If you are reading this article or visit Just Fly Sports often, there is a good chance that you or your athletes are interested in getting faster. I have spent much of my life learning and writing about jumping higher and sprinting faster (although my sprint muse hasn’t truly kicked into high gear until the last 5 years). Funny enough, I coached a national champion in the 55m on a largely jump-training oriented philosophy back before I was overly concerned with the finer points of sprint mechanics, Frans Bosch drills, and motor learning strategies. Perhaps if now was then, we could have made her 2nd place outdoor finish in the 100m dash a 1st.
These days, my study focus is on speed more so than jumping, not because I have switched gears, but because the two skills of sprinting and jumping complement each other so well. In fact, the more we as coaches (and athletes) can learn about different human movement skills: sprinting, jumping, throwing, agility patterns, even swimming, how they relate, and differ, the greater awareness we have when coaching each athlete. It is also important to understand the distinction between those skills, and how specialists in either discipline (100m vs. high jump) can grow to their fullest potential. For today’s article, I’m going to share with you 5 proven ways to get faster this next year and be a better athlete. The 5 are as follows:
- Utilize mini hurdles
- Use bounding (and plyometrics) in context
- Keep your general strength ability up
- Compete and measure regularly
- Find what you can do less of
1. Use mini hurdles/wickets
I don’t know exactly who invented the idea of mini hurdles in sprinting, and I’ve used them myself for years before hearing coaches like Chris Korfist really enlighten me on their how and why, just because I knew that they made athlete’s sprint mechanics look “better” (this was even before I truly know what defined better sprinting). The video below shows some of his mini-hurdle staple drills that I’ve taken on and love incorporating.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, mini-hurdles, or “wickets”, refer to having athletes sprint over a series of small collapsible hurdles around 4-8” in height. The nature of the hurdle itself causes a few good things to happen as far as sprint mechanics are concerned, such as:
- Better frontside mechanics without compromising backside push
- Better position of the swing knee at touchdown
- Better position of the stance leg at the moment of “footloose” (avoiding excessive butt-kicking)
As with many things, the research is years behind the practitioners, but a really interesting and well-done study out of Japan has shown that the inclusion of mini-hurdle running for well-trained sprinter (not just gym rat) into a 60m sprint workout acutely improves maximal velocity by 3% over groups that just did sprinting and groups that did sprinting and standing triple jump type bounding (the bounding we’ll get into in my next point). I’ve also seen the motor learning effect from mini-hurdle running have acute effects, as having young athletes (ages 10-14) run through wickets, and then continue into a 10m fly (freelap BLE markers positioned with the first gate 5m beyond the end of the last wicket) actually improved the majority of my athletes’ sprint times. When we took the mini-hurdles away, 10m fly times got worse for a lot of athletes, particularly those with the worst sprint mechanics.
I’ve always felt that it’s important to “keep sprinting” for a few meters after completing a series of mini-hurdle/wicket runs to “hardwire” the movement in better, and even did this back in the day with my NCAA DIII athletes 7-8 years ago and before I knew what the difference between pronation and supination was (yes, I am admitting my early guilt here!). I’ve found that less skilled athletes can only maintain the “technical boost” of the mini hurdle for 2-3 strides before deterioration sets in, while better athletes can maintain the form for at least 10 meters or more. It’s always interesting to see the impact that each stride has on the next, and always remember that sprint strides are not independent of each other!
2. Keep bounding in context
Don’t get me wrong, I love my bounding workouts and drills, but I realize where and how they are useful to sprinting faster. Bounding, at its core, is the art of covering as much ground as possible in each stride, which increases the magnitude of ground reaction force, and primes the body’s posture in doing so. However, there are some key differences between bounding and sprinting from a skill (and therefore muscular coordination) perspective:
- Mechanics of the swing leg in recovery, this is very low and sweeping in bounding, versus high in sprinting
- Backside mechanics are exaggerated in bounding, which will cause big problems in sprinting, as the foot must immediately begin recovering to the front after ground contact
- Frontside mechanics in bounding are exaggerated beyond 90 degrees of hip flexion
- Ground contact in bounding is further in front of the hips than sprinting, and more of a mid-to rear foot strike. The supination to pronation dynamics are different
- Rotation in the transverse plane is heavily exaggerated in bounding (note arms and thoracic spine in particular in the image below)
Check out the still picture of bounding below with some of these key differences from sprinting. 
When outdoor season rolled around, however, his 200m dash was way behind last year. Heck, even his 100m performance didn’t come close. Looking back on his old sprint photos, his torso was in heavy flexion in the middle of sprint gait on the runway, and I know that a lot of those things really took away from his ability to sprint properly with good posture. It wasn’t the bounding so much that hurt, but more so doing those drills at the expense of actual speed-endurance work.
I’m not saying I don’t think bounding is a good idea for sprinters (I’ve written before about how helpful bounding and triple jumping is for improving raw explosive power), but just remember that bounding is a supporting and special strength exercise that helps an already good platform of appropriate sprint training and mechanical work. It can help as a GPP developer of the tissues and neuro-magnitude abilities (some great sprint coaches use it in this way), but beyond this, it downshifts in importance to the primary gears of your sport speed.
I do believe strongly, however, that bounding, when coached properly in the context of ground contact time, posture, and distance, is an excellent preparatory exercise for sprinters, and most definitely all speed-seeking athletes. I also believe that those athletes who need stride length and power coordination can potentially utilize bounding as a sensory input, pairing it with sprint work in circuit fashion, and allowing the brain to put together the exaggeration and distance between the mechanics of sprinting and bounding.
3. Keep your general strength up
Speed is a very high-magnitude neural activity. It activates many of the highest threshold fibers one can recruit and also demands lots of coordination. Between sprinting and jumping, I’ve seen numerous athletes “hit the wall” (and been there myself) during track season, and have performance drop significantly, losing a significant amount of speed or jumping ability. Yet, how many times during basketball season does an athlete “completely lose their hops”? Does an athlete lose their ability to accelerate during football season? Not often; yet I’ve seen sprinters go flat, and high jumpers unable to jump outdoors within 6” of what they jumped indoors. I’ve seen throwers PR the first meet of the indoor or outdoor season and not PR again until the next year.
When athletes do too much specific work, there is a level of “toxicity” that builds up over time. When this toxicity hits a critical point, performance drops, and there generally needs to be time taken off from specific work to get the ability to adapt back. What makes team sport athletes robust in this regard? General strength. General strength is the building of movement ability in different planes and vectors in relation to one’s sport skill. In terms of sprinting, general strength is cutting, decelerating, jab-stepping, throwing, rolling, and jumping. By infusing these means in, and doing so in a high-variability package, one can “ward off” the toxicity of repeated speed (and jump) training in high density.
In talking with Daniel Martinez recently, he mentioned to me how Derek Evely refers to general strength as an “anti-virus”. To get the most out of high-specific training means, there must also be general strength. If you are a track athlete, just playing sports is great general strength work (since its alactic aerobic nature is “general” in regards to pure speed work), and there are also other ways to acquire general strength for speed, such as:
- Tri-planar circuit training
- Crawl, crouch, run circuits
- Tempo running over unstable surfaces
- Medicine ball and hurdle mobility circuits
A key with the general work is that it should be done with a fairly high heart rate of a constant 140bpm, give or take a few.
4. Compete and measure regularly
Sprinting is a “hindbrain” activity. As such, athletes need to put themselves in a situation that allows their subconscious to adapt to faster sprinting. This is a bit different than things like bodybuilding or powerlifting where “the grind” is more of the norm vs. regularly competing or measuring yourself. 
5. Find what you can do less of
Over the years, I’ve had various people tell me things like: “You aren’t making your athletes do enough running,” or “You aren’t doing enough heavy weightlifting” in your program. The fact of the matter is that great coaches look back on each year and find, not what they should do more of, but first look at the things that weren’t needed. It is immensely easier to pile on a load of extra volume and exercise busywork in a season, but it is important to know if it will make a difference.
The minimum effective dose is a truly exceptional training idea. How much is needed to elicit a change/adaptation in the athlete? Beyond this, how much is this helpful before exhaustion is reached and gains start going the other way? How much fluff is in a program that could better be spent on recovery measures, mental training, social time, or just plain-ol sleep (you’ve seen the studies that sleep is good, haven’t you)?
If you took 30 min of fluff out of a program and simply slept that extra time, how much would that help in the training equation? What about taking out that 15-minute weightlifting warmup and spending it on visualization? When less is done, it puts a higher quality and higher sense of urgency behind the work that is done.
Here is some food for thought: If you could only do 100m of sprinting, 1 set of plyometric exercises, and 2 sets of exercises in the weight room, what would you do? In terms of things I think speed-seeking athletes tend to do too much of, it is things like:
- Too much lifting (#1)
- Too much junk running (e.g. 14x200m, but I think that with modern education, this type of mentality is slowly being reduced, and 99% of shots against over-distance training on social media are preaching to the choir since coaches who are set in their junk running ways are not reaching out to learn more about their sport)
- Warm up for too long (in both the track/field and the weightroom)
- Too much foam rolling (save yourself the hours it will take you to actually do something here and go see a good therapist instead)
- Too much specific volume without any planned or reactive undulations and/or deloads
- Too much plyometric work done out of context
I really enjoyed a podcast with Vern Gambetta on maximal strength, where he mentioned that “no athlete at the end of their career says that they wished they did more weightlifting”. He mentioned that we do have times in our careers where we should seek maximal strength, but these phases are often carried on for far too long. Many of the things on this list are important (for example, I wouldn’t take a warmup, lifting, or plyometrics out of a program), but they have just fallen to the “pile it on” mentality that a lot of athletes are often subjected to.
Conclusion
I hope that these 5 things provide you with means to take your speed game to its next level, or at the very least, give you some things to think about and discuss in your journey towards the fastest you (or your athletes).
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