Sam Portland - Speed Coach, Worthing (2026)

02/09/2026

THIS ATHLETE SHOULD BE FASTER.

Rugby player:

120.1kg bodyweight
50.3cm CMJ
40.6 W/kg
4.61s 30m

Look at those numbers independently and you might miss the most important thing.

Look at them as a relationship:

120.1KG ATHLETE ➡️ 50.3CM CMJ ✓✓ ➡️ 40.6 W/KG ? ➡️ 4.61S 30M ↓↓

Now it gets interesting.

Moving 120kg through a 50.3cm countermovement jump demonstrates significant physical capability.

Yet his 30m sprint is poor.

So the question ISN’T:

“How do we make him more powerful?”

It’s:

“Why isn’t this physical capability being expressed locomotively?”

That completely changes the programme.

Now we’re investigating the gap.

Is it acceleration?

Force orientation?

Projection?

Relative horizontal force?

Sprint mechanics?

Elastic qualities?

Body mass?

The ability to convert force at the velocities and contact times required during sprinting?

This is transfer-led programming.

For years, I made the mistake of looking at testing data in isolation.

Strength = good/bad.

Power = good/bad.

Speed = good/bad.

Then I started looking at the relationships:

CAPACITY ➡️ CONVERSION ➡️ EXPRESSION ➡️ TRANSFER

And once you see athlete data like this, you can’t unsee it.

You don’t necessarily need another 15 tests.

You need enough data to identify where the chain breaks.

Because testing isn’t about creating prettier dashboards or more green boxes.

It’s about making better coaching decisions.

One caveat with this athlete: I’d verify the W/kg calculation because it doesn’t sit completely comfortably alongside the 50.3cm CMJ.

Good data analysis means questioning the numbers too.

But assuming the jump is valid, the jump → sprint transfer gap is difficult to ignore.

If you’ve got athlete testing data and you’re not sure what it’s actually telling you…

Comment DATA and I’ll show you the process I’d use to start identifying the transfer gaps.

You might not need more data.

You might just need to look at the data you already have differently.

01/09/2026

I thought filling my diary would give me a successful coaching business.

It did.

It also gave me a completely full diary.

Post

There’s a stage of building a coaching business where almost everything points towards the same goal:

Get more clients.

I did it.

1-to-1s.

Groups.

Teams.

Programming.

Whatever created income.

And initially it works.

More clients.

More sessions.

More revenue.

You feel like you’re winning.

Until you realise you’ve accidentally created an equation:

MORE MONEY = MORE OF ME.

Want another £500?

Find another client.

Want another £1,000?

Give away another chunk of the week.

Eventually the problem isn’t demand.

It’s capacity.

And I think this is where a lot of good self-employed coaches get stuck.

Not because their business failed.

Because the first version succeeded.

You become good enough that people want your time…

and then build a business entirely dependent on selling it.

I still coach.

I love coaching.

I don’t want a business that removes me from the thing I’m actually good at.

But I also don’t want every pound I earn to require another hour of my life.

That distinction changed how I started building everything.

Products.

Education.

Groups.

Recurring revenue.

IP.

Systems.

Not because I wanted to become an internet marketer.

Because I wanted coaching to remain something I chose to do.

Rather than something my income forced me to do.

A successful coaching business shouldn’t eventually make coaching feel like a prison.

It should give you more control over how, when and who you coach.

30/08/2026

COACHES TELL ME THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND BUSINESS.

I don’t believe them.

Because most of the coaches I work with already understand the fundamental principles.

They’ve just never applied them to themselves.

Think about block periodisation:

ACCUMULATION

Build the resources.

INTENSIFICATION

Increase specificity.

REALISATION

Express the outcome.

Now apply exactly the same logic to your coaching business.

ACCUMULATION

Build attention.

INTENSIFICATION

Book consultations.

REALISATION

Present the offer.

Secure the client.

Create the contract.

Build recurring revenue.

Same thinking. Different application.

This came up because I sat down with a coach this week who wanted more financial security.

He had THREE different services.

But when I asked him:

“What’s the offer?”

Silence.

Because coaches love talking about the process.

But your athlete doesn’t initially care about your process.

They care about the outcome.

Make the team.

Earn the contract.

Run faster.

Return from injury.

Become a serious competitor.

That’s what they’re buying.

The training is how YOU get them there.

So if you can understand adaptation…

Programming…

Periodisation…

And transfer…

You can understand business.

You don’t need to become a marketing guru.

You need to learn how to apply the brain you already have to building your own financial security.

If you want me to help you work through that, comment DIAGNOSTIC and I’ll send you the link.

You’re not selling out when you start selling.

28/08/2026

One of the biggest changes I see in coaches isn’t that they suddenly know more.

Programming just stops feeling as heavy.

Early on, every programme feels like a test.

Is this enough?

Should I add something?

What would another coach do?

Am I missing something?

That’s exhausting.

Because you’re effectively rebuilding your coaching philosophy every time you open a spreadsheet.

The change comes when you start developing principles you trust.

You know how you assess.

You know how you prioritise.

You know how you classify training.

You know how you’ll judge whether it worked.

The programme still requires thought.

But you’re no longer starting from zero.

That’s the benefit of a system I’ve probably underappreciated for years.

It doesn’t remove thinking.

It removes the need to rethink everything.

And that gives you far more capacity for the decisions that actually require your expertise.

That’s becoming a huge part of the work I’m doing with coaches inside Legacy and on the Performance Coach Diagnostics.

27/08/2026

One of the easiest traps to fall into as a performance coach is continuing to improve something simply because you can.

This is real data from an 18-year-old hockey player I’ve been working with.

Over roughly six weeks:

Standing broad jump:

2.54m → 2.78m → 2.77m

Around a 9% improvement.

3-fold broad jump:

7.29m → 7.87m → 9.14m

Around a 25% improvement.

That final 3-fold result is exceptionally high, so I’ll reproduce it before treating it as an established benchmark.

Now here’s the interesting bit.

He’s already got a substantial general strength base.

His horizontal power has clearly developed.

So what do we do?

Keep pushing the numbers?

Try to get the broad jump to 3 metres?

Make him even stronger?

Add more plyometrics?

We could.

And I think that’s where coaches can accidentally become trapped by their own testing.

Because when a KPI improves, we’re naturally incentivised to keep chasing it.

It’s working.

The athlete is getting better.

Why stop?

But the purpose of testing isn’t to create an endless collection of PRs.

It’s to help you decide what deserves training.

Eventually a quality moves from:

DEVELOP

to

MAINTAIN.

And your attention moves somewhere else.

For this athlete, I’m increasingly interested in what happens downstream.

Can we take the force-production qualities we’ve developed and transfer them into acceleration?

Can we transfer them into skating speed?

Can we integrate them into hockey actions?

Can he actually solve sporting problems faster?

That’s the progression I’ve always thought about as:

GENERAL → SPECIFIC → SPECIAL → TACTICAL

The numbers don’t have to stop improving.

But eventually improving the number stops being the priority.

Good testing tells you what to develop.

Great interpretation tells you when to move on.

Want help making more efficient decisions with your data comment "system" for my performance coach operating system.

27/08/2026

It's not about all the metrics it about how the influence one another

26/08/2026

If an exercise isn’t producing the result you expected, don’t immediately replace the exercise.

Change the constraint first.

This is something I use constantly in speed development.

An athlete isn’t projecting properly in acceleration.

The instinct is:

Find another drill.

But the drill might not be the problem.

Change the constraint.

Add resistance.

Change the start.

Manipulate distance.

Change the task.

Change the intent.

Alter the environment.

Then observe what happens.

Because sometimes the athlete doesn’t need another exercise.

They need the same problem presented differently.

I think exercise libraries have accidentally taught coaches to solve every problem through selection.

Exercise isn’t working?

Find another.

But good coaching often involves manipulating the variables within the intervention before abandoning it.

That’s a very different programming philosophy.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve built so much of my speed work around progressions and classifications rather than exercise libraries.

25/08/2026

IF you copy without question you will get found out.

24/08/2026

ACCELERATION IS STRENGTH TRAINING.

It’s just not done with a barbell.

And once you understand that, the way you programme speed starts to change.

Traditionally we’ve separated the two:

Strength = gym.

Speed = field.

So when an athlete needs to produce more force?

We make them stronger.

Squat.

Deadlift.

Split squat.

Add load.

And hope some of that new strength eventually appears when they sprint.

But acceleration doesn’t care about your back squat.

It cares whether you can apply force:

In the right direction.
At the right time.
At the required velocity.

Think about acceleration.

Overcome inertia.

Project the centre of mass.

Produce horizontal force.

Apply it through increasingly shorter ground contacts.

Repeat as velocity increases.

That’s strength.

But it’s a very specific expression of strength.

Which is why athletes can keep getting stronger in the gym…

While their acceleration barely changes.

Adaptation ≠ Transfer.

Maybe they genuinely lack general force capacity.

Get stronger.

But maybe they already have plenty.

Maybe they can’t convert it quickly enough.

Maybe force direction is the problem.

Maybe projection is poor.

Maybe their first two steps are ineffective.

Different problem.

Different adaptation.

Different intervention.

That’s why I don’t start with:

“What strength exercise should I use?”

I start with:

“What is limiting this athlete’s ability to accelerate?”

That’s the process I’ve gone deep into inside my new Sports Speed — Acceleration Manual.

Not another collection of sprint drills.

A system for assessing, understanding and programming acceleration for team-sport athletes.

I’ve just opened the pre-order.

And everyone who pre-orders also gets access to an archived BTS Acceleration Masterclass from one of my live seminars.

Want the pre-order link?

Comment ACCELERATION and I’ll send it over.

23/08/2026

Coaches love adding training.

But adaptation doesn’t reward you for how much work you wrote on the programme.

Think about two programmes.

Programme A

8 exercises.

Lots of volume.

Athlete exhausted.

Coach feels productive.

Programme B

4 interventions.

Each targets a defined adaptation.

Volume controlled.

Outcome measured.

Which is the better programme?

You can’t answer that by counting exercises.

That’s the problem.

Coaching has a strange tendency to reward visible work.

More exercises.

More sets.

More testing.

More complexity.

But athletes don’t adapt to how impressive the spreadsheet looks.

They adapt to the dose.

So the question isn’t:

“How much training can I fit in?”

It’s:

“What’s the minimum effective dose required to create the adaptation I want?”

That distinction becomes especially important when you’re working with team-sport athletes who already have enormous competing demands.

It’s one of the reasons my programming has generally become simpler as my coaching has become more sophisticated.

Sam Portland - Speed Coach

02/09/2026

01/09/2026

30/08/2026

28/08/2026

27/08/2026

27/08/2026

26/08/2026

25/08/2026

24/08/2026

23/08/2026

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