Sprint More or Squat More? The Research Says Stop Choosing

Faude, Koch and Meyer watched video of 360 goals from the German Bundesliga for a 2012 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences. In 45% of them, the scorer made a straight-line sprint in the moments right before the goal. Speed decides games. So every offseason, parents and coaches land on the same argument: does a player get faster by sprinting, or by getting stronger in the weight room?

My answer is that it’s the wrong fight. Here’s what the research actually shows.

Strong legs and fast starts travel together

In 2004, Wisløff and colleagues tested 17 international-level male soccer players for the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Their maximal half-squat strength correlated with 10-meter sprint time at r = 0.94, which is about as tight as relationships get in sport science. The link was weaker over 30 meters (r = 0.71).

That pattern makes sense. The first few steps are where a player has to push the most force into the ground to get their body moving, and that’s where strength matters most. But a correlation in 17 players doesn’t prove that adding squat strength makes someone faster. For that you need training studies.

Getting stronger does make players faster

Seitz and colleagues pulled those training studies together in a 2014 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine: 15 studies and 510 subjects. When lower-body strength went up, sprint performance improved, and the size of the strength gain tracked closely with the size of the sprint gain (r = -0.77; the minus sign just means sprint times went down). On average, resistance training cut sprint times by 3.11%.

That sounds small until you put it on a field. Wisløff’s players averaged 4.0 seconds over 30 meters. Three percent of that is about 0.12 seconds, which is the gap between winning a 50-50 ball and arriving just after it.

Force has to point the right way

Strength isn’t the whole story, though. In a 2011 study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Morin, Edouard and Samozino measured ground forces on 12 physically active men sprinting on an instrumented treadmill, then timed them over 100 meters on a track. The total force they pushed into the ground did not predict their sprint performance. How well they angled that force forward did (correlations above r = 0.73).

That’s the case for sprinting itself. The weight room builds the engine, but sprinting is where an athlete learns to aim the force horizontally and apply it fast enough to matter at speed.

The biggest review says stop choosing

Nicholson, Dinsdale, Jones and Till published the largest review on this question in Sports Medicine in 2021: 121 studies and 3,419 athletes from soccer, rugby, American football and other football codes, all focused on sprints of 20 meters or less. Resisted or assisted sprinting improved short-sprint times. So did strength, power and plyometric training. So did programs that combined methods. No single method came out on top.

Two things didn’t produce a significant improvement in that analysis: just playing the sport, and sprinting or running drills by themselves. That second finding surprises people, but it lines up with the rest of the evidence. Short sprint speed responds when you raise how much force an athlete can produce, how well they direct it, or both.

What to do with this

First, an honest check: if most of your “speed” work is ladders and cone patterns, those drills aren’t building either quality. I covered why in Stop Calling Ladder and Cone Drills Speed Work.

For most youth and high school players, here’s how I’d set up an offseason. Lift two days a week with a real emphasis on squat, hinge and single-leg strength, and keep adding load as technique holds. Sprint on two days, too: short efforts of 10 to 30 meters at true full speed, fresh, early in the session, with enough rest that the last rep is as fast as the first. Add a little resisted sprinting or jumping once those basics are consistent.

So, sprint or squat? Do both, and give each one a job. Strength raises the ceiling. Sprinting teaches a player to use it.