Coach Jim Hodgins

​Speed Development Coach

Strength and Conditioning Specialist

Jim Hodgins is a High School Track Coach and, more generally, a Strength & Conditioning Specialist with an emphasis on Speed Development. He is a former strength athlete (strongman and powerlifting) who fell in love with sprinting and speed development during his graduate studies. He believes strongly that speed is the most useful physical attribute an athlete can have if they want to be successful in their sport.

​

"Speed in its most broken-down essence is the ability to reposition limbs quickly. Success in field and court sports comes from being able to create movement faster than your opponent can react and create a defensive movement, so if we accept that as true then it's easy to see how speed directly relates to success in that context.

If we dial in and look at locomotive speed - even linear sprinting more specifically - we know that breakaways in American football occur often at speeds faster than 10m/s. If you can't hit high speeds like that, you're not likely to get away very often, if at all. We also know that the action most frequently preceding soccer goals is a linear sprint by either the goal-scorer or the assisting team-mate. Takeaway point: be fast. Speed isn't everything in sport, but it seems to very often be present wherever athletic success is happening."

​

Coach Jim believes in "walking the walk" as a coach, so you'll find him on the track and on the field working to develop his own speed in an effort to better serve those who want to be fast.

​

"I think it's valuable to - in addition to understanding workouts and programming for speed at a conceptual level from a physiology/exercise science standpoint - to know what these stimuli we are trying to expose our athletes to kind of feel like. This way I think we can better cue them and relate to the training experience. Granted, I'm a lot older and slower than my high school sprinters, so their experience is likely gonna differ a bit from mine. But I think I've always learned a lot as a coach by being my own lab rat, and getting my ass out on the track the past few years has been no exception."