Why Your Sprint Training Isn’t Making You Any Faster
***I’m going to preface this article with the caveat that sprint training is an important aspect of any physical preparation program. This article is not an indictment on the training itself, but how it’s being trained. The problem is that many coaches don’t use it as a piece of the puzzle, but rather the entire puzzle itself. Too many coaches only carry around a hammer so everything becomes a nail and it’s important to understand what we should be doing, as opposed to what’s popular or physically hard.***
Sprint and agility training have been all the rage in the sports performance world for a while now and I’m here to tell you why: it’s cheap to do, it makes you tired, it looks like you’re engaged when you coach it, you don’t really have to know what you’re doing and parents love to watch it because well, speed. Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD) models tell us to focus on speed especially at younger ages and that’s true. Speed development is important to develop at a young age, but speed isn’t necessarily just sprint speed but rather speed of movement. Jumping is speed, sprinting is speed, throwing is speed, skipping is speed, bounding is speed, etc. And on the surface sprint and agility training make sense, you want to get better at something you’ve got to practice it right? The short answer is yes, but it’s not quite that simple and I’m going to lay out my case for why you should spend less time on the track and more time in the gym here.
Unnecessary and Mostly Useless Modalities
There’s a ton of circus drills, eyewash and unnecessary movements coaches use for “speed drills” out there. You have a set of cones and an agility ladder? Great you can be a speed guru too! There are two reasons for this: your coach may have the best of intentions but just doesn’t understand what they’re doing, OR they’re lazy and willfully using outdated and unnecessary drills in an attempt to steal your money. Either way it’s going to amount to you not getting any better, and it’s going to set you back in your training and reaching your ultimate goal of being a better athlete. We’re going to talk about some of the most overutilized speed drills and why they’re unnecessary right now.
Agility Ladders
If you’ve been around me for any amount of time and have had the chance to talk shop with me you’ve probably heard me rant about “speed” ladders and there’s a reason for that: they don’t increase speed. Studies have shown they don’t help to increase ground reaction force, they don’t really require you to propel your center of mass anywhere, and they require you to move your feet really fast in an effort to go nowhere. There’s not a sport on the planet where any of this helps, and outside of helping to increase coordination in athletes with very low training ages they don’t really serve any particular purpose. Coaches continue to use them for a couple of reasons:
They’re cheap, you can pay for an agility ladder with half a session’s profits.
There’s no real coaching necessary outside of yelling “SPEED!”
They make you tired because you’re moving fast (but not really going anywhere)
Parents love them
They look really good on camera
It’s an easy way to eat up 15-20 minutes of a session
Notice the list doesn’t say anything about increasing performance, and that’s because there’s simply no data to support that claim. While I’m not opposed to using them sometimes to keep things fresh in a warm up or help with coordination early on in training, they shouldn’t really be a part of your sprint training or even sprint prep.
Wall Drills
If you’ve worked with a speed coach there’s a chance you’ve been subjected to wall drills at some point. While these drills can be beneficial for the rehearsal of acceleration front side mechanics, they’re relatively detrimental to the most important part of acceleration: backside mechanics. Wall drills teach the athlete to strike the ground behind their hips as opposed to underneath their hips to reach terminal hip extension. Don’t get me wrong here, rehearsing front side mechanics is very important when it comes to speed, however there are substantially better ways to accomplish that task. Coaches like to use wall drills mostly because we can do them in large groups so I don’t think they’re completely useless, but if your coach is using them as a part of your sprint training outside of session one and two then it’s probably time to find a new coach.
Bungees/Bands
Lots of coaches LOVE to pull out the bungee cords and bands when it comes to sprint training. Whether it’s for resistance or assistance you can see these modalities tied around the waists of athletes all across the world. Honestly, I don’t understand the hype behind it however I can tell you why coaches use them: they have a general misunderstanding of the modality itself. Bungee cords and bands are designed to increase in resistance as the band expands leading to more resistance (or less depending on how you use them) as you more forward. When accelerating and sprinting in general we want the resistance to maintain itself if we use any throughout the movement and not increase or decrease. On top of that you don’t want the least or most amount of resistance to be right at the start of the movement. Doing so can increase the likelihood of break forces/destroying movement patterns and even injury. Furthermore, many coaches will use them in an assisted method trying to perform overspeed training and the data to support overspeed training simply isn’t there. Many coaches are under the impression that to become faster we need to increase stride length and stride frequency and on the surface that seems to make sense. The problem lies in the fact that these increases in stride length and stride frequency are merely a byproduct of running fast. If you can deliver more force into the ground you’ll increase your stride length, and if you can increase your stride length you’re going to have to increase your stride frequency or you’ll end up falling on your face. Overspeed training simply doesn’t work.
Arm Speed Drills
Another waste of your time when it comes to sprinting is spending too much time on arm speed drills. Coaches will often have athletes perform drills for arm speed while sitting, kneeling, or even standing in an effort to increase the speed of arm movement for sprints. The thought process behind this actually makes a good amount of sense as the arms and hips won’t fire separately. What I mean by this is that your hips will never move faster than your arms and vice versa, so in theory increasing the speed of movement at the shoulders should have a positive effect at the hips. HOWEVER, your hips are more than likely not going to speed up to join the arms, the arms will end up slowing down in an effort to match the hips. If we’re trying to work on speed of movement, we’re a lot better off focusing our time and energy on the hips and not the arms.
Cone Drills/Obstacle Courses
Don’t get me wrong there’s absolutely value in a lot of cone drills when it comes to body positioning and even agility. The problem with cone drills isn’t the drills themselves it’s with the way they’re coached. More often than not the emphasis isn’t on the position on the body/hips or even the speed of the movement, it’s on how tired we can get the athlete or how long the drill is. When we’re learning to change direction, or become a more agile athlete it’s important that the reps are short so we can focus on positioning the hips outside of the feet and not on overcoming exhaustion.
How to Get Faster
With all of this being said what can we do to actually help sprint speed? It seems simple enough, and in reality it actually is. Too many coaches try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sprinting in an effort to set themselves apart from the pack and to their credit it’s mostly worked out for them. It just doesn’t tend to pay those same dividends for their athletes. Here’s a list of tried and true ways to help both your speed and agility on the field of play.
Incorporating A/B Skip Variations and short sprints into WARM UPS
A skip and B skip variations are not the end all be all for sprinting (although some coaches treat them that way), but there’s a lot of value in them. These drills were never designed to be a teaching tool, they were actually developed by Gerard Mach to help his athletes stay warm during training sessions throughout the cold Polish winters. What he didn‘t realize is that there’s value in the repetition for frontside sprinting mechanics when it comes to athletes who aren’t necessarily sprinters. Throwing a skip series and 5-10 yard sprints into your squat/deadlift warm ups allows you to chip away at the mechanics while prepping your CNS for the work that lies ahead. You don’t have to spend an hour long session working on sprint mechanics, but if you can spend 5 minutes 3 times per week by the end of the year you will have spent 13 hours on sprint mechanics.
Increasing Strength
There’s absolutely zero argument anyone can make against strength training to help increase your sprint speed, especially in youth athletes. Most kids (and even a lot of professional/collegiate athletes) lack a base level of strength for sprinting and all the frontside mechanics in the world aren’t going to change the fact that they simply can’t deliver enough force into the ground to generate any real speed. If we can gain some strength in the gym while chipping away at the mechanics of movement we will absolutely see an increase in our overall speed on the field of play. Try to favor compound movements like squats and lunges in the gym to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to strength development.
Pushing a Sled
Speaking of strength, pushing a sled is the perfect modality for increasing acceleration position strength. Think about it, you’re leaning at a 45-degree angle and you’re delivering force into the ground underneath your hips in an effort to propel your center of mass forward. A heavy sled march is really just a slowed down version of the acceleration phase of a sprint. Pushing a heavy sled will not only help with sprint specific strength, it will help to ingrain sprint phase movement mechanics at a speed that athletes can control. If you can push a sled for 10 minutes two times per week, by the end of the year you will have spent another 17 hours on sprint specific strength and mechanics. Add that to the work in your warm ups and voila, you’ve now spent 30 hours on sprint speed without spending an entire session dedicated to sprints.
Jumping
Earlier we touched on LTAD models favoring speed when it comes to younger aged athletes in athletic development. It’s important to remember that speed doesn’t necessarily mean just sprint speed, but speed of movement. Jumping and bounding are a great way increase ground reaction forces while focusing on speed of movement. Linear, vertical, multidirectional, and lateral jumps and bounds are all great ways to improve speed, coordination, balance and ingrain proper force direction concerning movement. They will absolutely have a positive on sprint speed over time.
Medball Work
Medballs are another great tool when it comes to speed of movement. We can throw medballs upwards, forwards, laterally and we can even slam them on the ground. They also allow the athlete to learn how to transfer force from the ground into an object which is going to help increase ground reaction force and thus help to make them sprint faster. It’s really important though to use fairly light medballs, we’re really not trying to train strength here, we’re more-so in the explosive speed/power arena when doing this kind of training.
Speed is important in sport, it’s probably the hardest aspect of sport to game plan a defense against. It’s also probably the number one part of training I hear athletes say they need help with. If you’re going to take the time to train for speed you really need to focus on making sure you’re tackling the aspects of training that will have a positive impact on speed. Don’t waste your time with the eyewash and sex appeal drills, work on the aspects that have worked time and time again. Remember, you’re more than likely not a 100 meter sprinter, there’s no need to spend so much time focusing directly on speed when you could be getting stronger or developing a skillset.
