This week’s guest is Derek Hansen. Derek is the head strength coach at Simon Fraser University, and is a renowned speed expert and consultant. He is the director of SPS consulting, and owns the site www.strengthpowerspeed.com.

Derek is a Canadian coach who was mentored by Charlie Francis and is well-respected as one of the top speed and strength experts in the world. He wrote the chapter on speed training in the book “High Performance Training for Sports”, which many sports performance professionals are familiar with.

If you haven’t noticed, a recurring theme on this podcast is that of strength, speed and power development. I’m happy to have Derek on due to his long-running experience in strength and conditioning and track and field.

As with most experienced and successful coaches, Derek has taken a lot of complicated ideas and funneled them down to simple and effective principles. Today on the show, we talk about Derek’s philosophy in application towards linear speed testing, sprint drills, general vs. specific strength, bar speed monitoring, and more.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.