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Athletes Can Develop More Speed With Better Alignment

Most serious athletes strive to become faster. Whether young or old, athletes search for ways to improve in their sport by increasing their sprinting speed and agility. Unfortunately their search for improvements are often misguided, mis-taught, and more often than not, above their ability levels. The result of their search for improved speed or agility ends up only teaching them to work harder and less efficiently.

The most common methods of improving speed are: increase stride length (amount of distance between each foot plant), increase stride frequency (how fast the feet move), and the amount of force applied with each stride. To improve these aspects of speed, athletes will often try to perform over-speed drills or resisted sprints with bungee cords or weighted sleds. These methods of training do work and have their place in sprint training however, only for advanced athletes.

Often the most overlooked aspect of speed training is the ability to sprint properly. Imagine having a high performance race car with an insane amount of horse power, but only having spare tires to run on that aren’t balanced and are misaligned with the wrong amount of tire pressure. No matter how hard you push that engine and practice driving, you will only be able to go so fast.

For athletes, this race car is often similar to how they run when asked to perform sprint training drills. Athletes need to spend a great deal of time aligning their body to ensure that everything is moving in the same direction. So often I see athletes who’s upper body is twisting and their knees are driving every direction but straight and it looks as if they are about to split in two.

One of the greatest misconceptions on speed improvement, especially in young athletes is that they need to spend a great deal of time doing these highly advanced sprint drills or worse yet, complex plyometrics. The most important aspects of speed development are improving coordination, balance, line of force, rate of force development, and simple running mechanics that look at knee drive, hamstring activation, and foot speed.

Let’s face it, the body has a limit on how fast it can move, the body is willing but the feet won’t move faster. Thus to see further gains in sprinting ability, one must improve the amount of force they can apply with each stride. The simplest form of training they can do to improve this, is performing back squats. This is especially true for young athletes who do not have a great deal of strength or coordination. A proper squat that utilizes the gluteals and hamstrings will help to align and stabilize the body while applying force and creating good knee drive with the hamstrings.

So whether you are an athlete or your son or daughter is, when it comes o improving sprinting ability, be sure to partake in activities that meet your specific development level. If the drills performed exceed the skill level of the athlete, only short term gains due to increased work capacity will result. Long term, long lasting gains in speed are formed over time with an all-around approach that forms a base from which athletes can consistently make gains and train from.

Written by Kevin Ebel, May 2006
Published in the Stevens Point Journal, May 30, 2006

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