I have been working with a couple of local High School Lacrosse Teams over the past couple weeks and something keeps coming to mind for me as I work with the players.  The request of the coaching staff in both cases was to increase speed and conditioning level going into the Spring season.  

So although we are working on the usual improvement of movement patterns, including mobility, stability, and strength (which are definitely a prerequisite to those things), I have been thinking more and more about how the increase of speed and conditioning will effect the teams this upcoming season.  What keeps coming to mind is the exponential change, in this case exponential decay, that they will experience as the team as a whole continues to decrease the amount of time it takes for them to perform specific skills.  

Skills such as deceleration, acceleration, and multi-directional speed are all well and good when one player increases his or her ability to do those things, but when you have an entire team working on improvement… Whoa!  

What will that do over the course of a game, when you are shaving seconds off of every short burst of action?  And add on an increase in anaerobic and aerobic conditioning…. Exponential change occurs!!

When each player can be faster in and out of a play and continually do that in and out over the course of a 4 quarters with the same efficiency, does skill level really matter.  Surely at the highest of levels it does, but the better the team’s ability to change direction quickly and maintain their wind for the entire game, the more likely that team will be victorious.