Sam Portland - Speed Coach

06/10/2026

I’ve wanted to quit social media more times than I can count.

Sometimes I log on, scroll for five minutes and think:

F**k me. This is bad.

An exercise discovered yesterday is suddenly the secret to elite performance.

Complex problems get reduced to:

DO THIS. NOT THAT.

And whoever communicates with the most certainty wins.

Some days I genuinely wonder whether I want to participate anymore.

Then I remember something.

There’s an entire generation of coaches whose first classroom is social media.

Before they read the book, they’ll see the Reel.

Before they speak to an experienced coach, they’ll hear the influencer.

Before they’ve developed their own filter, an algorithm is deciding what ideas they’re exposed to.

So if experienced coaches decide social media is beneath them, we don’t remove the bad information.

We just leave the space to it.

And eventually our profession pays the price.

Coaches pay it.

And ultimately, athletes and clients pay it.

Because ideas become decisions.

And coaching decisions have consequences.

That’s why I’m still here.

I don’t want to use social media to become good at social media.

I want to use it to demonstrate what good coaching looks like.

Question things.

Explain nuance.

Show my work.

Share frameworks.

Change my mind when the evidence tells me to.

And hopefully give another coach a better starting point.

It’s also why I invest so heavily in long-form work.

Emails.

Blogs.

YouTube.

Podcasts.

Books.

Manuals.

Because some ideas deserve more than seven seconds and a trending audio.

I’m not interested in teaching coaches to chase likes.

I’d rather help them chase a vision.

Develop a philosophy.

Stand for something.

Build a body of work.

Have a message worth repeating for the next decade, rather than a hook that works for 48 hours.

Social media isn’t the body of work.

It’s the doorway to it.

So I’ll probably open Instagram again tomorrow and think:

F**k me. This is bad.

But I’ll keep contributing.

Because if the people who care about the standard leave the conversation…

we shouldn’t be surprised when the standard drops.

06/10/2026

Same problem. Different programme.

Three rugby players run a poor 10m time.

Athlete A lacks force.

Athlete B has the physical qualities but doesn’t transfer them into sprinting.

Athlete C looks good in isolated testing but can’t express speed in the game.

Same outcome:

Poor acceleration.

Completely different problems.

Which means they shouldn’t receive the same programme.

This is why I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the decision before the programme.

Testing isn’t valuable because you collected data.

It’s valuable because it changed what you decided to do.

I’m going to be doing something later this month specifically around this.

More soon.

05/10/2026

Find yourself learning a ton and you're still in the same place?
Watch this video!!

05/10/2026

How to Make a Living as a Strength and Conditioning Coach: A Career Framework

How to Make a Living as a Strength and Conditioning Coach Making a living as a strength and conditioning coach means building a professional structure around your coaching: a clear position, services people can actually buy, relationships you own rather than borrow, more than one source of income, and systems that stop the work from eating your life. Coaching skill is the starting point, not the plan....

How to Make a Living as a Strength and Conditioning Coach Making a living as a strength and conditioning coach means building a professional structure around your coaching: a clear position, servic…

05/10/2026

ORE DATA ≠ BETTER DECISIONS.

Coaches have access to more information than ever.

GPS.
Force plates.
Jump testing.
Sprint splits.
Strength numbers.
Power.
Z-scores.
Percentiles.

Beautiful dashboards.

But here’s my question:

Has all that data actually made it easier to decide what to train?

Because the purpose of testing isn’t to collect numbers.

It’s to answer:

WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

So here’s something I want you to try.

Pick ONE athlete.

Not your entire squad.

Run their data through this relationship:

STRENGTH → JUMP → SPRINT

Then look for where it starts to break.

Maybe they’re:

Strong enough → Poor jump → Poor sprint

Or:

Strong enough → Good jump → Poor sprint

Or:

Weak → Poor jump → Poor sprint

Same outcome.

Completely different potential problems.

This is where I think coaches get caught out.

We find the lowest number and try to improve it.

But a low number doesn’t automatically need improving.

And a high number doesn’t necessarily mean it’s transferring.

The better question is:

WHERE DOES PHYSICAL CAPACITY STOP TRANSFERRING?

That’s why I’ve built my new Sports Speed Profiler.

The process is deliberately simple:

PUT THE DATA IN → IDENTIFY THE GAP → TRAIN IT → MONITOR IT → ADJUST

No more collecting data for the sake of it.

No more improving numbers because they’re easy to measure.

Use data to make a decision.

I’m giving the Profiler away completely FREE.

Comment PROFILE below and I’ll send it to you.

Then do me one favour:

Put ONE athlete through it.

Don’t change their programme yet.

Just identify where you think the gap is.

Because later this week I’m going to show you what I’d do next.

And that’s where this gets really interesting.

04/10/2026

The Law of Accommodation got traded for “microdosing” and relying on residuals that often can’t exist in team sport in the way we pretend they do.

And I’m not convinced that’s progress.

The Law of Accommodation isn’t shiny.

But it’s useful.

Expose an athlete to the same training stimulus for long enough and the response diminishes.

Eventually, the stimulus needs to evolve.

Not randomly.

Not because you found a new exercise.

Because you understand the adaptation you’re trying to create.

And I think this highlights a bigger problem in team sport S&C.

We keep importing training paradigms that weren’t designed for the environment we’re trying to solve.

Block periodisation.

Residual training effects.

Microdosing.

High-speed exposure targets.

GPS thresholds.

All can be useful.

But the model isn’t the coaching.

Take residuals.

“Speed only lasts X days, therefore every athlete needs 90%+ exposure every week.”

But has the stimulus actually been removed?

The athlete is still training.

Competing.

Accelerating.

Decelerating.

Jumping.

Changing direction.

Expressing speed within their sport.

So before adding another exposure because the spreadsheet says it’s due, ask:

What adaptation am I actually trying to create?

What stimulus is the athlete already receiving?

What is actually limiting performance?

That’s the bit that gets lost.

We can end up with athletes who have beautifully organised spreadsheets…

but chronic fatigue, long injury lists and poor performances when it matters.

Because we’ve become very good at satisfying the training model rather than solving the sporting problem.

That’s why there isn’t much “new” inside my Sports Speed System.

Human adaptation hasn’t suddenly changed.

What matters is the application of first principles, motor learning and frameworks inside the messy reality of team sport.

Problem → Limitation → Adaptation → Intervention → Transfer.

Principles endure.

Methods change.

Application is everything.

I’ve just built a new Sports Speed Profiler to help coaches identify the physical limitation, organise their thinking and make better programming decisions.

Comment “PROFILE” and I’ll send it over.

02/10/2026

Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Coaches are "do-ers" and "fixers" by nature but when you apply that to your own chaos. You just muddy the waters.

02/10/2026

Coaching isn’t about ownership. It’s about development.

Seven years ago, I somehow found myself at the centre of a small group of coaches trying to get better.

Since then, that group has evolved into something I’m incredibly proud of.

Coaches have joined.

Coaches have left.

Some have stayed for years.

Some have left and come back.

My longest-serving member has been with me for 7 years.

The average is around 3 years.

And I think that’s because the goal has never been to make people dependent on the group.

It’s to help them grow beyond the problems they arrived with.

Become better coaches.

Build businesses.

Make more money.

Take back their time.

Become leaders.

Build families.

Buy houses.

Change jobs.

Change priorities.

And sometimes leave because they don’t need the same support anymore.

That’s development.

I have an enormous amount to be thankful for because of this group and the coaches who have trusted me to be part of their journey.

Many of which whom have become great friends.

Long may it continue.

And this week, for the exact reasons I explain in this video, one space became available.

If you’re a serious coach and feel like you’re entering the next stage of your own development…

DM me INNER CIRCLE.

I’ll send you the application and we can see if it’s the right room for you.

Think better. Build better. Lead better.

02/10/2026

Does Conditioning Make You Slower? How to Build Fitness Without Losing Speed

Does Conditioning Make You Slower? How to Build Fitness Without Losing Speed Conditioning does not make athletes slower. Badly prescribed conditioning does. That distinction matters, because the fear of "losing speed" has pushed a lot of coaches into one of two errors: either they avoid conditioning until their athletes cannot repeat anything, or they condition so heavily that every sprint in the programme is performed on tired legs....

Does Conditioning Make You Slower? How to Build Fitness Without Losing Speed Conditioning does not make athletes slower. Badly prescribed conditioning does. That distinction matters, because the fe…

01/10/2026

This is the big challenge with High Skilled Labour and coaching.

You believe you have to be in the room to earn the money.

I've loved building my business over the last 15 years and now helping my fellow renegade coaches build real coaching businesses is a great joy for me.

When I first started pro sport was the only option to work with athletes and now for many graduate coaches and OG's a like its their last option.

You just have to want control more than you want the tracksuit.