as keep their athletic health/longevity intact by training to retain our speed and athleticism as we age.
Speed & power is the first thing we lose as we age due to neglect and has great consequences to health outcomes (more than raw strength) - study here
If speed & power was considered a training factor that is important for your health and well-being and the average person could easily incorporate it into a fitness regimen you would see very clear and common increases in peoples speed + athleticism and it would be widely accepted that it is more malleable then currently thought. (Provided training information is of decent quality - plenty of terrible muscle building advice exists despite being popular)
To Summarize:
Very few people are ever trained with a stimulus that would realistically improve their speed, and only those with significant natural talent are trained for more than a couple years and even then it is for a short period of time within the year itself & often comprised of poor coaching. It is also difficult to notice that you are making gains in speed for the average person unless you are very diligently tracking it (which almost no one does) and thus we have practically a zero-sample size in our life experience of individuals who have “worked out” and become noticeably faster.
Compared to general endurance and muscle gain → It’s much easier to see the possibilities there because there is a large number of people who have trained with that aim and successfully accomplish that.
We don’t see enough individuals even attempt with any sort of valid training system for speed over a long enough period of time to see the possibilities in the average person.
Many trainees likely even DO get faster & more explosive over some years of training but do not necessarily notice it as a gradual change may be difficult to perceive for most not effectively tracking speed times. They are likely unaware that speed has improved at all if it has.
This perpetuating belief even further hinders peoples hopes of athletic excellence and overcoming their weaknesses/staying young and athletic for life.
Improvement in speed/power is absolutely a factor you can improve through training. It requires know how in some cases that people conflate with bodybuilding methods and are unsure of what to do - which is what this substack provides.
The argument that “speed is all genetic” and not worth training despite every single other athletic quality - like strength, endurance, skills, coordination etc are still highly adaptable despite *also* having great genetic disparities - is a laughable statement.
This idea hurts people from getting the full physical development they have the potential for and diminishes their ability to remain young and athletic throughout their life as we age.
Train athletically, sprint fast, jump high, and train with speed & power in mind (see below) and see your potential be realized and your healthy, natural ability to move increase.
IGNORE the naysayers.
So, what should I do?
Here are several resources you should go over in loose order:
Athletic Transformation Thread:
Structure Types & Athletic Foundations → Potential
After watching this video read the below information →
Informative Essays/Posts & Programs to Utilize:
The Elite Secret To Ultimate Performance
“Bodybuilders are slow” - Short Video
Building Basic Tendon Structure (Read all 4-5 Parts)
“Natural Athleticism” - Plyometrics
How to Begin Sprinting & Add to Your Program
“Explosiveness” Posts:
Testing Why You Aren't “Explosive”: Diagnosing What Your Training Needs to Work On
How to Measure Your 'Explosiveness': Simple Test for Athleticism
"Power" Training: Basics Exercises & How to Build Athletic Power
Non-Speed “Power” Posts
Training the Foot/Ankle Complex
Training The Feet/Ankles for Health, Speed, and Creating Maximum Power (Part 1)
Connecting the Feet/Ankles with Compound Lifts + Advanced Elaborations (Part 2)
Strength Base Beginner + Intermediate Programs
Advanced Hybrid Athlete Training Program Template
As strength, speed and power training is by far the most requested topic, this substack is going to continue to focus on those subjects within the hierarchy of training goals (however don’t worry, our endurance training protocols are absolutely going to be covered this fall) and advanced training for the foot/ankle, advanced plyos & sprints, upper body power, plus training roadmaps and programs will be released weekly for the rest of the year.
If you need a custom training program designed for ELITE performance, message me on Twitter, comment below, or email me at hybridathletetraining@protonmail.com and we can design a program for your specific needs & goals
As always, train sensibly.
Not medical advice. All information here should be consulted and approved through your physician before using.