Long Sprints for Reactive Vertical Power: Part III

When it comes to building speed, cleans and snatches are slow as dirt.

Compared to actually sprinting that is.

Keep this in mind when you are building a training program around speed. Not to polarize anything, after all, if you want to bring your athleticism to the next level, you gotta throw around some iron on a regular basis! When it comes down to it though, if you want to be fast, you have to train fast.

This is one of many reasons that long and exhausting sprinting, although not “specific” to jumping, can still bring about nice gains in elastic strength off of the ground. Aside from speed, sprinting offers some other great benefits to reactive and elastic seeking athletes which include the benefits of coordination, perception of workload, fat loss, and more. If you are interested in building the total athletic package, read on my friend.

Even the fastest lifts are still slow compared to sport play.

High Velocity Coordination

Let’s knock the training distance down a bit for a minute, say to 40-120m sprint efforts. The purpose of speed-endurance (40-60m+ sprints) for jumpers has been explained this way: a person slows down in all out sprinting due to a temporary lack of CNS coordination or CNS fatigue. Recent research has confirmed that when a sprinter (or anyone else trying to run fast for as long as possible) slows down, it is not due to a lack of energy substrates, but rather due to neural fatigue.

The nervous system starts to struggle to coordinate limbs after 2-4 seconds of maximal speed sprinting. To maintain this velocity longer, the brain must figure out a way to hold together coordination for just a few more moments. This improvement in “holding together” will also help a jumper hold together their coordination during their final few steps on the runway, preparing to jump.

This also helps explain the principle behind Olympic great triple jumper, Willie Banks’ “two minute drill” where he would perform repeated 1-stride triple jumps with a jog back recovery for two minutes. From an energy system point of view, this drill makes little sense, but guess what…. It works.

Trying to jump with good form through the fatigue of the two minute drill should help the body hold its’ coordination together just a little better in the grand scheme of things. The “two minute drill” also develops elastic hip and ankle strength, and just a little lactate, which can actually be useful as explained below.

According to motor learning theory, the “fight” to hold technique together during maximal velocity sprinting can also lead to coordination benefits during a high speed jump takeoff.

Recovery and Lactate Considerations

Long sprinting can be a fantastic tool for building a single leg jumper, but can also be a big time distraction if not administered properly.

Something I have noticed over the years is that my jumpers will start hitting big time jumps and PR’s 1-2 weeks after I stop or lower their long sprint volume after it has been maintained for a few cycles. Most athletes will never reach their full power potential in the middle of weeks they are regularly running and churning lactate. The reason is simply fatigue and neural tuning. Running long sprints has many benefits, such as those listed above, but long sprint workouts (such as 8x200m) will typically require a window of a day or two (or more) before the athlete really feels powerful again.

Considering the above paragraph, an important recovery point is that long sprints should be administered at fairly relaxed paces, and should not cause the athlete to accumulate great amounts of lactate. Lactate generated by long, “burning” sprints are going to cause athletes temporary dis-coordination of the central nervous system, which will impede the quality of their power and speed work for a day or two after. Like legendary sprint coach, Charlie Francis once said, “keep your highs high, and your lows low”. Long sprints is a “low” workout, not a “high” one, and don’t forget it.

Side Note

Looking at lactate in another light though, just a little bit can be a good thing, if it was built up in the context of power. Doing short sprints with slightly incomplete recoveries can cause just enough lactate to get a little growth hormone boost. An example workout like this would be 8x30m with 90” recoveries, where the sprints can be completed with good form and power, but the athletes will be slightly winded at the end, with a little lactate built up. This type of work is best administered in accumulation phases of training.

Workload Perception

This is a pretty simple one. Training can be divided into two subcategories: work and training. Training consists of quantified sets and reps, which makes up the bulk of a periodized program. Work, on the other hand, goes something like this: “you have 20 minutes to do as many pushups and pullups as you can….now go”. Athletes under the “work” mindset will expend less mental fatigue than those in the “training” mindset, because of a different outcome goal, and thus be able to handle more volume. They will also recover faster.

The perception an athlete has of the difficulty of a given training load will influence how quickly that athlete recovers from that workout. Hard workouts in accumulation phases make training from then on seem much easier, and the athlete will recover much more quickly.

If I told an athlete to go do a workout consisting of 800 quick plyometric contacts, they would leave mentally exhausted and think I was obsessive. If I told them to just go run 7x200m, they would think nothing of it, and be fine. Likewise, if I told an athlete to go do 600m worth of short sprints, 300 multi-directional single leg plyos, and 100 maximal jumps, they would be complaining for hours. The 40 minutes of basketball that contains the above workload seems significantly less taxing than the workout described in the sentence above when it is actually played.

This all happens simply because under the “work” mindset, athletes can handle a greater volume of training. The perception an athlete had of the difficulty of a given workout, and the mental stress they expended into that workout will largely dictate how long it takes them to recover for future sessions. Long sprints build up a tolerance to hard work, and can make “easier workouts” less mentally taxing down the line, as well as an easy way to build up some basic stiffness.

Fat Loss

This is one of the most basic and common sense applications of longer sprints. High intensity interval style training will cause you to lose fat (and overall body weight) and do it fast. You want to know who the most ripped of all track and field athletes is…..? OK, let me rephrase that. You want to know who the most ripped of all track and field athletes is and still owns some resemblance of muscle? 400m runners. What do they do all the time? Long sprints. Add some 400m style training to your program and you will get shredded. Same thing with top crossfit athletes. They are jacked (the good ones) and they live and breathe high intensity interval training.

The problem is that the work of these athletes revolves around lactate. A little lactate can be good, as it can stimulate some growth hormone release, but a lot of lactate is bad for power. Really bad. Unless you don’t mind waiting 3 days after your workout for a quality jump session.

High intensity interval work will help get you shredded: running, lifting, crossfit, whatever, just do it in respect to the power demands of your sport.

Conclusion

So are you convinced? Confused? And the most important question, yet to be addressed:

“How do I implement this into my training?”

This and more will be answered in part IV of this series on long sprints and reactive power: practical applications. Stay tuned!

Takeaways

Long (200-400m+) sprints are still faster than anything in the weightroom
Maximal speed endurance work (40-120m) helps an athlete hold together coordination in a high speed jump takeoff
Long sprints help with workload perception
Long sprints are a fat shredding machine