TopSpeed Strength & Conditioning

Your yearly reminder that hill sprinting, in addition to the obvious benefit to unilateral power output, is basically for sh*tty sprint mechanics, reinforcing among other things;

-Hip Flexion✅
-Foot Dorsiflexion✅
-Reciprocal Arm Swing✅
-Achilles Adaptation✅

Check out the shapes & landmarks from these athletes - regardless of sport, build, or age (that’s a 6 year old in the last slide)

K-State 🏈 TE Lawson McGraw knocking on the door of 37 inches after Monday’s new standing PR 🙌

Kansas City TE John Mike Gyllenborg performing Rear Foot Elevated Jump Squats (RFEJS) during the break between OSWs and OTAs.

Compared to the traditional split squat , the RFEJS relies more on rapid force production and elastic/reactive qualities, allowing athletes to train explosiveness with less muscle damage and residual soreness.
This makes them especially useful during in-season training or phases where maintaining freshness and movement quality is critical.

Want to take a sec and highlight the incredible progress Blue Valley DB Austin Ramthun has made…

1) After adding 20 LBS the dude is now built like Captain freaking America 💪

2) After missing the entire 2025 🏈 season with a severe knee injury the 2027 recruit worked his ass off to not just to get back to baseline, but blew his old marks out of the 🌊

2025 40 Yard Dash = 4.97 👉 2026 40 Yard Dash = 4.63
2025 vertical = 27” 👉 2026 vertical jump = 33.6”
2025 5/10/5 drill = 4.78 👉 2026 5/10/5 drill 4.31
2025 broad jump = 95 inches 👉 2026 broad jump = 110 inches

3) His recent performance in front a college coaches earned him his 1st scholarship offer 🤝

Way to go Austin 👏👏👏

Day 1: Sunday - Top Speed Emphasis: Max speed output is super sensitive to fatigue, and top-end speed development needs to be at or above 95% of your max, put it early in the week when the legs are likely to be fresh. Exercises like Flying-10s with 20-30 yard leads and those that build elasticity/stiffness work well on this day.

Day 2: Wednesday - Acceleration & Power Emphasis: that build power work well on this day. Hill sprints, sled runs, loaded jump variations or the Olympic lifts typically work well on this day since they fall into the realm of Speed-Strength when loaded correctly.

Day 3: Thursday - Special Strength: This term was popularized by current Detroit Lions S&C Coach Cam Josse, essentially they are exercises that have a very high carryover to sprinting. Methods we we typically use include heavy sled pushes, run rocket drags (…our version of Joe Defranco’s HASDs), really any high-intensity resisted march works well, and I like to pair them with a 10-20 yard sprint.
One added bonus to this type of is they tend to be concentric dominant so recovery is typically faster than when we use their eccentric-dominant counterparts. That way we’re ready to sprint again at max effort 48–72 hours later.

PS - all KC area athletes looking to get better are welcome to join in on our hill sprint workouts for free, simply follow myself or and pay attn to the IG story for days & times

🙇‍♂️ Decades of research within 🏈 have highlighted a simple fact, teams prefer to recruit bigger/more explosive players over their smaller/less explosive peers (duh, right?)
Some of the more analytical college teams have been using peak power scores to evaluate the players on their rosters, with the Johnson equation being commonly used.
 
On that topic, I’d like to the highlight the 2 area athletes who’ve made great gains this spring
 
Pembroke Hill QB Braden Shelley walked into gym back in mid-March with metrics that put his baseline peak power output at 8303 watts.
Since that day he’s added 14 pounds to his frame and 6.7” inches to his vertical leap, numbers that raised his peak power score to 9731⚡️, an eye-popping 1428 watt improvement 
..and he didn’t even lose a step with all that new mass, in fact, he ran a new 40 yard dash PR this past week timed using the PHHS 🏈’s Smart Speed gates.
 
Blue Valley RB Michael McCarthy joined up with the goal of adding significant mass and ahead of his SR season, and that he has....having adding 12 pounds of 💪 so far to go along with 5.3” more inches of 🚀. That improvement in size & explosion has raised his peak power metric from a baseline score of 7379
to 8763 ⚡️, an improvement of 1384 watts.
 
Great work so far, still more work to do 🤝

Congratulations to Rockhurst High alum Johnny Pascuzzi who joins fellow athlete Luke Grimm on the roster for the LA Chargers 💪

After leaving Rockhurst Pascuzzi saw action in 23 games for the Iowa Hawkeyes prior to his final season at Tulane University where he helped the Green 🌊 qualify for the college football playoffs.