Friday Fitness: Spike Velocity

I wanna (hit) fast!

This spring I’m doing 3 different running article series.

On Tuesday, I’m releasing articles aimed at giving you a small, specific tool to make your in-practice or in-match coaching more effective. On Fridays, I’m writing about ways to increase the physical capability of players. On Sundays, I’m releasing a more statistically-oriented beach article.

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The first Friday Fitness article of this spring dealt with jump testing and last week’s dealt with some different forms of sprint testing. This week, we’ll talk about measuring spike velocity. This article will be a bit shorter than previous weeks because (a) they were way too long, (b) there are fewer options for measuring spike velocity, and (c) more of you are likely familiar with it in some way. So let’s get to it!

Why “Testing”

If you have competitive athletes, they like to perform in practice. We’re definitely going to do some things, be they physical preparation or technical drills, where there’s no performance goal. Maybe you introduce some systems concepts or rehearse some new footwork. Okay, that might be part of it. But as much as possible, we want to be able to measure what we’re doing.

One of the reason that drills like Aceball and FBK are popular once introduced to a team is that they have clear measures that also link to match performance. At our level of volleyball, if we can side out X times before we make Y reception mistakes, we’ll probably win the match. At many levels of NCAA and good juniors-level volleyball, X = 6 and Y = 2.¹ Add in different levels of servers in your gym and you get a feeling of “leveling up” on your team.

And, because of The Flippening, at higher levels, winning Aceball becomes more of an expectation for the offense, while it becomes a mark of potential progress for a server. At the men’s pro level, for example, you’ll have guys that have almost zero chance of winning an Aceball game if they start up 23-19 and it’s a hope and prayer for them to win if they are up 24-19. The offenses are too good and their dinky serve just isn’t producing enough pressure. But if that guy starts to find a little more heat or a few more tools in his serving toolkit, maybe he can start winning 24-19 games a little more frequently and maybe now has a fighting chance in a 23-19 game.

So we want to perform in relevant training and we want to measure that performance to show progress. Players love progress! One of the most fun ways to progress is spiking the ball harder.

How To Measure

To my knowledge, you basically have one option, and that’s a radar gun. There’s a few different brands. You have the old school Bushnell ones with the pistol grips. Those seem to work fine and those are the first ones I ever used. Pocket Radar is a brand that’s gotten very popular. I’ve used them a bunch and they work well too. People like them for their portability and their continuous mode is awesome. If you can get one set up on a mounted tripod and hook it up to the display you’re in heaven. You’ll also have to drop $900 to get that bundle. Well worth it for some programs, out of reach for others.

So spend it if you got it, but you can probably find an $80 Bushnell manual radar gun used on Amazon or eBay that will work just fine.

My favorite way to track spike velocity is off of a self-toss mini-jump serve from 3-6m, or else a full jump serve from 9m.

When you record velocity, the measurement device has to be in-line with the flight of the ball. I have had gunners stand behind and in front of the server and gotten the same readings. So, because of this, I tend to like a coach to stand behind the player. It’s just a bit easier and also the coach is there for feedback as the players prepare to spike. When I’ve been able to set up fixed display systems (we had this with Canada MNT), I would have the server serve toward the display, because they could land, look up, and see velocity.

You can see here an example of a player spiking a 3m self-toss in front of a coach with a radar gun.

Track Progress

There’s almost always an instant bonus the first time you pull the radar guns out. If you’re a high school team and you’ve been doing some self-toss and then you bring a radar gun to practice, you might even be able to close your eyes and start hearing some different sounds of hand-on-ball contact and players start trying to max out on their velocity.

And the next level up is when you start writing those numbers up on the board and start tracking them from practice to practice. How quickly your players latch to the numbers will depend on their level of competitiveness as an athlete. Your top competitors will want to their numbers and everybody else’s and probably want a chance to go again to put up an even higher number. Your less-developed competitors will probably even have to be reminded to put their numbers up on the board at all.

Here’s an excerpt from my board. The columns on the left are jumps, then there’s the spiking, then the sprinting. Blue marker is my writing with their target jump or velocity and the black (red for sprint, for whatever reason that happened) is their best effort of the day. (The reds for jumps represent something else.)

So you can see, on this day, there was a lot of target-hitting!² And you better believe that players are goign to start running over to that board and put their number up their when they beat their target.

Simple As That

Spiking harder wins volleyball games. Not always and it’s not the #1 factor. The way that I’ve always viewed it is something like, “your physicality determines your level of play and your teamwork and ball control determines your success within that level.” Typically we tend to recruit our physicality and then train our culture, systems, and technique. And there’s not necessarily anything WRONG with that.

But I’d argue that spike velocity can be raised, especially if you’re at a program where you have athletes for multiple years. The median velocity for my players this season raised 2.5 km/hr or 1.5 mph. And that’s in-season, without really a supporting off-season and despite the unfamiliarity (and in some cases, outright resistance³) of any of the training staff to these methods.

And still 1.5 mph x 4 years = 6 mph. And let me tell you, adding 6mph to a player’s spike velocity is a bump up in the level of physicality. That’s probably the difference in spike velocity between the Big South and the Big 10. If you have the chance to take that level up, wouldn’t you do it?

Now the thing is, this doesn’t scale linearly. For a female athlete, going from 53mph to 56mph is an order of magnitude harder than going from 50mph to 53mph. And going from 56mph to 57 or 58 (much less 60+) starts involving genetic factors that may or may not be there for that particular athlete.

I know I have a few readers here who are at the P5s or pro clubs where you have girls getting mid-to-high 50s or guys starting to crack 70. At that level, you (and/or a staff member) is going to have to start diving into every aspect of their spiking mechanics and physical prep in order to squeeze out each increasing bit of velocity.

But there is a sense of linearity of progress for players to go from low-40s to low-50s. A player that can crack 52 or 53mph on a self-toss, or especially a full 9m jump serve, is a girl that’s got the capability to start playing some pretty high level volleyball.

And this can be done with a relatively small investment. In my standard club template, we’re looking at about 10 minutes per practice. For NCAA teams, you might want to go something like 20 minutes 1-2x per week. Doing measured spike velocity for 10 minutes won’t, by itself, turn a 40mph spiker into a 48mph spiker, but it’s a link in the chain that can lead to your team leveling up their physicality over time.

1. Especially because there are sub-modifications available. For juniors-level teams to win this, you might count only aces as reception mistakes, while NCAA teams might also give the serving team a chance to earn a point off an overpass or other shanked reception..

2. In this case, for pro athletes with a long season and a lot of training, “target” doesn’t represent their top-ever PR but instead represents the median of their last-10 training sessions. I think that’s a better measure (especially in-season) for a more developed athlete. For a teenager who is doing this once a week, you can easily just use PRs. (Also, yes, in the Korean league there are plenty of players making lots of money who cannot spike over 80km/hr or 50mph… it’s a strange experience.)

3. Yes, NCAA coaches, it happens at the pro level too.