This is an article on some basic reasons and ideas on why and how to become a faster sprinter. This is not an in-depth technical analysis of sprinting, how to warm up, a full training program, or a lesson on how the central nervous system (CNS) or other biomechanical functions work. All of those will be touched upon in their own articles, but this should serve as an appetizer that touches upon a good number of these.

Jump to…

• Obsession with speed

• Why we should sprint more often

• How to sprint faster

  • Running

  • Weights

• Reasoning behind the exercises

• Caveats

• Other suggestions

• Conclusion
  

Due to human biological limitations (i.e., short allowable durations of specific energy systems), the 40y dash at the NFL combine and the indoor track 60m dash are the truest tests of human speed we assess today.

There’s nothing that is more sought after in all of the sports these days than speed. So, how is it possible to reach such limits, elevate your game, and potentially captivate an awe-inspired audience all your own? By practicing speed!

Have I let you down? Are you closing your tab already?? Don’t go! I promise there’s more to it. But at its core, the one thing that will build more speed is to do more speed work. With this comes a number of caveats, and you’re not going to win a gold medal or blast through defensive linemen with that alone, but it is the most important and often underutilized initial piece of your training. Let me tell you what I mean.

Let us think about how a 100m sprinter can learn to be a better sprinter as we traverse the rest of this article. This is obviously applicable to any sport (basketball, soccer, football, ultimate frisbee, etc).

The reason I say that you should run faster and sprint more often to achieve speed is two-fold. First, you should always practice what it is you want to do. If you want to be a better singer, you better practice singing. If you want to shoot a basketball with more accuracy, would you just play shadow basketball? Clearly not. The way you use your diaphragm and vocal folds to sing aloud, the weight and size of the basketball in your hands, dictate the efficiency of how well you perform in real-time.

All of these things are neuromuscular skills, meaning your CNS plays a huge role in your acquisition and perfection of these skills over time. You didn’t just pop out of the womb and start walking, did you?

Second, to build off of the first, sprinting should be done in the same manner you would perform it as if you were competing. Do it early, do it often, and do it fast. If you’re a seasoned sprinter, you don’t need to start your new season running wind sprints, tempo runs, or long mileage.

I see many coaches and athletes fall into this trap of starting athletes by running distance and training long, drawn-out bodybuilding circuits. This is something that has unfortunately carried over from decades of cookie-cutter training methods, in part, created by middle distance coaches and dated processes on building a more resilient team. 

Remember, before we get into a huff, we are talking specifically about speed and power athletes. There is a different method for middle-distance and long-distance-oriented athletes, and though there’s certainly a need for a speed component for them as well, aerobic capacity takes precedence there. Also, while I say that you should start early in the season working on speed, that does not mean that you must, though, as you’ll see, it’s more beneficial.

We’ve already discussed that running faster and practicing explosive movements more often and early on, is a good way to do this. Sprinting has a direct correlation with increased athletic ability. It’s a precursor and a good indication that your body is able to move quickly, calculated, and synergistically. If you can run fast, you can usually jump well too. It’s all about force production. Force production is the amount of force you can apply, in this case, to the ground when trying to move fast. The higher amount of force you can exert in a short amount of time, the better your result.

The thing that determines the force, is the number of cross-bridges between actin and myosin proteins in your muscles. I think of them as hands on a tug o’ war rope, and the more hands pulling at once, the more force. The faster cross-bridges form (the velocity increases), the force tends to drop because sometimes the cross-bridges miss at high speeds -- the hands miss the rope. This is another argument for repeated high rate movements, to help alleviate the chance of this happening through adaptation.

This is all in an effort to prime and train the CNS to fire quickly. The CNS, in short, plays a monumental part in controlling muscular recruitment and patterning. We all have built-in blueprints or patterns we follow when trained. These can even be emotional patterns, but here we are speaking on movement patterns built on a set of well-executed, trained, neuronal firing patterns and muscular movements. We call these engrams. The more you do something, the better and more clear that engram, or blueprint, becomes.

Think of it like putting a spoon to your mouth. When you were a little kid, that task was very difficult and took a lot of brainpower to learn how to grip the spoon, position it near your face, and then put it in your mouth, etc. Now, it’s nearly autonomic. In the case of sprinting, it should become just as smooth. We need the signal transference from your brain, through the rest of your CNS, or from a stimulus back to the spinal cord and so on, to be as quick as possible, and that movement pattern to be honed to a high level. The more signals that can fire before a muscle relaxes, the more powerfully it will contract as well. Speed maketh speed.

When you fire one muscle, the antagonist (opposing muscle) must be inhibited or turned off, effectively. If you are contracting your quads, your hamstrings need to relax and elongate to allow the lower leg to extend. This relationship is also controlled by the CNS and it needs to be (have you caught on yet?) quick. It also has direct control of the amount of force produced via the motor unit and fast-twitch/slow-twitch muscle fiber recruitment. All that said, just know the CNS is your saving grace and best friend.

So, you can see where intensity starts to shine a bit when it comes to this kind of training. Intensities should never fall below 75-80% of maximum effort. This is the switch region from aerobic to anaerobic energy systems. When you begin to fall below that line, you won’t produce significant enough stimulation to your system to activate more motor units or fast-twitch fibers anyway. We’ll go over why having more fast-twitch isn’t really what we need to aim for and how it too is a bit overrated in further articles. 

But what EXACTLY should I do?

As we live in a world where all we really want is a recipe or template, I’m prepared to feed you baby birds. I too, like to know what others do and how I can better my own regimes. Let’s look at a few example workouts both running and with weights.

You need to work in some overspeed training every once in a while with some downhill runs or bungees, and always sprint with the wind when you have the opportunity. Speaking of resisted exercises, light sled pulls or parachutes (not really a huge fan of parachutes) might help most with technique, as they share similar motor patterns within the same ranges. Subtlety is key here. Try to never change the athlete’s velocity more than 15% or so. Heavy sled pulls, for instance, can help with strength, but we don’t like to spend too much time pushing through the ground, even during the acceleration phase, out of the blocks.

Be sure to cue quick turnover. Something I use a lot depending on the necessity is to remind athletes of the old “floor is lava game”. The longer they stay on the ground, the more you get burnt. Don’t allow for over-striding and waste the effort drilling the wrong patterns. Short hills work here and are appropriate to help overcome the rigors of sprinting, add strength, and engrave good turnover and motor patterns (as with the over speed). Stair work is fine as well, though it will limit the horizontal speed and stride, so use more to train the more plyometric vertical component of sprinting.

 I’ll throw in a multi-throw (med ball throws) type circuit on a high-intensity day to change things up, work on explosiveness through all ranges of motion, and work on coordination. It’s a great addition to a plyometric day or a day you need a little extra neuromuscular work.

Also, resist every urge to do intensive tempo in season. They are never fast enough to correlate to intensive sprinting. If you must, modify it to be something like three sets of 100m/200m/100m at 75% effort with a walk back recovery between reps.

It’s just as important to understand what it is you wish to train on your sprint days. Do you want the focus to be on acceleration development, top-end speed, or speed endurance? Where are you at in your season?

Speed workouts (examples):

• 4 x 4 x 40 Meters w/ 90 sec rest (5 min rest between sets)

• 3 (3 x 60m)

• 5 x 10m w/ 90 sec rest; 4 x 20m w/ 2-3 min rest; 3 x 30m w/ 4-5 min rest

• Plyometric circuit with lots of rest (between 100-150 ground contacts)

Longer speed for later in the season or 400m sprinters (examples):

• 4 x 250m w/ 7 min rest

• 700m workout

  • One of my absolute favorites. Athletes will take their goal time in the 400m open sprint (let’s say 48 seconds for a solid men’s race) and divide that by 4 to get what their even split would be per 100m (in this case 12 seconds). They will proceed to try and run 12 seconds flat for every 100m.

    • Here’s how to run it: Start anywhere on the track. Run 100m at the goal time and walk back 50m. Immediately turn around and run another 100m at the same time, walk back 50m. Repeat this until you have ended where you started, completing one full lap, but 700m in volume. 

  • If the athlete can run each in the goal time through 700m, they should be able to realistically run the goal time for the 400m in competition.

Non-sprint days (example):

• 10x100 meters; no time, with equal distance walk back recovery.

  • They will run these at a perceived 75-80%, and preferably barefoot on the grass if possible. I will do as much barefoot running as I can before winter hits and we cannot feasibly do so any longer. It’s great for footstrike issues, strengthening the foot and joints, and can help me, as a coach, identify further concerns while helping eliminate shin splints.

• Technical work. There’s a diminished expenditure but the focus is more on relaxed technical work. This is a good time to think and feel rather than just push. This can include cone drills, heavier form analysis, breathing patterns, and other cues.

Weights (example exercises)

• On fast (neuromuscular) days, I like incorporating post-activation potentiation (PAP) training, though there’s a calculated balance to consider with CNS fatigue and where you stack this in your week.

  • Ex: Heavy quarter squats or box squats followed by countermovement jump onto plyo boxes within a couple of minutes (more on this in future articles)

• Nordic hamstring or Arabesque

• Single-leg raised split squat

• Hex bar deadlift on toes (outside pressure)

• Single-leg leg press on the ball of the foot (heel hanging off edge)

  • I always have my athletes work as they would experience the sprint. If a sprinter strikes more on the front half of the foot when sprinting, then we need to build some strength and stability in the same way. This will help with strength through the lower leg and foot, but also with Achilles tendon hysteresis over the long haul.

• Primary Olympic lifts

  • Power/Hang cleans

  • Split jerks (both legs)

  • Power/Split snatches (both legs)

• Quarter squats (this is the power position for all sports)

  • The key here is speed on the way up. I allow for slower control on the way down for better co-contraction of the hip and stabilization.

• Any core exercises are done transversally or high speed and dynamic. A simple plank doesn’t do shit for a sprinter. Work stability through the genuine range, or speed, of motion.

• Alternating dumbbell military press

  • Again we do single-arm work and add some lateral instability.

• Front/side raises

  • I like to do a lot of work using resistance bands tied to a sturdy object for shoulder work with my sprinters as well. It incorporates more all-around activation of the shoulder girdle from multiple angles and leverages.

• Bench press (not a main lift for this crew)

  • While it’s not a heavily prioritized lift, it is still utilized for general strength and tendon work, range of motion, and balance to any back exercises. For sprinters, it’s more of an auxiliary lift.

• Bent over alternating dumbbell rows or cable rows

  • Both narrow neutral grip and wide pronated (overhand) grip

• I LOVE to incorporate slow and light single-leg extensions and single-leg curls into the routine for rate coding and general pre-habilitation practices.

  • Perform the movement taking 8 seconds to go up, 8 seconds hold, and 8 seconds on the way down. 

  • These are all done one leg at a time for 5 reps (total of 2 minutes of time under tension each leg, each exercise)

    • Do NOT unload and relax at the bottom, just stay under tension until the set is completed.

• Hip abductors, or as I like to call them “Baby Makers” (perhaps this is not PC these days so call them what you will).

  • Great for hip stability through predominantly weak gluteus medius muscles for most people.

  • These can be any number of things from gravity-assisted Lying Clams, to Lateral Leg Raises, to resistance band work (my personal favorite).

The one thing I like to make consistent after explosive days is the feeling of being bouncy and full of energy. Much like one would execute a plyometric routine, athletes should not be taking a staggering walk of death post-exercise. As we are taxing the CNS more than anything else, one should feel like they have more in the tank. I have this issue with many athletes I coach these days who are acclimated to executing high volume in the preseason. They will look at you after each session for the first couple of weeks as if you are treating them like babies, and actually want more! Don’t give it to them just yet. We can work in other energy systems on alternating days or change the rest periods as we progress.

You’ll notice that a lot of things I advocate are unilateral (one-sided) movements. Why? This goes back to practicing what we do in competition. The real question is why would you not practice things on one leg? If you run, walk, jump, and plant/kick with one leg, it only makes sense that you try and strengthen that aspect most. The coordinated movement and ancillary muscular complexes used to perform these movements should be trained in that manner to boost your feats. Try running off of two legs simultaneously and tell me how that goes. First of all, that’s called hopping no matter how fast you repeat it, not running. There’s a reason we don’t do it, so practice what you do.

In the weight room, I make it a habit of breaking down muscle early in a more useful manner. Eccentric exercises, in particular with the hamstrings, are a staple. One of the most prevalent injuries in a sprint is a torn, pulled, or inflamed hamstring. This comes down to biomechanics and some unfortunate timing in how we land and takeoff. Most hamstring injuries occur in sprinting in two places -- out of the blocks as we transition, and when at full and upright running form.

For the latter, when the drive knee begins to head back down toward the ground the hamstring lengthens, but it simultaneously resists via contracting a bit to prepare for contact. When the muscle tries to be long but is being pulled tight, disaster is but a literal breath away. This is why I like to have athletes train their hammies in much the same way they would be used when sprinting. Use a controlled exercise to help give them a chance. See “nordic hamstring” or “arabesque” above. Plyometrics are also eccentric.

You also do not need to sprint every single day, and you shouldn’t. When you don’t allow your body to recover and adapt to the extreme forces you put upon it the day prior and resume to do it again, in the same manner, the next, you’re more likely to run into problems. Give yourself at least a day in between each bout of sprinting to allow for some adaptation and healing, to start.  You want to work a different energy system more so every other day to give it a rest. For instance, run some short 90% sprint repeats one day (or plyos) with plenty of rest, and the next day tone it down to 75% and run some somewhat longer distances with shorter rest periods.

I should mention that I prefer to hit the weight room AFTER a sprint or plyo session. It's fatiguing and athletes have to think and act with a little more purpose. It also helps recruit some previously inactive motor units, but likewise produces the potentiation we seek. By doing so in this manner, you add complexity into a workout you otherwise would not experience in a normal competitive environment. It does not always need to be after, though. It can occur before a sprint or jump workout and still benefit via potentiation. I know some other Olympic coaches who switch it back and forth throughout the season, you just want to do what works best and set what needs to be at the forefront of the day as a priority.

I can hear the long-to-short approach guys yelling from every corner of the globe right now as I state the above cases for a more short-to-long approach. For us to tell everyone who practices that way they are wrong would be to segregate me from the vast majority of our readers. I was also a long-to-short approach coach for many years and I can appreciate where you are coming from. What I will say, is that there’s always another way, and if you haven’t tried it with your speed and power athletes, give it a shot. No seriously, you are taking away from your athletes early on by not doing so.

For all you high school coaches, in particular, your pre-seasons are extremely short for some sports. It’s a lot easier to get your kids faster in a short period of time before the first competition. Once they have developed that CNS work in a couple of weeks, they can compete themselves into aerobic shape. Aerobic changes are chemical and take more time, so why wouldn’t you take the easy victory and get them fast first and then maintain that speed while working longer sprints?

Remember that you have to run fast at the beginning of long sprints too, so you’ll be continuing that work rolling forward. You also don’t probably want your kids who already hate long slow things going out and practicing bad habits when they are out of shape — they won’t do it right. This is where repetitive stress injuries can occur. I wouldn’t make my 300 pound shot put guys run 100m repeats for the same reasons.

We will never profess to have all the answers, but we ask that others always keep an open mind and, as coaches or athletes, remain vigilant in their attempts to be the best through continued education.

Long and significant sub-maximal running for a sprinter only hinders their ability to learn the movement patterns necessary for sprinting. While this may be useful for some long sprinters, middle or long-distance runners, and soccer players, for example, it’s detrimental to a pure speed and power athlete. This is because you spend a lot of time building a base of long ground contact time and diminished contact forces.

As stated earlier, the two things a sprinter needs are to generate high contact forces and reduce the amount of time they spend on the ground. There’s a slew of other problems that can occur with long rounds of exercise, but that’s for another time.

I can also hear my lovely readers already berating me with comments on the efficacy of this strategy when our goal is to keep athletes injury-free. You’re right. There are a few very specific caveats to keep in mind, one of which is always the risk for injury. But injury is something that we risk every day no matter the exercise. You can trip on a tree root and break your ankle, reach up too quickly to grab something and strain your shoulder, get hit by a bus — the possibilities are endless. Repetitive use injuries are just as common in long slow runs.

I make it a habit to not only gather consistent and honest feedback from my athletes but also perform any prehabilitation exercises needed to mediate unnecessary issues from occurring in the first place. You must listen to your body. If you feel you need to rest, rest. If you’re doing too much, lighten the workload and decrease the effort level a tad. Be reminded that there are several ways to skin a cat and “no wrong way to eat a Reese’s.”

In combination with appropriate weight training to help in building strong tendons, muscles, and ligaments, one can also modify workouts. In my experience, by following this pattern, I rarely run into injury issues. In fact, if you trained long to fast and never had your athletes do much in the way of speed throughout the earlier part of the season, they are just as likely if not more likely to get injured. You are asking the CNS to fire quickly and with peak force output when it isn’t used to it handling the load. The timing also isn’t there, thus the body’s limbs don’t reach optimal positioning before applying force into the ground.

What else does the long-to-short group generally fear when it comes to early season sprinting? Usually that you can’t train the athletes to handle the large workloads they need to for competition. That means, they won’t be able to sprint for longer, or that they can’t handle the rigors of a long game because their “base” isn’t large enough.

While this is true, initially, it’s only so if the sprinters are not training up to lactic threshold consistently. In other words, one thing you will need to do is ensure you always get to a point in your workout where you start to experience labored breathing and you feel that familiar burning sensation in your legs. It’s at this point it’s acceptable to begin ending the session.

If you feel there’s too much rest, do your sprints but shorten the rest in between sets or reps. Over time, that lactic acid buffer begins to build and you will notice you can run the same speeds for longer distances without the need to run repeat 400s for your 100m/200m/jumper crew (a very common practice, unfortunately).

For your short sprinters, you’re very rarely going to have to worry about running back-to-back sprints in a meet. There’s almost always enough time to adequately recover before another maximal effort. You will still feel the possible effects of CNS fatigue, especially over a multi-day event, but that’s hard to fully curb. This is why you’ll see Olympians, who are talented enough to qualify in two or more events, assess their odds very carefully. Recovery is a big factor.

One of the largest cautions and things to keep at the forefront of your mind is, who are you as an athlete, or what kind of athlete are you coaching? By this, I’m referring to the stage of development of the athlete in question is. If they are still young and haven’t come close to scraping the ceiling on their athletic potential, you can work them a bit harder neuromuscularly, do some higher volume even, and they will tend to recover and bounce back quickly. Because there’s much for them to still work toward, the potential risk is less evident.

On the flip side, a more well-developed sprinter might not be able to handle the higher rigors because they can produce far more force or the work might be more taxing and need more restorative sessions between.

I think you have a better understanding of what this approach means and how to begin using it more effectively, but here are a few more pointers that will make it even more viable.

Time your weight sessions that include heavy leg lifts or power lifts on the same day you work speed! I like to also do weight training AFTER to further reinforce the work you put out on the track, court, or field. If you lifted fast or heavy on Monday and then run fast or jump hard Tuesday, you might run into some local peripheral fatigue (specific muscles are tired out). This really just means that you might not be able to do the same quality of work desired. Contrary to some research or blogs out there, central fatigue doesn’t really affect sprinters, jumpers, and heavy lifters as much as we think. Though, it certainly can and will depend upon the prevalence and frequency of intensive exercise. 

Central fatigue, or central nervous system fatigue, is the diminished ability to apply voluntary force through means of your CNS. By overstimulating and “tiring” out your CNS, you can alter the effectiveness of signals moving from your brain to your muscles. We see this typically in a decrease in the sheer number of signals that can be sent in succession, causing a decrease in motor unit recruitment, which in turn means less peak contraction (less force created). Blah blah blah, just know that it can affect your performance no matter how rested you think you should be or feel. This has nothing to do with your muscles (that is peripheral fatigue or muscle fatigue). You know when your muscles are tired because you can feel the damage you did, and you’ll likely experience delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Central fatigue is much more difficult to determine or quantify, though slower, or lack of coordination is a good starting point. Where we see the most cases of central fatigue is in endurance programs like distance running and CrossFit. 

The one advantage to back-to-back or three hard neuromuscular days in a row, and this is mostly conjectured from experience, is the potential for creative motor unit recruitment. In other words, going back to back might elicit a wider range of recruitment over the span of two or three days. This is because your body might have fatigued out a good number of motor units, but not all were used, so you can get more out of it. Don’t be a cookie-cutter and do what I wrote up above without using your own brain and logic to find the best fit for you. Experiment, it’s the best way to learn and bring out your best. While one method may benefit one piece of the system, it can also harm another.

As stated, science is still out on this, but there have been studies also demonstrating that slow and heavy (think heavy squatting) where time under tension is high, disrupts proprioception in the short term and can take several days to recover. So you can either remove it altogether and do faster lifts, tone it down to only once a week with 3 days rest in between it and the next high-speed day or just do your own thing. Either way, you need to give a generally equal amount of rest to hard days in a given week.

To further stab into the hearts of the diehards out there (don’t worry, I'm with you, and I love you) there’s no real reason to lift more than two to three (three is usually preferable) days a week once an athlete is proficient. Even post collegiately, when I was training for the U.S. Olympic Trials, I was training 5-6 days a week in the weight room. While I did stagger it well and understood what I was doing and what I was training for, at that point in my career there was no point to be fatiguing myself out that much. I also had to train for throwing and other events that pure sprint types won’t need to.

You will not lose muscle mass, and even better, you will likely maintain a higher degree of day-to-day mastery of your CNS allowing you to train more effectively. With any of my athletes these days, I typically start them out 3-4 days of lifting if need be, and take it down to 2-3 depending on if we’re in a competitive training phase.

I know it’s a lot to read through, but there’s some gold in there. Take out some of the exercise physiology concepts if you don’t know or understand them, and you can boil it down to a simple statement: If you want to achieve faster speeds, you MUST practice moving fast.

This doesn’t always mean it must be strict sprinting, as we use a lot of speed movements in the weight room, plyometric exercises, multi-throw circuits, agility ladders, and more to emphasize speed and power. I will say that if you want to run fast, you damn well better run fast at some point, and the longer you put it off, the more likely you are to take away from your season or even risk other injury.

Pay attention to your own body or ask your athletes for consistent and honest feedback on how they feel, as you would in any other scenario. 

Favor intensity over volume and allow for the CNS to build some decent pathways and experience before you start giving too much in the way of verbal external feedback. There’s a lot to be said for allowing an athlete to experience the movements and swiftness before handing out a bunch of technical cues. Let them get fast, then cue.

Other than that, this should serve as a great template to refer to and start using the ol’ noggin’ to formulate your own schemes. If anything, never stop experimenting, learning, and using reason to ask questions. I can’t express enough how important it is to think critically. So get out there and smoke somebody!

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