6 Months Of Speed Results

Atomic Speed + Spiking Workouts

In the Winter 2024 Mailbag, I was asked:

Loving this series of In The Gym. Curious about if you have measurable improvements from the atomic speed/swing daily workouts after 2 months? And from the non measurable side do they seem to jump higher, move more dynamically and hit harder during live gameplay?

I’ll repeat some of my response to kick this article off

My response after 2 months:

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As Tony Holler says, “speed grows like a tree.” (Meaning: slowly) I’ll take his word for it when it comes to sprinting and I think it must be true when it comes to spiking. A player who increased their PR on Self-Toss by 1mph every other month would add 6mph to their velocity in a year. 6mph is a life-changing improvement for a girl’s volleyball player. 44mph is a kill in a high school varsity match. 50mph is a guaranteed scholarship if you’re over 9’6”. And the next 6mph jump to 56mph potentially puts you in the pros.

So yes, there are measurable improvements from Day 1 to now… but there’s also a good chance there’s noise. Every single kid is faster on their sprint times. Every single kid has hit a PR on their spike velocity since November. But, if you just measured somebody 3 days in a row, there would be 1/3 of the kids who would hit their highest mark on day 3. Is that because they were more powerful after just a couple days of training or is it just measurement noise? I try to be conscious of not overstating results and that there’s a lot of noise, especially when training kids.

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Now it’s been 6 months, so I feel comfortable discussing these results. This is going to be a long post with a lot of detail.

But first..

Atomic What?

I’m not a track coach, but I know speed is important. The Atomic Speed Workout was coined by track coach Tony Holler:

He describes it as "10 in 10" and "2 in 6" where the "10 in 10" are a series of 10 preparatory drills performed in 10 minutes and the "2 in 6" are 2 maximum-speed sprints performed with a 5-minute rest between them. As he says it, just like the word "Atom" means basically "the smallest unit", this Atomic Speed workout is the smallest unit of a workout that an athlete could do to stimulate speed development.

I go into more detail in this article about the evolution of my thought on physical training for volleyball. I used to see sprinting more than 10m as non-specific and thus less important for volleyball players. My mind has changed on that and I go into detail in that article. This post will be long enough, so I’ll leave the background information to previously-published articles.

Speed Results

After 6 months, here’s our results:

(Note: This is a hand-timed 20m fly. Track purists will be horrified but it’s the best I can do with these logistics. They were all timed by me in the same fashion so, while there’s for sure some margin of error in the hand-timing, I think you can look at overall trends and average performances.)

Yellows indicate new PRs. You’ll note that there’s only 22 practices up there. We didn’t time in November, we just raced. Also, I don’t time at every single practice because sometimes I do skills tutors on the court as the players come into the gym.

The median improvement was 0.16s or about 6%.¹ This corresponds to improvement in spike touch. A 6% improvement in vertical jump would be an additional 1” or 1.5”. Our club doesn’t have a good vertec, so testing spike touch requires me to haul mine in from home. I also only have an assistant coach half the time, and testing spike touch takes longer and is more logistically-intensive than testing sprint times. So we only tested spike touch 3 times throughout the year. Nobody improved 1.5” but most were in the 1” PR range over the season. Maybe some will make it 1.5” by Nationals.

So quantitatively: improvement in sprint speed corresponded to improvement in jump touch, although imperfectly.

Spike Velocity Results

Everything here is measured off Self-Toss attacking with a Pocket Radar on a tripod.

There’s more entries because we started spike velocity in November, so there’s 30 entries here.

The median improvement² was 2mph, which is about 4.5% improvement. The range of improvement was from 0-6mph. A look at the individual cases sometimes is helpful:

0mph improvement
1. HL and NC are liberos. They often do the Self-Toss, but not always. Also, they get little-to-no hitting reps in practice. This shows that these Atomic Spiking workouts provide a good stimulus for max velocity, but might not be “Atomic” in the sense that they, by themselves, will increase spiking velocity. You still need hitting reps in practice!
2. SR is an interesting case. You might get some kids like her in your gym. She entered the season as an inexperienced sophomore with some natural size and power playing up a year on 17s. The second day we tested, she hit 46 on the gun, but that was the only ball above 43mph she hit until January. With her, I’m not sure she’s added much top-end velocity yet, because she had to gain the ability to consistently make good contact on the ball. You can see she’s had a string where she’s hitting 46 or 45 most of the time now. Now that her contact is starting to catch up, I think she’s in position to make the push up toward 50mph next year as a junior.

5+mph improvement
3 players made an improvement of 5mph or more. As I say above:

6mph is a life-changing improvement for a girl’s volleyball player. 44mph is a kill in a high school varsity match. 50mph is a guaranteed scholarship if you’re over 9’6”. And the next 6mph jump to 56mph potentially puts you in the pros.

All 3 of those players are in and around that bucket:

AC was an undersized hitter without a clear position and without any experience playing Open-level volleyball. This change in velocity puts her position to go Juco for a year to continue to develop and potentially play scholarship-level at a 4-year after that.

EK is an undersized (notice a theme?) outside who was on the recruiting radar already but the increase in her velocity put her over the barrier “she’s going to get a scholarship, it’s a matter of where,” that many kids at this level are trying to get to. Qualitatively, the increase in her velocity was noteable when we played Open in our 2 qualifiers in March/April. Out-of-system cross-court balls that she was getting dug on early in the season were now scoring.

LH is a freshman playing up on 17s who kind of got stuck playing out-of-position in the middle for me this year, because that was her best shot to get playing time playing up. Like SR, you can see the improvement in peak velocity, but also consistency. (Especially when I look within a session, more on this later) The increase from 42mph to 47mph is when a player can start to really put the ball away. She’s in good position to push into that 50mph next year as a sophomore.

Methods and Details