Speed Training For Lacrosse Players: An In-Depth Guide

The modern game of lacrosse is won and lost in transition.

The ability to explode past defenders, win the race to ground balls, and rapidly shift from offense to defense has transformed lacrosse into a sport dominated by athletes who can generate and sustain speed. This isn't just coach-speak – it's the reality of the game at every level.

During a recent conversation with an NCAA Division I recruiter, his message was clear: "The first thing we look for isn't stick skills or lacrosse IQ – it's athleticism and speed. We can teach skills, but we can't teach explosiveness."

Let me be clear – if you want to play at the next level, your speed will be evaluated before anything else.

Today's elite lacrosse players aren't just technically sound – they're dynamic athletes who can accelerate, decelerate, and change direction with power and control. Look at the professional game or top NCAA programs and you'll see the evolution: bigger, stronger, and dramatically faster players who can cover ground and make plays that were unimaginable a decade ago.

For ambitious players looking to elevate their game – whether it's fighting for varsity minutes, earning a spot on an elite club team, or pursuing collegiate opportunities – developing next-level speed isn't optional, it's essential. The pace that allows you to succeed at your current level is merely the baseline for the next.

In this article we're taking a deep dive into the different facets of speed training, the current research of speed and lacrosse, and more importantly how you can put off-field speed training into practice to take your speed, and your game, to the next level.

Let's dive in.

Understanding Speed for Lacrosse Players

Speed training is complicated. And for lacrosse players, it demands a multi-directional approach that addresses the unique demands of the sport.

In biomechanics, speed is often broken into stride frequency x stride length. This simply means the amount of steps a sprinter can make is multiplied by the distance of their strides to determine their speed.

For you as a lacrosse player, this equation holds true, but we need to expand our thinking to encompass the unique demands of your sport. Unlike track athletes who focus on linear speed, you need explosive short-area speed, rapid acceleration and deceleration, and the ability to change direction instantly while maintaining body control (often with a stick in hand).

This is why we propose a more comprehensive speed equation for lacrosse players:

On-Field Speed = Stride Frequency x Stride Power x Movement Efficiency

That third component - movement efficiency - is crucial for you as a lacrosse player who needs to maintain optimal body positions while cradling, dodging, defending, and transitioning. An efficient player expends less energy on movement and can maintain speed longer while focusing on gameplay.

There's a reason that elite collegiate and professional lacrosse programs place significant emphasis on power output measures such as the vertical or broad jump in addition to linear and multi-directional speed tests. Studies of collegiate field sport athletes consistently show that jump measures are strong predictors of on-field explosiveness and speed.

The intended takeaway? Focusing on faster feet isn't necessarily the answer to getting faster on the field. While doing "quick feet drills" were considered speed training the norm in the past - a multi-faceted approach to speed training is what actually translates to the field.

Whenever discussing speed and lacrosse players, it's inevitable that a traditional coach weighs in that game speed can only be improved with more gameplay and scrimmage time.

While we'll be focusing on the off-field attributes of speed in the article, it's important to not understate the importance of refining on-field mechanics. All elite players carry a level of technical proficiency that allows them to more efficiently and effectively express force on the field.

It's no secret, the most elite players in the world continue to work with movement and position-specific coaches. Top NCAA programs and professional teams have specialized coaches focused on movement mechanics, and many players actively seek out coaches in the off-season to refine and dial in their mechanics.

Saying that, even the most refined sports car isn't competing if it has a basic engine under the hood.

This is why Strength & Conditioning and Lacrosse Coaches often work hand in hand. With the elite players we work with through our Coaching Program, we'll often be in communication with their position coaches to see where we can maximize their off-field training to support their on-field results.

At the end of the day, you need to focus on improving foot speed and athleticism, getting stronger and more powerful, and more technically proficient with your movement skills.

Now let's break down how you can unlock and develop more speed that actually translates to the field.

Quick Feet for Lacrosse Players

Understanding that on-field speed has multiple components means that we need to be actively trying to improve our ability to move our feet faster while maintaining control and power output.

Quick feet drills matter. But most players are doing them wrong.

While quick feet training is the most common area players focus on to get quicker, faster, and more agile - it's also the area of training where players can waste a lot of time if not done properly.

For younger players, classic quick feet and ladder drills are super valuable. These drills improve both coordination and kinesthetic awareness, ultimately allowing players to refine their movement skills and have a better basis for motor learning on the field.

But this is where some debate starts - are quick feet drills valuable for older and elite lacrosse players?

While this is often a spirited debate amongst Strength & Performance Coaches at all levels, let's skip the philosophical discussion and keep it practical. I can say that after working with thousands of lacrosse players at all levels of the game - I'm confident that quick feet drills are valuable for lacrosse players.

Saying that, it's important to make each one of these drills intensely intentional and deliberate. Going through the motion of these drills makes them essentially just a poorly executed conditioning drill. Instead, we want to make sure that you're focusing on getting dialled into your movement mechanics and finding better positions while pushing the upper limits of speed capacity.

That means that for quick feet drills, you should focus on three primary aspects:

1. Lighter feet

Lacrosse players can develop the tendency to get "heavy" in their feet, especially those who play with a more physical style. The golden rule here is that loud feet are slow feet. The slowest players tend to make a lot of noise in their footwork because they make heavy and aggressive steps, whereas the fastest players tend to be light and quiet in their footwork. We want to practice being light and on our toes for all of our quick feet drills.

2. Better Movement Patterns & Athletic Postures

This is essential for players at all levels. Often when lacrosse players are challenged to move quick and fast, they default into tall postures and can find sloppy movement patterns. We want to use quick feet drills to challenge you to find low-hip positions that allow you to get low and athletic, thus creating better movement patterns that translate to dodging, defending, and transitioning with speed.

3. Athleticism & Fluidity

A fast player is an athletically fluid player. For younger players this is essential, but even for our elite players, we want to find drills that challenge you to move multi-directionally and find new movement patterns that you can master. This means choosing drills that aren't just straight lines, focusing on one repetitive movement, and require novel movement skills that mirror the unpredictable demands of lacrosse.

So while you might love doing footwork drills, you need to make sure that you're hitting them with intensity and intention. More reps and pushing the pace aren't necessarily better here.

As we try to enhance that upper limit of speed capacity, it's important to recognize that we're not just making physical changes - but neuromuscular changes. This means that we don't want to turn this into an absolute bagger, but instead allow our body to recharge and find more speed for the next rep or set.

Recommended Further Reading:

• Quick Feet Drills for Lacrosse Players - This article takes a deep dive into some of our favourite drills (with videos) that you can use to improve your foot speed and athleticism.
• The Best Ladder Drills for Lacrosse Players - Speed ladders seem to be a staple for most athletes, and this article breaks down the most effective drills for lacrosse-specific movement.

Change of Direction Development for Lacrosse Players

Improving your ability to change direction can completely transform your game.

If you look at all of today's most impactful players, they're often the players with the highest ability to change direction with power and control.

When you have the elite ability to stop and start, cut sharply, or shift directions off the dodge - you have the ability to determine and dominate the play. Not only does this allow you to completely burn defenders, but suddenly they have to start playing more reactively and start giving you more time and space so that they don't get burned.

Simply put, more offensive opportunities come from the ability to rapidly change direction, especially for attackmen and midfielders who rely on this skill for successful dodges.

So does this mean we need to do more quick feet drills? Not quite.

While rapid and explosive first steps are essential for changing direction, there's also an intensive power and technical demand.

Let's think about initiating a dodge from the wing, making a hard plant step, and then explosively cutting toward the goal.

This sequence means that you've started with speed, you're then rapidly absorbing that speed, and then expressing it in a completely different direction. A challenging set of movement patterns if we're really breaking it down.

Researchers and Sport Performance Coaches have broken this sequence (and all change of direction) into three distinct phases:

1. The Braking Phase – taking speed and rapidly decelerating
2. The Transition Phase – also called the "planting" phase, in which you've absorbed speed and are in a position to express power.
3. The Propulsive Phase – where you're expressing power to accelerate in the opposition direction.

This is helpful to understand, because it allows both you and your coaches to create drills that focus on these demands, while also intensely feeling and finding better movement skills through these phases.

For you as a lacrosse player, we place a lot of emphasis on trying to master that transition/planting phase. In comparing an elite player with a lower level player, this phase is where we can see the most significant differences.

The elite players, regardless of the type of change of direction, typically find lower positions that allow them to generate explosive power. In contrast, lower level players will often leak power by standing up, being too tall, or not fully absorbing into low positions that allow them to generate more power.

The best lacrosse dodgers in the world all share this ability to get low in transition moments, creating the perfect platform to explode past defenders.

So while this topic deserves a deeper dive, along with specific drills to improve your change of direction capacity, there are three areas to focus on if you want to take your CoD to the next level:

1. Power Expression

You want to get explosive? You need to train your strength and power to be able to generate more in each push and cut.

2. Finding Lower Postures

Sometimes this is a mobility challenge, especially if you have tight ankles or hips, but in most cases this is a movement skill that can be challenged and improved with deliberate practice. The ability to drop the hips quickly creates a more powerful base to push from.

3. Aggressive First Steps

Note that this isn't just quicker first steps. The ability to plant and generate power in a new direction requires aggressively hitting the gas. This is a combination of both short burst power expression and foot speed.

That's exactly why we created the Relentless Explosive Speed program for lacrosse players - to specifically target these critical components with a proven system that translates to on-field performance.

Agility for Lacrosse Players

What's the difference between change of direction and agility?

Agility is commonly (and wrongfully) used as a blanket term for everything from quick feet training, to change of direction, to speed work.

The truth is, while agility may be the single most important attribute for lacrosse players - it's also the most complex.

Let's quickly define agility so that we can look at it from a deeper perspective.

Agility has been defined as: "a rapid whole-body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus".

This last part is the most important.

Agility is the ability to read and react to a developing play, see an opportunity and act on it, mirror an offensive player's movement, or anticipate a pass - it's the ability to be responsive to the game.

Researchers have broken agility down into three key components:

1. Cognitive

This is the ability to read a stimulus (a play, an opportunity, etc.) and choose the appropriate physical response as quickly as possible. Mental agility could be an article in its own right.

2. Physical

After choosing the right physical response, how well can you physically respond? This involves strength/power, speed, footwork, etc.

3. Technical

This is more motor skill related, and can be closely related to our section on change of direction. How good are your cutting mechanics, how low do you get in your CoD, simply put - what skills do you have to respond to a stimulus.

If we understand this, we can then understand that ladder drills or any sort of repeatable pattern drill isn't going to improve our agility. It might improve aspects of our agility, but unless we're intentionally creating drills that challenge us to read and react - we're not improving agility.

So if there's a heavy cognitive or mental component of agility - is it actually trainable?

The answer is absolutely yes.

Both in the gym, and in research, we're seeing that athletes can actively improve their agility with reactive based drills designed to challenge their ability to "read" and then "react" with the appropriate movement skill or pattern.

Most commonly these are with a partner or coach.

With a partner, these often involve "mirror" drills - where one player leads and another player must follow. The most basic version of this can start with a simple mirror shuffle, and evolve into more complex drills that allow the lead player to create more movement variance and options. If you have a training partner or teammate nearby - we highly recommend you use these drills. Not only are they super beneficial, but they also demand a compete level that can be tough to find off field.

For you as a defensive player, these drills are particularly valuable since you need to mirror offensive movements, but they're equally valuable for offensive players who need to read defensive positioning and react accordingly.

With a Coach, parent, or anyone else, you can use an assortment of drills that involve responding to verbal or physical cues.

This could be as basic as having different coloured cones laid out and having a Coach call out a colour or number that you need to respond to.

As this evolves, we often like to challenge players to read our body positions starting with a point in a direction and evolving to reading postures such as what way the hips are pointed and responding to the opposite way (just like you would beat a defender on the field).

As long as you're creative in creating a mental stimulus that requires you to read and react to - you can be endlessly creative with agility drills.

A couple of training considerations:

1. Make sure you do agility drills at the start of your workout. We want to make sure that you're fresh for all your agility work. Do these types of drills immediately after a warm up so that both your body is ready to fire and your nervous system is primed.
2. Make sure you're giving yourself adequate rest. Because agility is both cognitive and neuromuscular, research has shown that ideal work to rest ratio is 1 to 4-6, meaning that you should work all out in a short burst (e.g. 10s) with a long break (e.g. 40-60s). Focus on quality not quantity.
3. Compete and get aggressive. These drills are the perfect opportunity to really push the pace. Going through the motions here, or even just going 80%, essentially turns these drills into conditioning drills. We need to push the upper limit that we can read, react, and fire.

Strength & Power

Enhancing power is by far the easiest and most effective way to improve on-field speed.

That might seem like a bold statement with so many coaches and players focusing on quick feet drills - but we've seen hundreds if not thousands of players who unlock that extra gear in their first step through structured and intensive strength work.

Most of the elite players we work with in our coaching program will typically take time in the off-season to focus strictly on work in the gym. The number one thing they nearly all say getting back on the field is that they can't believe how much extra gas they have in their step and how much more powerful their dodges feel.

The research supports this thesis too.

Studies of collegiate athletes consistently show that measures of lower body power, like vertical jump, are strong predictors of on-field speed and performance. The correlation between power metrics and game speed has been demonstrated across multiple field sports, including lacrosse.

So, what is power?

Power = Force x Velocity.

We'll spare the sports science nerdy definition and simply say that power is the ability to express strength (force) as rapidly as possible (velocity).

This is actually super helpful for you to understand, for a handful of reasons:

1. Strength is paramount.

Your ability to express power is ultimately defined by your level of strength. Strength can essentially be considered the horse power of your engine. If you want more fire power, you need the strength to express it.

2. Power has a central nervous demand.

Your ability to fire your strength is intensely CNS dependent. This means your power is defined by how efficiently and effectively your nervous system can recruit and fire your muscles.

3. Power isn't trained by doing 100s of box jumps.

This is likely the most important takeaway. A lot of players hit box jumps for rep after rep and think that they're getting more powerful. You might be getting more efficient at jumping on a box, but you're not developing the strength and power that translates to explosive cuts and dodges on the field.

Understanding this means that there are two areas of focus for you in the gym.

First, you need to be actively developing strength. This isn't just functional exercises. It's developing the lower body strength that matters. In all of our programs, we make sure that we're developing the strength that translates with heavy lunges, split squats, hip thrusts, and deadlifts. You want to get faster? You need to get stronger.

Secondly, you need to be developing the power that translates. There's a wide variety of training methodologies that you can use to improve your power output. Popular methods such as plyometric exercises have been shown to specifically improve power output and speed measures in field sport athletes. We'll dive deeper into the types of power and the best way to train each in a separate article, but simply put - you need to practice expressing force as rapidly as possible.

For offensive players, especially, don't neglect rotational power. The ability to rotate explosively not only enhances shot velocity but also improves dodging capability by allowing you to change direction more powerfully. Exercises like medicine ball rotational throws, landmine rotations, and cable woodchops can all develop this crucial aspect of lacrosse-specific power.

That's why all of our lacrosse workout programs incorporate both strength and power development with specific emphasis on rotational power. Our Relentless Explosive Speed program was specifically designed to develop the type of power that translates to the field for lacrosse players.

Other Factors

If you've gotten this far, you likely realize that speed is a complex topic for lacrosse players.

While foot speed, strength/power, and agility/change of direction capacity are the core tenants that all lacrosse players should be focused on - there are a couple of other factors that we should consider.

We could consider this the bonus material. For most players, 90% of their speed gains will be from improving the above attributes, but these facts do make an impact.

Mobility & Speed

Stretching and mobility exercises can make you a faster player.

It's a concept that players rarely consider as enhancing performance, but optimal mobility is vital to movement mechanics and optimizing power transfer for speed and explosiveness.

Lacrosse players often develop tightness in key areas - particularly the hips, ankles, and thoracic spine - due to the demands of the sport. While often players and coaches consider this a health focus rather than a performance focus - poor mobility will make you slower.

This can be attributed to creating suboptimal movement patterns that causes you to incorrectly utilize your body's natural kinetic chains and often find sloppy mechanics.

While the most notable example of this can be tight hips limiting your ability to get low in cuts and dodges (and thus limiting the range to express power), it doesn't just stop there. Lack of ankle mobility prevents you from getting into athletic positions, thoracic spine stiffness limits rotational power for shots and dodges, and the list goes on.

A stretching and mobility routine isn't just to stay healthy, pain-free, and injury proof the body - it pays dividends when it comes to performance.

Feel tight and restricted? It's slowing you down. Get into focused mobility work.

Recommended Further Reading:

• 5 Mobility Exercises Lacrosse Players Should Do Every Day
• The Importance of Hip Mobility for Lacrosse Players

Body Composition & Speed

There's no way around this - the more extra fat you're carrying, the more you're slowing yourself down.

This is the specific reason why we created our Lean & Agile program. We'd constantly see players who were strong, powerful, and highly talented athletes just always missing that extra gear because they were carrying unnecessary weight. This isn't just opinion, research has shown this too, with body composition and speed being directly correlated in collegiate athletes.

It's easy to conceptualize. A player carrying extra weight needs to work harder, express more power, and has a higher cardiovascular and physiological demand on every movement.

For midfielders especially, who need to cover the most ground and transition quickly between offense and defense, body composition can make a critical difference in performance over the course of a game.

We take a deeper dive into this topic in the recommended article below, but the important takeaway is that if you want to be fast - you need to be lean.

Recommended Further Reading:

• The Optimal Body Composition for Lacrosse Players

To Wrap It Up

Players at all levels know why they want to get faster and the impact speed has in the modern game - but we hope with this article & additional resources you now understand how to get faster.

Speed can be improved off the field. But it isn't just focusing on going faster. It's the intense and intentional focus on improving all the attributes that translate to speed.

Structured Strength & Conditioning is the answer when it comes to speed development. That's why we created the Relentless Explosive Speed program that was designed to attack, challenge, and develop all of these attributes. That may seem like a shameless plug, but we truly believe it's the single best program in the industry for developing speed in lacrosse players.

Regardless if you're training with a Coach, following a program, or going at it solo - these are the attributes that you need to be training to take your speed to the next level.

Speed is the variable of success for lacrosse players.

Now go act on this information. Get out there and train Relentless!

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