Deceleration: Building the Brakes As An Athlete

Field and court athletes often must rely on quickness in order to gain the advantage in crucial moments. Sports are often defined by exactly that—— split-second moments. Inches of distance can be the difference in scoring game-winning points or making game-saving tackles. The quickest athletes are often the ones most capable of creating space away from a defender or closing down space against an attacker, and in order to be that quick, athletes must possess a strong ability to hit the brakes at high speeds.

That’s why it’s important to improve your braking ability and not just focus on being fast. What good is a fast car if it has no brakes? Improving your ability to decelerate will help you become a more explosive and resilient athlete!

Section 1: “Eccentric Qualities”

There are several qualities that contribute to your deceleration ability, but for the sake of this article we will focus on eccentric qualities of force production.

An eccentric muscle contraction, to put it simply, is the phase of contraction in which a muscle lengthens under tension to produce force. Think of the lowering portion of a squat, the landing from a jump, or stopping from a sprint. Typically we think of it as absorbing force against the ground, but in reality we are producing force against it in order to counteract the movement and slow down the momentum of our bodies.

When we brake during high-velocity sprints or land from high jumps, our bodies may experience up to SIX times our body weights in the form of ground reaction forces (GRF). Just think about that for a second. You can imagine how detrimental it can be on your body if it is not prepared to withstand that much force consistently throughout an entire game. Strengthening eccentric qualities is just as important for long-term health as it is for competition performance.

Now, let’s talk about two major parameters of eccentric force production: peak force (PF) and rate of force development (RFD). Eccentric PF is the highest amount of force you can produce in a given braking action, while RFD essentially focuses on how quickly you can produce that force.

We need to produce large amounts of force very quickly in order to decelerate safely and efficiently.

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Section 2: “Eccentric Peak Force: Get Stronger”

As we very well know, in order to produce desired adaptations to the body, we must elicit sufficient stimuli for the body to respond to and recover from over time. Therefore, we need to push enough load consistently and progress appropriately to make this happen.

So how do we train this quality? One solid way is to incorporate slow tempo reps during the eccentric phase of an exercise. Surely you’ve heard of time under tension? In the case of a squat, slow down the lowering phase. Start with 3 seconds and build up to longer times.

Of course, relative load is important here too. Slow body weight squats are great for beginners, but advanced athletes need to be pushed a lot more. Try really heavy rear foot-elevated split squats with 5-second eccentric tempos. Use a weight that you can control every time but challenges you greatly.

Section 3: “Eccentric Rate of Force Development: Move Faster”

To produce a maximal amount of force takes time, well up to a few seconds. Sports actions commonly occur under 0.25 seconds. This tells us that being strong is not enough. You need to be able to tap into your strength as quickly as possible.

Eccentric RFD is important for this reason. In order to beat a defender, you have to produce force as quickly as you can to brake and change direction in a way the defender can’t keep up with.

Now, we mentioned before that one may experience up to six times his or her body weight in GRFs during decelerations. Not only do we need to exert eccentric forces more quickly, we also need to ensure that the body is strong enough to withstand these forces in order to reduce the risk of injury.

The number one way to achieve this is to actually practice decelerations. Sprinting and cutting from the front, back, laterally, all of it. Beginners should start with shorter sprints (ex: 5 yards) and more braking steps (more steps = less stress to the body), while advanced athletes can perform longer sprints with more abrupt decelerations.

Incorporate exercises that force you to perform faster eccentric phases. An example of this is a depth landing from a tall box. These can be stressful to the body, so make sure the technique is top notch and the height of the box is appropriate for your training level.

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Section 4: Conclusion

Training deceleration goes a lot more in depth than this discussion, but hopefully this information is enough to convince you to start paying attention to these qualities in your training.

To summarize:

• Deceleration ability is important for explosiveness and resiliency, and eccentric qualities (ex: PF and RFD) are important for deceleration ability.
• Improve eccentric peak force to get stronger and push your ceiling higher.
• Improve eccentric rate of force development to be able to express force more quickly and handle stress more effectively.

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