What Makes a Great Athlete? Breaking Down Speed, Power, and Resilience
Becoming a great athlete isn’t about overnight success. While talent and skill play a role, it’s the consistent pursuit of speed, power, and resilience that ultimately separates the good from the great. These qualities are not just physical—they shape how athletes train, recover, and grow.
The real secret to becoming great lies in embracing the process. Small, consistent improvements, made day after day, lead to significant results over time. In fact, improving by just 1% per day compounds to a 37x improvement over a year. This concept is at the heart of building an elite athletic mindset—where every bit of progress, no matter how small, adds up to something big.
Let’s break down each of these core qualities—speed, power, and resilience—and explore how they play a critical role in athletic performance.
Speed: More Than Just Quick Feet
Speed isn’t just about how fast you can move your legs—it’s about how efficiently your body applies force to the ground in the right direction. To truly develop speed, it’s essential to understand and train the biomechanics of sprinting, including acceleration, deceleration, and maintaining top speed.
Effective speed training starts with good posture, creating big shapes with your body during acceleration, and being quick off the ground. These elements allow you to apply force in a way that maximizes efficiency and minimizes wasted energy.
But speed doesn’t develop overnight. Here’s where resilience and consistency come in. It’s easy to get discouraged if you don’t see immediate improvements, but remember that speed takes time and consistent effort to build. Just like in any other area of training, speed is improved gradually. The athletes who succeed are the ones who keep showing up every day, putting in the work, and trusting the process. 1% improvement each day compounds over time, leading to noticeable gains.
While there’s a genetic component to speed, it's often overemphasized. Consistent effort and resilience in your training are the key drivers of progress. Stay committed, and you’ll see improvements in ways you didn’t expect.
Power: The Engine That Drives Performance
Power is the ability to generate force quickly, and it’s a critical component of athletic performance. Without power, speed is limited, and strength alone won’t deliver the explosive performance you need. Power training allows athletes to apply their strength rapidly, whether it’s sprinting, jumping, or changing direction.
To develop power, you need to focus on explosive movements like Olympic lifts, jump squats, and plyometric exercises. These exercises are designed to help you move weight quickly and efficiently, improving your overall explosive power. It’s not about how heavy you can lift—it’s about how quickly you can apply that strength to athletic movements.
But just like speed, power isn’t built in a day. The key is consistent power training with a focus on explosive strength and resilient effort. Over time, you’ll see significant improvements in how you perform, whether you’re sprinting, jumping, or changing direction in your sport.
Resilience: The Secret to Overcoming Setbacks
While speed and power are essential, resilience is what allows athletes to keep improving, even when setbacks happen. It’s the ability to bounce back from failure, stay focused during tough times, and continue progressing without losing sight of your goals.
Resilience in athletics isn’t just about pushing through physical challenges—it’s about developing the mental toughness to keep going. Mental resilience helps you stay consistent in your training, even when progress feels slow or when setbacks occur. Whether it's recovering from an injury, overcoming a bad performance, or pushing through a hard training session, resilience is what helps you rise to the occasion and keep moving forward.
A resilient mindset allows you to remain committed to your training program, trusting that results will come with time. It also helps you recover physically by knowing when to rest and when to push harder. In fact, resilience isn’t just about training harder; it’s about training smarter, ensuring you’re rested and recovered for each session so you can perform at your best.
The Power of Consistency: 1% Better Every Day
It’s often said that greatness doesn’t happen overnight—and it’s true. Success in athletics, as in life, is built on consistent, incremental improvements. The idea of 1% improvement per day is a powerful principle to embrace. Even small steps forward can lead to massive gains over time.
When you commit to improving by just 1% each day, at the end of a year, you’ll have improved by 37 times. While the progress might not seem dramatic at first, over time, those small improvements accumulate into something incredible. This applies to every aspect of athletic development—whether you’re building speed, power, or resilience.
It’s easy to focus on big goals, but the real secret is staying consistent. The athletes who succeed long-term are the ones who embrace this principle. They stay resilient, training hard each day, and understand that even small improvements matter.
Putting It All Together: A Holistic Approach to Performance
The most successful athletes don’t just focus on one quality—they develop speed, power, and resilience simultaneously. These qualities are interconnected, and focusing on all three leads to better overall performance.
For example, power training helps you become faster, while speed training improves your overall athletic performance. Resilience ensures you can stay consistent through the inevitable ups and downs of training, ensuring steady progress over time. When you work on all three aspects—speed, power, and resilience—you build a well-rounded athletic foundation that will serve you in any sport or competition.
The key is balance. Consistent training, paired with rest and recovery, will allow you to achieve lasting results. Whether you’re a seasoned athlete or just starting, developing all three qualities will maximize your potential and elevate your performance.
Takeaways: Key Actions for Athletes to Focus On
To improve in speed, power, and resilience, focus on these key actions:
Speed: Train sprint mechanics, focusing on good posture, big shapes, and quick off the ground. Add resistance training to build strength and power.
Power: Incorporate explosive exercises like Olympic lifts, jump squats, and plyometrics into your routine to develop explosive strength.
Resilience: Cultivate a growth mindset, set realistic goals, and practice mental recovery techniques like visualization. Stay consistent with training and recovery for long-term success.
Conclusion: The Road to Becoming a Great Athlete
Great athletes are not born—they’re made through consistent, dedicated effort in developing speed, power, and resilience. These qualities shape not just performance, but also how you approach training and recovery. By focusing on small, consistent improvements each day, you’ll unlock your full potential and take your athletic performance to the next level.
1% better every day might seem like a small goal, but over time, it compounds into extraordinary results. Commit to the process, trust in your training, and embrace resilience on your journey. The path to greatness is long, but every step forward counts. Keep chipping away, and you’ll see the results in ways you never expected.
