Fred Duncan (@Fred__Duncan)

Overcoming vs Yielding Isometrics - When and Why Overcoming isometrics bias intent, neural drive, and force expression. Yielding isometrics bias position specific strength, tolerance and force maintenance. We often use overcoming ISOs as a warm-up or as a primer/contrast ...

Hard training isn’t the same as good training. A lot of athletes grow up believing that if they’re exhausted, sore, or throwing up, they must be doing something right. And for a while, that belief gets reinforced. But fatigue is cheap. Anyone can create it. What actually ...

Of course there are differences between athletes. Different sports. Different anthropometrics. Different strength and elastic profiles. But if all we ever focus on is what’s different, we miss the similarities The athletes who accelerate well, across sports, often show us the ...

Sprinting is unique. It shows up in almost every sport. Acceleration, max velocity, chasing, separating, reacting. Because of that, a lot of people assume sprinting just “takes care of itself.” But in training, sprinting is still used as a general stimulus. And general ...

Drills get judged like they’re supposed to be the sprint. They’re not. From a motor learning standpoint, drills are constraints. They let you isolate a sensation, exaggerate a position, or bias the system toward one piece of the movement so the nervous system can organize ...

Hill sprints are one of my go to tools for developing acceleration. They regulate intensity/ limit velocity, emphasize projection and posture, and teach athletes how to direct force horizontally without over cueing or over coaching. They’re also slightly more concentric ...

We hear talk about “lengthening” muscles, But you really just change what happens inside it. Every muscle is made up of fascicles…bundles of fibers lined with contractile units called sarcomeres. When you train at high velocity or under eccentric load, the muscle adapts by ...

Even at 75% of max speed, hamstring activation can exceed max isometric levels. That’s how intense sprinting is. Submaximal runs…like 70–80% effort still provide massive hamstring stimulus while keeping fatigue lower. If you want to understand why sprinting builds what the ...

This is the foundation of how I structure most sessions. We start with warm-up and extensive work to build rhythm, posture, and coordination. Then we move into acceleration or speed work, the ultimate plyometric and one of the best tools for athletic development. From there, ...