Elite-level training, no matter where you live.

Excellence shouldn’t be dictated by a zip code.

Working within youth athletics for the better part of two decades, we’ve noticed three main struggles that schools face within today’s athletic environment.

  • Most schools don’t have the luxury of a coach whose only job is strength and performance. That means a sports coach must pull double duty (in addition to all their other responsibilities), a member of the community gets pulled in, or there’s no one for the weight room at all. This naturally means that time gets thin to plan and implement a program (let alone keeping up with the most effective methods).

  • Check any high school weight room and you are bound to find football players in there. Athletes from other sports (specifically girls' sports), though? That’s a nut that schools have been trying to crack. For some reason—not understanding its importance, training programming not matching their goals, feeling like it’s not for them, or whatever else—full participation feels tough to impossible to achieve. And even when participation from certain teams exists, speed kills. Is that program actually making athletes faster and stronger toward success on the field, court, or mat?

  • Sometimes there literally just isn’t a person who is free, qualified, or even able to be in the weight room when it’s needed. One school district we work with has around 15 coaches for all sports, boys and girls, from grades 7-12. Is it to be expected that one of those coaches come before school, go to work, and then stay until after practice? There just isn’t anyone who can be trusted to do the job.

Goldfinch Speed exists to help solve these problems

But don’t just take our word for it.

So what is Goldfinch Speed?

We exist to help schools and programs elevate their weight rooms and training programs. The same program that we use in our facilities across central Iowa that’s been used to train NFL players and Olympians gets tailored to your space and equipment. Then we integrate you into our software that delivers workouts directly to your athletes, so you don’t need to spend any time inputting workouts except for any modifications you’d like to make. We have educational offerings through The Strength Coach Network to train existing staff on how to better implement and coach the programs. And, if your school is in need of a coach, we will actually staff your weight room for you and do all the implementation for you!

Goldfinch Speed Stats

95+ % of athletes playing a sport at our partner facilities attend weight room and training sessions because we prioritize enjoying the training process.

The demographics of our programs, both in our facility and at partner facilities, are 55% girls and 45% boys. The training is relevant and the environment is welcoming.

100% of our partner programs have renewed their agreements with us since launching this program.

Improvement in athleticism isn’t measured by feelings, it’s measured by objective data. Your athletes are measured with laser timing gates and force plates and then shown how they stack up compared to more than 1,000 athletes in our system of their age, sex, and grade.

Our Training Philosophy

  • The best training program anywhere is one your athletes are excited to come to. Our program builds in games, competition, and group work to make sure that all athletes love the training and look forward to putting in the work.

  • Rather than "squat day" and "deadlift day," our programming is built off of attributes such as top speed, agility, and jumping explosiveness. For example, top speed requires fast cycling of the athlete's legs, so on that day, we want to train everything fast. A max, slow lift is useful in the right circumstances (which we still will do). so we'll sprint on that day, but we'll also do strength work such as a light squat for relatively high repetitions.

    In addition to these base movements, sports also rarely give the opportunity for you to plant your feet and balance up perfectly. So we work in strengthening unilateral and asymmetrical movements such as a step-back lunge or single-arm press.

  • If you want to run faster or jump higher, you need to run and jump. But you also need to know how high and how fast you're going. That's why we laser time all of our sprints and measure all of our jumps.

    We take all these speeds and jumps and rank them against our database of thousands of athletes so you can see how your athletes are improving, and how they stack up to other athletes like them.

Sample Programming Week