Monday, June 23, 2008

Speed Training and Acceleration Development

Use the speed drills for acceleration running development makes sure that your athletes are getting the most out of them by not sacrificing form in any of the drills.

Ground contact times (the amount of time each foot spends on the ground) are another important factor to consider during acceleration. During the earliest parts of acceleration, especially the first two steps, you are trying to overcome (inertia) the weight of your body by moving it forward as quickly as possible. This takes a great deal of strength and power. The stronger and more efficient you are, the more you can extend your acceleration phase.

An example workout would be hill running. Hill work is perfect for acceleration development as it puts the athlete in proper acceleration mechanics naturally without any tools or cues. You are bringing the ground up to them as they will be driving out and running in the 45 degree angle to the ground.

Since high intensity sprint work involves recruiting specific groups of muscle fibers improves the efficiency of neuromuscular firing patterns, sprinting is taxing to the central nervous system. Once the CNS becomes fatigued, workouts quickly lose their effectiveness. Any type of speed work must be done with full recovery. Generally speaking, that means approximately one minute of rest for every 10 yards that you run. Sprinting is a highly technical activity. Without full recovery, both your muscles and your central nervous system will begin to fatigue quickly, reducing the short and long term effectiveness of your training. For this reason, acceleration should not be trained with fatigue present. To optimize your success, full recovery must be adhered to both in your individual workouts as well as your weekly plan. It takes roughly 36-48 hours to fully recover from a speed workout.

Speed training drills give us an opportunity to teach cues. We use speed drills to break down certain aspects or parts of the whole body of sprinting. For example, I use cue like: 'drive down' during a speed drill in practice. This gives the athlete a frame of reference to use when I need them to make adjustments to their form while sprinting. This will help the athletes carry over the theory of what needs to be done so they can apply it when performing high speed sprinting.