Kevin Mulcahy, TMC Performance Coaching

Kevin Mulcahy, TMC Performance Coaching Performance Coaching for anyone who wants to improve their health & performance in sport or work

Kevin is a Performance Coach to anyone who wants to improve their general performance be they athlete or professional.

06/09/2026

The second half hamstring injury is usually described as bad luck. It is more often an exposure problem set up
weeks earlier.
Malone and colleagues, 2017, found hamstring injury risk in Gaelic football relates to sprint exposure, and that
players under exposed to high speed running relative to the demands of the game carry more risk, not less.
Which creates a trap. In-season, the first thing most programmes cut is speed work, because it feels like the
risky bit. So the player arrives in the last quarter having not run at full pace in three weeks, and then does it
eight times under fatigue.

3 things carry most of the protection. Keep a small dose of maximal velocity running in the week, every
week, right through championship. Do the posterior chain work, Copenhagens and Nordics, every single
week without exception.
And train the game the way you want to play the game!

This is the difference between having your best player available in October, or not.

How much speed exposure a given player needs is not the same for everyone, and that is what the profile tells
you.

Free in the bio.

04/09/2026

Every conditioning session, however it is written, ends up as a number of metres between two cones.

This is where that number comes from, and it is four steps.

Convert MAS to metres per second by dividing by three point six.

Find the reserve by subtracting MAS from top
speed. Pick your percentage of that reserve and add it to MAS. Multiply by the number of seconds.

That is the whole calculation. Full walkthrough on YouTube, link in bio, and the Profile Finder does the first half of it for you free.

Save this if you have ever guessed at a distance.

In-Season you can still build, you just have to be exact. You are protecting what your players already have and stopping...
01/09/2026

In-Season you can still build, you just have to be exact.

You are protecting what your players already have and stopping the other end from decaying.

Two running days, split by profile.

Day one, each profile expresses what it is good at.

Day two, a small dose of what it lacks, purely so the floor does not drop.

Speed profiles get sprint priming on day one and a low dose of engine work on day two.

Aerobic profiles get their extensive MAS work on day one and a small exposure to sprinting on day two so the top end does not decay.

Hybrids sit between the two.

The rule that matters most is on slide five.

Heavy match week, cut day two first. It is the limiter top up and it is the lowest priority thing in the week.

Never drop day one, because that is the quality the player actually plays with.

Volumes are deliberately low. This sits on top of a match and team training, not in isolation. If it feels light, that is the design working.

Cone distances are individual. The structures are fixed, the metres come from each player’s own numbers.

Profile Finder in the bio.

Save this one, it is the most usable thing in the series.

31/08/2026

Your quickest player fading in the last twenty minutes is the most predictable thing in field sport, and almost nobody treats it as a profile issue.

A sprint profile has a wide speed reserve because the top end is high and the aerobic ceiling is comparatively low.

That is a weapon for one action. It is a liability for the fourth action in ninety seconds, because recovery between high intensity efforts is an aerobic job, and that is their smallest quality.

So they win the first sprint. They win the second. By the fourth they are working at a higher fraction of their ceiling than anyone else on the pitch, and it looks like they stopped trying.

The usual answer is more running. Long continuous running is the single thing a fast twitch dominant athlete tolerates worst, physically and psychologically.

Short intervals do the same job without the cost. That is the fix, and it takes ten to fifteen seconds at a time.

Profile Finder in the bio tells you who this applies to.

31/08/2026

Player’s out. Six weeks of rehab ahead. What do you actually give them for conditioning?

This is a reference tool for coaches, physios and S&C’s.

Detraining timelines, deep water running, off feet protocols, all in one place. Weatherproof too.

Check it out. Link in bio.

Three profiles. One ratio. This is the whole classification.Speed Reserve Ratio is top speed in metres per second divide...
30/08/2026

Three profiles. One ratio. This is the whole classification.

Speed Reserve Ratio is top speed in metres per second divided by MAS converted to metres per second. That
is it.

At or below 1.70 you are an aerobic profile. Endurance dominant, big engine, and the gap is at the top end.

Between 1.71 and 1.90 you are hybrid. Balanced at both ends, and this is where most field sport athletes land.
Above 1.90 you are a speed profile.

Real top end, smaller aerobic engine, and the engine is what limits you when the game gets repeated.

A note on the bands, because people ask. The original thresholds come from eight hundred metre running
research. I use a wider hybrid band than the source, because sub elite field sport is not eight hundred metre
running, and the wider band catches genuinely balanced athletes correctly rather than pushing them to an extreme they do not belong in.

That is my applied call, not the literature’s.

Knowing the band is not the point.

What you do differently on Tuesday because of the band is the point.

That is next week.

Profile Finder in the bio. Save this one.

This is where the framework stops being theory and becomes cones on grass.One prescription. Fifteen seconds at fifteen p...
28/08/2026

This is where the framework stops being theory and becomes cones on grass.

One prescription. Fifteen seconds at fifteen percent of the speed reserve. Same session, three athletes.

The aerobic player runs to seventy three metres. The hybrid to seventy one. The sprint profile to sixty five.

Eight metres of spread off one instruction, and that spread is the entire point. The percentage equalises the effort.

The cone individualises the distance.

Set a flat seventy metres for everyone and you have cooked one player and under worked another, in the same rep, on the same whistle.

The maths is one line. Target speed equals MAS plus the percentage of the reserve. Distance equals target speed times the seconds.

Profile Finder in the bio. Save this for setting up your next session.

27/08/2026

The most common reason coaches do not profile a squad is thinking it needs GPS, a lab, or a budget.

It needs cones, a stopwatch and twenty minutes.
Test one is a Modified Cooper.

Six minutes on a two hundred metre loop, distance divided by one hundred, that is MAS in kilometres per hour.

Test two is a forty metre sprint where you time only the last ten. Ten divided by that split, that is top speed in metres per second.

Two numbers. That is the whole input. Profile, intervals, individual cone distances, all of it comes out of those two numbers.

Watch for two errors.

Going too slow too early in 6 min run. 2 mins slightly easier running, not slow, not a jog. 2 mins really into stride and finish with 2 mins all out. It’s not trot, jog run. It’s all run. It’s MAXIMAL aerobic speed, not “kinda” aerobic speed.
The only guide to not going out like a Cheetah is that can drive someone far too far into a fatigued state too quickly and that also hurts the score.

On the sprint test then you aren’t worried about the 40, it’s the 10m between 30 and 40. We are not testing acceleration, we are testing flying speed in an area we can get a great estimate on someone’s maximal speed.

Those mistakes are common, and are the ones that wreck the data.

Free Profile Finder in the bio does the rest.

Every conditioning session written as a percentage of MAS has this problem inside it.120% MAS sounds like one intensity....
25/08/2026

Every conditioning session written as a percentage of MAS has this problem inside it.

120% MAS sounds like one intensity. Run it across a real squad and it is three.

For an aerobic profile it is 32% into their speed reserve, which is close to repeated sprint territory mechanically.
For a sprint profile it is 15%, which is a warm up relative to what they can do.

The number on the whiteboard was identical. The training effect was not close.

This is the entire reason the Anaerobic Speed Reserve exists as a construct.

Above 100% MAS you prescribe as a percentage of the reserve, not a percentage of MAS, because only the reserve is individual.

Sandford, Laursen and Buchheit, 2021, if you want the source.

Profile your squad free, link in bio.

Save this for the next time you write a session.

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