Sprint Training — sprinting technique

Here we go over an acceleration sprinting workout, as well as discuss the concept of increasing the stimulus of your training sessions over time in an effort to stabilize movement skills under increasing amounts of stress. Sprint Straight To Sprint Fast One issue that I commonly see in my own sprinting and that of other athletes is that, as an athlete begins their sprint, they may have a tendency to deviate from a straight path of sprinting. If we leave the blocks and go to the right or to the left instead of sprinting directly toward the finish line, we...

As fall approaches in the Northern Hemisphere and summer track events begin to wind down, athletes shift their focus toward off season training so that they can prepare for the next season. Here we will discuss some ideas surrounding how to build your own training program and how to progress your sprinting workouts.   The Debrief The first step to take before setting off on your training is to do a season debrief with yourself or your athletes. The goal of a debrief is to take an honest look at how your training went in the previous season and perform something...

What is the point of a warm up? The first goal of the warm up is, as alluded to by the name, to raise the body's core temperature. This takes approximately 8 to 10 minutes of continuous activity to accomplish. Once the body is warm, the next goal of the warm up is to tune in motor qualities, improve coordination, and maximize force outputs so that the work you perform is as high quality as possible. Typically you will be least coordinated right when you wake up, becoming more coordinated as you become more alert and move around. A proper...

In the world of sprinting, our ability to sprint is limited most by how we apply force to the ground more so than how much force we put into the ground. Smashing the ground with your foot moving forward or out to the side is less effective than producing less force that you’re better able to apply into the ground in the proper vector. Because biomechanics and sprinting technique do play a pivotal role in whether we stay healthy and run faster or stay injured and run slow, it is important that we all have a fundamental, GED level understanding...

Most of us understand that high performing sprinters do certain things differently than slower sprinters, but determining what it is that constitutes these differences can at times appear elusive. Once you identify the proper way to sprint, you must then go about implementing this proper technique into your sprint training program. Previously we’ve discussed how the best sprinters exhibit a hammer-like, whip from the hip action of the leg in their sprinting technique, which is especially visible from mid-acceleration and into upright sprinting. The idea is that by throwing the leg to the front side in a certain way, we...