Training Your Sprint Without Sprinting: Part I (Strength)
Training your Sprint without Sprinting: Strength
In order to be a better sprinter, you have to sprint. That will probably be the most accurate statement I make in this series. However, if you are looking to improve your performance without partaking in the traditional concepts of sprint training…try taking a break from your running and look into some other areas of sprint development. For years I worked in the private sector of sports performance, meeting a ton of athletes who were interested in speed acquisition. The problem was, though, that our facility was limited in space and didn’t have room to run traditional distances. Although this could be a “turn off” for most, this only creates an opportunity for us to be creative towards promoting sprint training without the traditional distances. We used our space, did a “needs analysis” on the athletes and realized the best approach would be breaking down the sprint into several components and using several exercises and movements to help develop their sprint without sprinting.
In this series, I will highlight concepts of strength, power, and specificity through various movement and exercise to help you “train your sprint without sprinting”. The first topic of this series: Strength.
To be a successful sprinter, you need to have capability in not only loading the legs for redirecting movement, but doing this one leg at a time. When you do a body squat you are loading the lower body with both legs, but when sprinting you are loading all your weight onto one leg. This simple observation can alone put a heavy appreciation on runners who can perform constant movement, loading one leg at a time and redirecting this force constantly. This loading is a “stretch” of the muscle, but once redirected the muscle “shortens” and causes the movement to progress forward. This process is related to the concept of the “Stretch-Shortening Cycle” which has the body developing dynamic movement through the contractile forces of the muscle. But in between the stretch and shortening phase is “amortization”, the amount of time it takes the stretch to be redirected into a shortened contraction. When we work components of strength we are helping the body effectively load the weight and redirect it while building the ability to shift in between these phases shorter and more quickly.
To be able to effectively promote strength development with a sprinter, we need to think of the demands of the athlete when performing their movement. We want the sprinter to develop strength with the legs through extension of the hips, knees and ankles. Traditional strength movements like the squat and deadlift have us do these movements using both legs, but we can also add variations of single leg movements as well in certain parts of our programming. This extension of the hips, knees and ankles is called “triple extension”, and any successful athlete will tell you those three areas of development are key to success. The following are movements I prescribed in my latest youtube video for any sprinter’s program:
-Squat
-Front Squat
-Box Squat
-Deadlift
-RDL
-Single Leg RDL
-Barbell Hip Extension
-Band Resisted Knee Flexion
With the sprint motion, it occurs predominantly in the sagittal plane, so we are talking about true extension and flexion of the hips, knees and ankles. This gives us an opportunity to pinpoint what parts of the muscular system we should focus on and the types of contractions that occur that we can further focus on. The muscular groups we want to work are the hip flexors (iliopsoas), hip extensors (gluteus maximums), the leg extensors and leg flexors (quadriceps and hamstrings). When working the squat and front squat, these movements displace the weight on either the anterior or posterior aspect of the body, which could place emphasis on the hips or the quadriceps. Learning the back squat will help load the hips, and learning the front squat will load the leg extensors but also be helpful with teaching sprinters how to correctly squat by pushing their hips back to counterbalance the resistance for better movement patterns. So the front squat also serves as a corrective measure for performance. The box squat, if applicable, is also another way to put more emphasis on the hips to help develop more effective extension. The more muscles we can use for extension, the better. The deadlift and RDL are pulling motions that work the hips and the hamstrings for balanced anatomical symmetry of the musculature. The single leg RDL and band resisted knee flexion are more about implementing specificity to replicate the smaller details of sprinting for developing the sprinter’s movement. The use of all these movemnts are important in developing the body’s strength, anatomical structure and movement patterns that could mirror the action of the sprint.
Stay tuned for more information as we will continue to develop the programming for successful sprinting. Let me again say, the best way to train sprinting is of course through direct sprinting. But when we break down the movement and the needs of the athlete, we can accommodate their performance through various movements and exercises that can replicate the physiological components of sprinting. This is just a post of literature that should inspire you on the other perspectives on how to train your sprint without sprinting.