Fred Duncan (@Fred__Duncan)

Early specialization comes with a cost, one we often don’t see until it’s too late. The major theme from my youth training program ✅ The risks of early specialization ✅ How we’re overloading kids before they’re ready ✅ Why resilience matters just as much as skill ...

After I posted my top single leg lifts for speed, a few people asked what I like for the posterior chain, so here are the three I program most often. Yes, we use all of these bilaterally too. This isn’t about ditching the basics. It’s about layering in single leg options that ...

There’s a lot of confusion around youth training. When should they start? What’s age-appropriate? How do you actually match training to their stage of development? These are questions I’ve been getting since I opened my facility in 2012 and they’re part of why I created ...

Acceleration and max velocity are very different phases…different joint angles, different time frames for force application, different movement strategies. This breakdown gives you a clearer picture of how those phases operate so you can better evaluate your training. ...

Good training doesn’t obsess over a single exercise, method, system. Every micro niche program that isolates one quality/exercise/tissue like fascia, tendon, functional, whatever, & tries to magnify its importance often signals one thing - a poor grasp of training fundamentals ...

This is a summary from a section in my upcoming speed development e-book, which also includes a full training program. “Stiffness” is one of the most common terms in performance training and one of the most misunderstood. It gets thrown around without much context, and ...

There’s more to the off-season than just “working hard.” Over the years, I’ve seen athletes stall out or regress, not because they lacked effort, but because they made one (or more) of these common mistakes… 1. Too Much or Too Little Early in the off-season we run a GPP or ...

There are athletes who are more physically gifted than you. That’s just reality. But what most people don’t realize? Those same athletes are usually training harder and more consistently, too. Reggie Bush was one of those guys. He had elite traits, speed, power, explosiveness. ...

Early specialization is often sold as a shortcut, but it often comes at the cost of broader development. A recent study (VanZile et al., 2025) on 110 male high school athletes compared countermovement jump (CMJ) and dynamic balance performance across low, moderate, and high ...