Science meets speed in a bold new way: a few vivid words can make teenage soccer players sprint faster—instantly.
The trick? Metaphors like “push the ground away” that tap into the brain’s power to visualize and move smarter.
Jet-Powered Sprinting Secrets
Picture a young soccer player exploding off the line like a jet taking off. That image alone can make the difference between a routine sprint and a game-winning burst of speed. Researchers at the University of Essex worked with Tottenham Hotspur’s elite academy and found that vivid, environment-focused phrases boosted teenage athletes’ 20-meter sprint times by about 3 percent—an improvement that usually demands weeks of specialized training.
Why does it matter? Those lightning-quick accelerations often decide whether a striker slips past a defender and buries the ball in the net.
Mind-Over-Muscle Coaching
Dr. Jason Moran, a sports scientist at Essex, discovered that young players run faster when they concentrate on what’s around them rather than on their own body mechanics. Telling an athlete to “push the ground away” or “launch like a jet” creates a clear mental picture and frees the body to move fluidly.
“The words we speak to athletes have a demonstrable and instant effect on their performance,” Moran explains.
“It’s long been known that it’s better to direct an athlete’s attention to the environment around them rather than focusing on their body positions, which seems to interfere with the fluidity of movement.”
Ferrari-Fast Imagery Tricks
Moran says, “This could be enhanced even further by using certain analogies, for example, asking a player to ‘accelerate like a Ferrari’ may create a more evocative image in their mind instead of simply telling them to run fast.”
The research used 20 members of the North London side’s academy, all between 14 and 15 years old.
Before taking part in sprint drills, the promising players were given different directions before running.
External analogies telling them to “push the ground away’ achieved better results than “driving their legs into the ground.”
Skyward Acceleration Cues
And top performances were encouraged by players being urged to “sprint as if you are a jet taking off into the sky ahead.”
In coaching, analogies can make it easier for someone to learn how to move their body in the right way by hiding complicated instructions within simple spoken words.
For example, by using analogies, a coach can tell an athlete how fast and in what position their body needs to be, without using hard-to-understand technical terms.
It is thought that this could be particularly advantageous in young learners who may show relatively lower levels of focus.
Grassroots Speed Boosts
Away from elite sport, it is thought these cues and coaching tactics could be used in PE lessons and at the grassroots.
Dr. Moran added, “Although these findings focus on the highest level of youth football, it could easily be used in schools or on a Saturday morning.
“By using a simple analogy, teachers and parents might be able to get the most out of their kids, whatever the sport.”
Reference: “How effective are external cues and analogies in enhancing sprint and jump performance in academy soccer players?” by Jason Moran, Matt Allen, Joshua Butson, Urs Granacher, Raouf Hammami, Filipe Manuel Clemente, Megan Klabunde and Gavin Sandercock, 1 February 2024, Journal of Sports Sciences.
DOI: 10.1080/02640414.2024.2309814
A version of this article was originally published in March 2024.
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20 Comments
Nice
“Old news.” Visualization techniques have been studied for decades. It’s nice to see it reported.
Why would a striker need to get past a defender? Strikers are just supposed to stand there with their little “unfair” signs and whine about how mean their bosses are and demand to be payed more money for doing less work. I know they have strikes in the UK. They don’t call people who participate in them “strikers?”
Sam Shepard…..this is talking about sports….not politics or employment. “Strikers” and “defenders” refers to the position the person is playing in the said sport.
Clearly he was making a play on words. Try to keep up. Perhaps train yourself away from the reflexive response to constantly lecture others on obvious points, and over time you’ll gain the ability to identify sarcasm and humor.
Oh a wise guy eh?
You got the study exactly wrong. External and away cues were only significant when compared with internal cues. The “jet taking off” analogy was used for the towards condition. The away condition was to imagine “being chased up a hill”. In either case, nothing was significantly better than their neutral/control statement to run as fast as you can.
They’re essentially brought visualization and imagery into it. There are studies suggesting the performance enhancing effects and the mind over matter component. But to be significant it has to be meaningful to the players or the kids will think the coach is having a moment or it’s an old guy thing. Rapora and knowing one’s players is significant especially if you’re trying to use mental imagery and queues in your coaching. Religion has sometimes dressed this sort of thing up in ritual in teaching martial arts to monks
Interesting topic but weakly written article
Boring comment with insubstantial evidence to justify ones opinion.
My cats breath has the smell of cat food.
In sports now, players whine about how mean their bosses are and demand to be paid more money.
No they dont
I think in general this is useful information. I discovered as a child that if I focused on the “feeling of the ball going through the hoop” I scored more in basketball. The adaptive subconscious has an incredible ability to simulate ahead if you give it a goal, and being consciously focused on the mechanics can get in the way of that flow in the moment (though we should question whether that awareness might still be useful in the pre-training that enables and may improve the later performance).
On the other hand, there’s a criticism and question mark to be leveled regarding jailbreaking our kids’ brains to make them run faster, eh? The framing of the article feels slightly cold from that angle.
This study is 100% true. Whenever people ask me “How do you always look so refreshed in the morning??”. So I tell them, “it’s because I slept like a gay guy last night!”. It’s about the analogy. I just try to help wherever I can.
So like in karae where you are taught to punch through the person?
A scientist came up with this???…….I knew this at about age 10 which is why I was just about unstoppable, averaging about 2.5 goals per game till age 17, as a right forward. This “discoverey” is inherently known. Today 99% of superstars in any sport use visualization. Notice the headphones or earbuds! It doesn’t take a scientist! Y’all are waaaay behind the curve!
*discovery
In sports now, players whine about how mean their bosses are and demand to be paid more money.
“…, environment-focused phrases boosted teenage athletes’ 20-meter sprint times by about 3 percent—”
Three percent is not a lot. What was the precision of original time measurement? Is it even statistically significant? What is the uncertainty (margin of error) in the average time measurements? There is a metric used in the peer-reviewed article (ES) that is not defined, so it is more than just a little difficult to analyze their claims.
Twenty samples is on the lower edge of statistically useful measurements. It is sometimes used as a deciding factor in using n or n-1 weighting for calculating standard deviation/variance.
Assuming a typical 100-meter sprint might be about 12 seconds for this cohort, one would expect that, including acceleration from standing still, a 20-meter dash would be about 3.0 seconds. Nowhere can I find any mention of the precision of the time measuring equipment. Three percent of 3.0 seconds is less than one-tenth of a second, what one would reasonably expect for precision in using a stop watch. That doesn’t account for variations in reaction time for the runner (~0.5 seconds) or simple motivation in trying to please the coach. The abstract for the article notes, “However, simply encouraging maximal effort from a youth athlete also appears to be a reasonable cueing strategy to drive performance in youth athletes.” They have basically undercut their claim that certain motivational words are ‘significantly’ better than other words.
I think that there is a lot of wishful thinking involved in this study. Even if it is valid, it seems like a lot of effort for such a small improvement.