Les Spellman on Speed, Simplicity and Staying Available

For Les Spellman, speed has never been about tricks, cues or chasing complexity. It is about building athletes who can show up, repeat effort, and stay available when it matters most.

Over more than a decade of coaching speed, Les has worked at six Olympic Games, trained over 100 NFL draft picks, including 15 first-rounders, and assessed more than 100,000 athletes through half a million individual tests. The environments have changed. The demands have intensified. The principle has not. “Most people think speed is about what you say,” he explains. “Really, it’s about what you do, and how consistently you do it.”
That philosophy sits at the heart of what it means to be built to outperform.

A simple model for building fast athletes

Les is quick to challenge the idea that speed is reserved for the genetically gifted. While acknowledging biological limits, his work has repeatedly shown that most athletes can run far faster than they believe. “In my world, relatively fast is around 22 miles per hour,” he says. “Most people can do that. We’ve done it in high school, even middle school.”
Rather than obsessing over a single technical model, Les frames speed development through three foundational layers.

Image courtesy of @les7spellman

The first is structure: anthropometrics, joint range of motion, and basic movement capacity matter. Without adequate hip, knee and ankle function, speed is capped before training even begins.

The second is kinetics. Force production, how quickly those forces are produced, and the direction they are applied. “If you can’t produce force fast, it doesn’t matter how strong you are,” he explains. This is where speed lives or dies.

The final layer is coordination. The technical expression of speed. But this comes last, not first.

“You don’t just coach someone into better positions, and suddenly they’re faster,” Les says. “You build the physical qualities first, then teach them how to organise it.”

That approach explains why athletes can look different yet still be elite. Some are step length dominant. Others rely on frequency. Some spend more time in the air, others on the ground. Speed is not a single mould. It is a continuum.

Performance without overcomplication

One of Les’ strongest convictions is that coaches often get in their own way.  “Speed training is simple,” he says. “If you get people running faster, they’re probably going to run faster.”

Across his network of over 200 speed labs, Les has seen near identical improvements from facilities with minimal technology and those equipped with the latest systems. The differentiator is not equipment; it is consistency.

“The primary factor in running faster is just running faster,” he explains. “The more you talk, the more you interfere, the more you distract from that.”

This simplicity extends to how he manages athletes across age, season and career stage. Early in development, weaknesses can be addressed aggressively. Later in a career, the priority shifts to protecting strengths and managing exposure.

“With older athletes, I’m not trying to change them,” Les says. “I’m bullet-proofing what already works.” That mindset becomes critical in high-pressure environments where risk tolerance is low, and availability is everything.

Image courtesy of @les7spellman

Availability is performance

Across football, rugby and soccer, Les has seen the same pattern repeat. Speed exposures that are avoided in training inevitably show up in competition, often with consequences. “If high-speed running isn’t in your weekly diet, your body is going to reject it when it happens in a game,” he explains.

His solution is pragmatic. Maintain regular high-speed exposures and develop acceleration qualities that the sport itself often fails to load adequately. When this approach was implemented consistently, sprint-related injuries dropped by around 30% across multiple environments.

“That’s not luck,” Les says. “That’s preparation.” This link between preparation, recovery and availability is where his interest in Blood Flow Restriction began.

From rehab curiosity to performance necessity

Les’ first exposure to BFR had nothing to do with performance. It came through rehabilitation. “I didn’t understand it at all,” he admits. “But everyone who used it came back faster, healthier, stronger.”

At the time, traditional BFR systems were impractical in team settings. Expensive devices, specialist operators, and limited scalability meant they remained on the fringes. That changed when he encountered Hytro. “I tried the shorts on and thought, this is it,” Les says. “This solves a major problem.”

For the first time, BFR became usable across entire squads, not just individual rehab cases. No wires. No machines. No bottlenecks. “I’ve got 43 players,” he explains. “I can’t afford one person running one device. I want everyone doing it.”

I’ve got 43 players. I can’t afford one person running one device. I want everyone doing it.

Why BFR fits the Built to Outperform mindset

What resonates most with Les is not novelty, but efficiency. His core question is simple. How can athletes train more, at higher quality, with less negative impact? “It’s not hard to make someone faster,” he says. “The hard part is organising training so you can apply frequent, high-quality stimulus without breaking people.”

BFR, in his view, offers a way to increase training density while supporting recovery. Whether used passively, during warm-ups, post-session, or in travel scenarios, it helps athletes arrive prepared and leave sessions in a better state. “What I’m interested in is doing more with less cost,” he explains. “More output, less downside.”

That logic makes BFR compelling not as a gimmick, but as infrastructure. A tool that supports availability across long seasons, congested schedules and high-stakes moments.

Image courtesy of @les7spellman

Coaching, not just technology

Despite his openness to innovation, Les is blunt about what truly matters. “There’s an inverse relationship between learning technology first and being a successful coach,” he says.

He believes young practitioners should spend more time coaching people and less time staring at screens. “Coaching is a service industry,” he explains. “If you can’t connect with athletes, the data doesn’t matter.”

This human-first approach is what allows tools like BFR to succeed. Athletes buy into what they understand and feel. When recovery improves, readiness improves, and performance follows, adoption takes care of itself.

A non-negotiable for modern performance

As Les prepares to integrate BFR across his largest and highest calibre groups to date, he is clear about why it belongs. “This year, the windows are shorter, the players are better, and the risk is higher,” he says. “I need tools that protect health and support performance at the same time.”

This year, the windows are shorter, the players are better, and the risk is higher. I need tools that protect health and support performance at the same time.

For coaches operating in the real world, that combination is rare. And increasingly essential.

Being built to outperform is not about doing more for the sake of it. It is about making smart decisions that keep athletes fast, fresh and available when it counts.

For Les Spellman, BFR is no longer optional. It is part of the system.

If you are building performance programmes where availability matters, and you want to understand how BFR fits into real training environments, speak to the Hytro team.

Want to hear more from Les? Listen to the Hytro Performance Podcast on YouTube or Spotify.