As I approach 30 years old, I find it easy to maintain or improve my maximal strength levels in the weight room. Heck, I work in a weight room, so it is also the most available way to train. Even without a lot of specific practice, by maintaining strength, I have also noticed a nice maintenance in many of my explosive qualities, such as vertical jump. Although I have done a reasonable job of maintaining my vertical over the years, if there is one thing that crash-bombs when I stop working on it directly, it is breakaway sprint speed.
Maximal Sprint Speed
Maximal sprinting speed represents the far end of the speed/power continuum in the athletic spectrum. There are several unique physiological adaptations to speed work vs. strength work. Many strength coaches will throw out the “more force into the ground is better” analogy when looking at getting kids faster, but that mentality (getting a stronger squat/deadlift etc.) will only work up to a certain point in the acceleration to top speed spectrum of things. Getting a huge squat and deadlift will most definitely help an athlete run a killer 20-30m time, but it is at the 20-30m point where their massive strength may start to work against them in a longer race or sprint.
There are some specific adaptations to sprinting vs. strength training. One of the most significant adaptations to speed work is an increased fascicle length of muscle fibers. On the flip side, strength training provides a stimulus that increases pennation angle (pennation angle refers to the angular orientation of the muscle fibers, which provides better intra-muscular leverage against resistance), but doesn’t do much to improve fascicle length. Fascicle length is important, because longer muscles can contract more quickly than shorter fascicles. Elite 100m sprinters have muscle fascicle lengths which tend to be longer than their slower counterparts.
In addition to changing the pennation angle, strength training also creates a higher resting muscular tension than other forms of exercise, particularly longer static lifts, such as heavy squats and deadlifts performed in sets of 5 or more. Top sprint speed requires efficient relaxation of the body, and having high resting muscle tension is going to inhibit that contraction/relaxation cycle that is so important to maximal movement speed and power. Different lifts will also place higher muscle tension in different muscle groups, depending on what lifts you did. Lifts like high-bar squats will tend to place a lot of that muscle tension in the anterior chain and quads. Having quads that have trouble relaxing properly is going to give the “people’s elbow” to your top end speed. In order to hit maximal velocity, your whole body must be on the same page from a tension-relaxation point of view. With the physiology at hand, it is plain to see that one cannot make a fix to their top end speed only through strength or power training. To get fast, you must train specifically.
Don’t let your strength work give the “People’s Elbow” to your top end speed
Many athletes want to get faster, and the answer is really simple. Sprint! Aside from that, there are things that can be done from the strength/power side of things that will make a difference. If you are looking to get faster, here are three great tips to help you improve your speed.
#1. Master pelvic posture
When it comes to mastery of top-end speed, athletes must have exceptional control of their pelvic position. Athletes should learn to sprint with a neutral to slight posterior pelvic tilt to allow a balance of front and backside sprint mechanics with minimal braking forces. To understand a bit more about proper pelvic tilt during sprinting, check out the video below.
Intelligent coaches weave elements of pelvic posture control into their warm-ups, drills and sprint practices. The most common “cue” given to athletes is to perform drills with their tummy tucked in. Many coaches just tell their athletes: “keep your hips underneath you”, although that term is somewhat ambiguous. Sucking in your gut by activating the transverse abdominus works like magic to take the pelvis into a neutral tilt position. Alongside performing this drill in various track movements, it is also critical for certain exercises in the weight room, such as the top end of deadlifts and during hip thrusts. Check out the video below by glute guy, Bret Contreras, to get an idea of what I mean.
Weight room exercises are a fantastic way to teach pelvic posture because the slow speed/high force environment is a great way to maximize the mind muscle connection with pelvic musculature. Alongside strength, mobility is critical to achieve proper pelvic tilt, so super-setting various postural strength exercises with mobility such as hip flexor/rectus femoris stretches will allow for some serious speed improvements! Athletes with poor mobility are pretty much doomed from day 1 in terms of getting into an optimal sprint position, so don’t sell them short on getting mobile. As a personal case study (and possibly a future article), at my job we run our athletes through a variety of mobility tests prior to the start of the season. After screening over 100 athletes, the ones with the worst anterior pelvic tilt always have tight quadriceps and/or hip flexors, tight internal hip rotators, and weak glutes. Target your mobility and corrective exercise on these areas if you are stuck in a cookie cutter situation (and probably even if you are not!).
#2. Maximize power of hip and ankle extension
There is a quality of human movement that we lose from adolescence to adulthood which really hinders our athletic progress. No, it isn’t the deep baby squat either (although that is important too). The thing we have as children is pretty good hip and ankle extension in our athletic movement. Then we get to high school or college, and start lifting weights with a focus on pushing through the heel, and doing drills that capitalize on high knees with a dorsiflexed foot and BAM, you get an athlete who has some serious neuromuscular issues when it comes to hip and ankle extension.
In order to fix this, there are a few remedies. I’ll give you my top 3.
- Modified clean pull
- Bounding variations
- Focus on hip pop rather than knee lift while sprinting
So to fix up ankle extension, one of my favorite movements is the modified clean pull. I use it to try to build up the skill of hip and ankle extension, and it filters over into the traditional Olympic lifts nicely.
Bounding variations are a tried and true method to improve hip and ankle power and extension. If you or your athletes are struggling in this department, I would highly recommend 100-200m of grass bounding a couple of times per week. A combination of long (over 30m) and short (standing triple jumps/standing five jumps) will work best for overall results.
Finally, the whole knee lift mentality is nice to get an athlete in a nice postural position that balances front and backside mechanics during sprint motion. Unfortunately, it can shoot a few holes in the hip extension capacity of the athlete, so it can be better to cue a “hip pop” or “thigh pop” rather than knee lift to attempt a better balance of these mechanics. Hip pop means to project the hip or knee forward rather than up. This cueing process helps to improve the concept of horizontal velocity preservation. As my friend, and sprint expert, Josh Hurlebaus has said:
I much prefer the “drive the knee forward” cue, or depending on athlete background something akin to a front knee strike or other martial art term because it solves many problems at once for max V. It creates a powerful hip pop/projection forward due to hip oscillation (conversely increasing extensive power of the support leg), it creates a target for person to aim for down the track which can clean up form problems, it emphasizes front side mechanics without ham-fistedly telling the athlete that front side mechanics are the goal (leading to over emphasis), and It will create that nice parallel thigh that all the coaches are raving about.
If you want to check out a great video featuring one of the world’s best coaches teaching thigh pop and other sprint mechanics, check out the video below.
#3. Keep sprinting the main thing (and build strength in balance)
If an athlete is looking to run faster, special strength training exercises should be #2 or #3 on the priority list. Sprinting itself must be the primary form of training for those seeking to improve their speed. For athletes who might be on the “strength side” of things, a lifting-washout might be needed in order to help reset the body to more easily accept high velocity stimuli.
Some people might say “well look at guys like Ben Johnson” in terms of sprinters who were very strong, but also very fast. As an answer to that, look at Ben’s strength training. In season, he would only do 2 sets of squats in a session, and it was his explosive work on the track that contributed to his strength levels as much as his lifting did. This is not at all to say, “Don’t lift”, because you should. I have noticed big time improvements in top-end speed and sprint posture through putting athletes through the right types of pre-season and in-season strength work, which runs complimentary to the overall goal of the training scheme. You always must have logic behind why you are doing the exercises and volumes you are doing.
Bottom line, if you want to improve your speed, you gotta sprint!
As always, I do online training and consultation packages if you are looking for an extra edge in you, or your teams training. Just check out the training services tab at the top of our homepage!
References
Training-specific muscle architecture adaptation after 5-wk training in athletes, by Blazevich, Gill, Bronks and Newton, in Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 2003
Special Strength Training Manual for Coaches: Yuri Verkhoshansky
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