The premise
Most speed programs hand you four drills and repeat them for eight weeks
A-skip, wall drill, falling start, sprint. Monday of week one and Monday of week eight look identical. The athlete gets better at the drills for about a fortnight and then stops getting better at anything.
That is not a small flaw. A stimulus stops being a stimulus once the body has adapted to it, and after that you are maintaining, not building. Eight weeks of maintenance is how a kid finishes a speed program running the same time he started it and blames himself.
This one ladders. Wall switches go singles to doubles to triples. The A-skip becomes an ankle dribble, then a knee dribble, then an A-run, then it picks up a B-march. The falling start becomes a two-point, then a three-point. The lifting moves with it. Every fortnight the athlete is asked for something he could not do a fortnight ago.
That is the entire argument for this program over a cheaper one, so it is on the page rather than behind the card.
What you get
Instant PDF download · yours to keep
The progression
Here is the whole ladder, before you buy it
Four mechanics tracks, each one stepping up every two weeks. This is the table the program is built on — published in full, because if you read it and think it is ordinary, you should not buy this.
| Weeks | Posture | Force | Rhythm | Start |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Wall march 3×5/leg | Wall switches — singles 3×6 | A-skip 2×20 | Falling start 4×10 |
| 3–4 | Wall march 2×5/leg | Doubles 3×4 | Ankle dribble → A-skip | Falling start 4×10 |
| 5–6 | Wall march 2×5/leg | Triples 3×3 | Knee dribble → A-run | 2-point start 4×10 |
| 7 | Wall march 2×5/leg | Triples 3×3 | B-march → A-run | 3-point start 4×10 |
| 8 | Test week — the short version of every block, then the same test he ran in week 1. | |||
The lifting ladders the same way. Loads are written as reps-left rather than a vague effort score, so the athlete always knows whether he stopped in the right place.
What the research actually says
Including the part that doesn’t flatter us
Speed training is full of confident claims and thin evidence. Here is what this program rests on, with the weak link named rather than buried.
A 2014 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine pooled 15 studies and 510 athletes and found that improving back squat strength improved sprint performance by 3.11% on average. That is the best-supported finding in this whole field, and it is why there is a barbell in a speed program.
Weyand’s 2000 study of 33 runners found the faster ones applied 1.26 times more average vertical force to the ground during contact. Their legs did not swing meaningfully quicker — swing times differed by about three hundredths of a second. Speed is what you put into the ground, so that is what gets trained.
No controlled trial shows that A-skips or wall drills make anyone faster on their own, and some respected coaches have stopped using them entirely. They are in here for one reason their critics still allow — teaching a young athlete to coordinate a pattern. We are not going to tell you they are magic.
Who it is for
And who it honestly isn’t
A good fit
A high school football player, thirteen to eighteen, who is out of season or in a light stretch of it, has lifted before, and can get to forty yards of flat safe ground twice a week.
Not a good fit
An athlete in his peak in-season weeks — this adds real load and it will take from Friday night. An athlete who has never lifted, because the percentages assume the movements are already known. Anyone hurt, as opposed to sore. Anyone after position skill work; this is the engine underneath the skill.
Local families
If you are inside driving distance of Chino, a coach watching the reps beats a PDF every time and the first session is free. See football training in Chino. This program exists for the families who are not close enough.
$67, one payment, yours to keep. The download link is emailed within a minute of payment. Checkout is handled by Stripe — we never see your card.
This is an instant digital download, so all sales are final. That is shown to you again on the checkout page before you pay, not after.
Common questions
Before you buy
How much time does it actually take?
Two sessions a week for eight weeks — sixteen in total. Each one is written out in order, warm-up through mechanics through sprints through lifts, so the athlete is running a session rather than designing one. Week 8 is a test week and is shorter.
What equipment does he need?
The full list is forty yards of flat safe surface, a wall, cones or anything that works as cones, a trap bar and plates, a squat rack and barbell, a box or bench to jump onto, and a stopwatch. There is also a page of substitutions for everything on that list. The minimum viable version is a wall, twenty yards of grass and one heavy dumbbell — that version still works.
Is it safe for a fourteen-year-old to lift this heavy?
Loading is gated, and the gates are written into the program rather than left to guesswork. The 2014 International Consensus on Youth Resistance Training supports heavier phases for young athletes given sufficient training age, technical competency and qualified supervision — and the program says plainly which of those must be true before the heaviest week is attempted. There is also a medical clearance page a parent is asked to read before session one. If any of those conditions are not met, the program tells the athlete to stay lighter.
Does he need a coach to run it?
No, but he needs supervision for the barbell work if he is new to it. The exercise library covers every one of the 24 movements — what it is for, what good looks like, and the two ways it usually goes wrong. What a book cannot do is watch a rep, which is why the heavy weeks are gated on someone competent being there.
Will this make him faster?
It will make him stronger and better coordinated, and the evidence that those improve sprint performance is real — roughly 3% on average across the research. Anyone promising a specific tenth off a forty time is guessing. He tests in week 1 and again in week 8 with the same protocol, so the answer is a number he owns rather than one we claim.
How is it delivered?
Instantly. Pay and the download link is emailed within about a minute. The link is good for 24 hours and three downloads — save the PDF somewhere you will find it again, or print the session sheets. If the link runs out, get a fresh one here.
Who wrote it?
Carl Bradford — four seasons in the NFL as a linebacker, 2014 fourth-round Green Bay pick, twice All-Pac-12 at Arizona State, a former high school defensive coordinator, and the owner and head coach of Bradford Fitness in Chino. More about Carl.