The difference is in how your body reacts to training.
agree.
Any relative strength gain should have a positive correlation to your jump/sprint times as long as you can express it efficiently. Without this you can get as strong as you want and it wont matter. You still have to practice the movements regularly to see gains.
Now I REALLY REALLY disagree with this. I just don't see this to be true unless the exercise in which relative strength was gained has serious transfer to the activity in question; i.e. squat strength to sprint speed, or even to running vertical jump. Even for an exercise that is more specific, such as a deadlift, increases in relative strength may be irrelevant past a certain point for a sprinter and may do more harm than good by converting type iib fibers to iia. Increases in relative squat strength from squatting may reduce a running vertical jump because now the athlete cannot handle eccentric forces as well and as fast form not jumping as often and thus will have less speed during the run up - this would be very likely to happen if you took a high jumper and told him to just squat and deadlift for a while. In my personal experience, even if I try to maintain plyometric training while strength training, strength training reduces my rate of force development no matter what. My bounding decreases, my speed and jumps decrease. My running vertical dropped 4 inches when I tested it once after I reached 315lbs in the squat. But I wasn't practicing it at all. However occasional bounding helped bring me up to PR levels. But as long as I had some deep heavy squatting in my program I could never feel as explosive as without any heavy/slow training, that could be due to the neural adaptations but also conversion of type IIb fibers to IIa. However for something more specific like the RVJ, i would jump slightly higher, not a ton higher because I was slow. As Kelly Baggett has said, the biggest gains from strength training for vertical come during the phase where we try to express the strength through more specific exercises. That's the phase I'm on now and it causes my squat/deadlift numbers to plummet a shitload, causing me to wonder why I would do it in the first place.
So theoretically increases in relative strength should increase performance in the activity in question if that activity is practiced so it might be irrelevant to bring what I just said up . . . but there is a reason why in season athletes don't strength train rigorously. And from my experience it's because it just takes away from the movements required for the sport - that's only if the strength training isn't that specific such as deep squats for TOP speed. Contrast that with hip thrusts for top speed training. In my experience with squats to improve sprints, even my acceleration feels slower with a lot of heavy squatting. But my top speed feels like absolute shit - I have no pull in my stride at all and I can feel my quads trying to push vertically into the ground like a squat, and forcing myself to pull with my hamstrings is probably what caused me to pull them nearly twice. Now I'm not spending 5d/wk on the track, but my idea is that these motor patterns compete. So strength training should be HIGHLY specific. Squatting for vertical jump increases is different. Squatting deep for increases in TOP SPEED, now that's not very specific. Deadlifts for top speed, I can't confidently say that would hurt a sprinter at all, but since I want to increase my top speed right now, I'm not going to do any deep squats (even though I badly want to).
We all can find examples to support each point certainly; the athletes in Contreras's article cast doubt on traditional strength training but inspirational stories from Kingfush's training journal, the Rutgersdunker youtube channel, and other accounts of people improving athleticism through traditional strength training provide support for the idea that increases in relative strength improve performance in sport (neither of them are sprinting though, well Kingfush has said he wants to do a 60 don't know if he has yet). Maybe this shows that people respond differently to training . . . if they're increasing their vertical jump, increasing force production and spending less time on the ground, it doesn't matter how they got there. But maybe their muscles/tendons are acting completely differently; the people who squat a lot may jump using different machinery than people like jordan kilganon who is just a beast who can't squat much at all.
With my experiences in improving running vertical jump, I think squatting has helped me absorb more force during the plant and has increased my movement efficiency during the movement and overall has increased running vert, but slightly more so for reasons other than being able to squat more. I simply feel "weaker" when I start to do exercises that are supposed to convert the strength to speed and power and I lose strength so once I again I just question what the point of doing it was. Efforts to maintain strength simply result in my being slower because I spend time doing slow lifting... I'm not trying to get attached to any one specific idea so I am starting to let go of training for max strength but if someone can explain in depth how to set up a proper program to avoid competing motor patterns I would be delighted to read it.
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