Sprint Mechanics
Correcting Backside Running Mechanics
Today I want to talk about what I think is a fatal flaw in your sprinters' running form or running mechanics that causes them to be extremely inefficient and, therefore, just not run fast times. And I see this – when I got to meets I see kids running this way, kids that I work with, kids on the team all have this same problem. And I think it stems from the idea that as we've begun changing the way we look at training speed and developing the skill of sprinting versus just having athletes go run fast, we start to really focus on the drive down aspect of running, recovering the heels, recovering the knee, and driving down in to the ground.
But what I tell my sprinters all the time is it's not enough just to drive down into the ground. You also have to focus on recovering, pulling back up off the ground. There's two movements that you have to focus on. Again, that's why coordination is one of the five biomotor skills. That's kind of hard to pull off. But the problem with that is if athletes are driving down – and some of them aren't even driving down at all, this is just what happens to naturally occur – but we drive down, what happens is at toe off, what athletes are doing is being lazy at toe off.
So if we want to be good sprint mechanical position, what we want to focus on doing as soon as we toe off with a stride is dorsiflexing that toe, flicking the heel, and pulling it back underneath our hips as quickly as possible. We want to try to minimize the distance that our heel travels from that toe off to pulling underneath. So the cue is at the flick of the heel, we want to shorten that lever. Long back here, back-side mechanics, lever long, lever slow, short lever, pull it up nice and tight underneath.
So we should be cueing our athletes to flick the heel and that's not what they're doing. So take that, steal that, flick the heel off the ground quick. Flick the heel, bring it back up, shorten the lever. That's a good cue. Take that, work it into your program. I know it's a good cue because I stole it. I stole it from Laurence Seagrave. And so he's a better coach than I am, I like to defer to that on this one.
So what athletes are doing instead of recovering quick and be in a good mechanical position to get that lift – like we tell hurdlers, between hurdles we want to run hips tall, get lift, transitioning to top speed like in the 100 or getting lift off the turn in the 200 – athletes aren't putting themselves in a position to do that because what they're doing when they toe off is keeping that foot plantar flexed and they're passive off the ground. So they let that foot hamstring curl back behind them and they have all this back-side mechanics.
And so when they're running, they toe off, the leg comes back this way. Obviously when we sprint, we want to minimize hip displacement. When we run we don't want to be bounding up and down like this. We want it to be more even keel. But the bottom line is we still travel up and so the hips still come up and down. And so what your athletes are doing when they run is they toe off, all this wasted energy spent back here. So as the hips start to come down – our brain's main function is to keep us alive, to keep us safe – so as we're coming down losing that fight with gravity, the athlete's only option, because they're in this position, when the thighs are parallel, they're in this position, is to just open this knee angle and drop the foot on the ground. So they're toeing off, coming around here, and slapping the foot on the ground running heel to toe or they're coming around here, letting that knee angle open up, and slapping back and clawing back at the ground. I don't teach clawing because that causes over striding in my opinion.
“How to Develop Champion Sprinters" Watch this video and your sprinters will set new Personal Bests The most successful coaches train their sprinters differently than you see in most programs. In this free 90+ minute video, I’ll show you everything you need to know about beating the elite programs at their own game.
|
So the range of motion is back all the way around here, through, and then in this position. You can't run fast like that. That's not efficient. And I think it stems from the fact that when we're doing our submaximal work, our tempo runs, we're allowing athletes to run heel to toe. Because it's not at top speed and they're running heel to toe, they're ingraining those bad habits of coming around this way and running like that.
Think about it like this. If you're doing, say, 10 times 40 meters in a workout, and that's probably too much especially if you work at the high school level, but if you're doing 10 times 40 meters and let's say for the sake of simple numbers, each run takes five seconds, that's 50 seconds of total work. If you're focused on good sprinting mechanics, good technique, all those things, 50 seconds of total work.
If you're doing 8 times 200 at 75 percent and the kid's got to run, say, a 30-second 200 and because it's at that low pace, you're letting them run heel to toe and letting them use poor running form and not really focusing on the things we'll talk about in a second, after two 200s at submaximal pace, they've already spent more time working, more time running than they did for the entire speed workout.
So now what pattern of movement are they going to ingrain in their head, the speed work one driving down or the tempo-paced, slower-paced, like mild-paced – maybe a little faster than mild-paced – mild-paced tempo that we do in our tempo runs? So when I do tempo work, I expect my athletes to be up on the balls of their feet and running like I'm going to show you in a second because that teaches them good technique. That makes their default way of running an efficient way of running as opposed to this way of running where they're coming back, running around here, back-side mechanic. They get to this position, they're not in a good position.
So very quickly what I want to do right now is I'm just going to run at like 75 percent and show you what it looks like, what your runners are looking like when they sprint and you can see how inefficient it is. Then I'll come back, show you what it should look like, what you should be cueing and telling your athletes to do. And then you can see the difference between the two ways of running and you can take that back and think about how your athletes are running. But I'm pretty sure that they're probably running the inefficient way with a lot of back-side mechanics and getting here and everything's taking place behind the hips as opposed to coming around.
Let's take a quick look at the old man running.
Okay, so now we know what your athletes look like when they're running most likely or, at the very least, a very close approximation. So what should they be doing? Well, what we want to teach our athletes to do at toe off – again, I talked about this at the very beginning – when they toe off, we want to pull that toe back up, dorsiflex the toe or cock or load the toe, whatever term you want to use. We want to focus on pulling that toe up and flicking that heel, quickly recovering that heel up underneath the butt. The faster we can do that and the more efficiently we can do that, the better we're going to put ourselves in a position to get over the knee so that we can get here and drive the foot down into the ground.
When you're quick here and you flick that toe and get to this position, now you can get that lift coming out of the drive phase, coming off the turn in the 200, whatever it is, trying to make a move on somebody. That is a more efficient want to run. Recover the heel, step over the knee, this position, and then you can get the foot back down into the ground.
That is the best position for your sprinters. That is an efficient sprint position. When you look at great sprinters or football players that run the 40 or whatever, you can see them as they come through, they're getting through here and getting good lift and the foot's coming back down into the ground, not what your kids are doing which is back here, slapping, running heel to toe. Remember, if your heels touch the ground when you're sprinting, that's not fast. If you're letting your athletes' heels touch the ground when they're doing workouts, probably not that fast, especially fast work.
So what we need to focus on doing is flicking the heel, pulling the heel up over the knee, driving and getting back down to the ground. That's what you have to cue your athletes. And so that's why we use basic speed drill progressions, one of the ways that we use to teach that.
Before I explain that speed drill progression, let's take a quick look at what your athletes should look like when they're running. Again, I'm over emphasizing it a little bit for effect, but just compare the difference between the two ways of running so you can see how your athletes are doing it and what specific fixes you need to make.
So now we know what your athletes probably look like and what they're doing incorrectly, and you've seen what it looks like to be done correctly, what you should be trying to teach your athletes to do. And, again, if you know speed drills, it's very similar to an A run.
So the A run is one of my favorite drills for teaching this quick heel recovery, step over action. And I think here when you watch here, you can see it better than the attempts – the over-striding attempt at running correctly that I did with the blue shirt on. And this is pulled more from CST II. But as you can see here, the quick heel recovery, and this is not what your sprinters are doing when they run, they have that back-side mechanics like I talked about earlier in the video, so if you can have your athletes learn how to do this drill where they quickly recover that heel and then, of course, focus on pushing their foot back down into the ground, they're going to learn and ingrain in their head that better running mechanic and form than they currently have.
So, again, flicking that heel, pulling the heel up underneath the butt. This is a good exercise for just strength. I'll use this for workouts for the fatigued kids. But the more reps we can get in this range of motion, the better we're going to be.
The problem with that is that if you haven't put your athletes in a position by doing the logical progression of speed drills, marching action to skipping action to running action, they're not going to have the coordination to be able to pull that drill off correctly. Again, if they're not sprinting correctly during the drill with good technique, it's going to be difficult for them.
So, again, that's where you have to have a system in place for putting athletes in position to be successful. Start with the marching, the skipping, the running actions. But A runner fun. Then you can go to the fast leg type drills. If you're not doing the dynamic warm ups and the warm downs after practice, you're doing hurdle mobility work, they're not going to have the hip mobility to be able to get that foot up here.
Think about some of your male sprinters, especially the football players. I don't know what it is about football players, but they always have the worst hip mobility on Planet Earth. Look like they're ice skating down the track. They can't get that lift because they don't have the hip mobility to allow them to put themselves in that position a lot of times because they lift and then they don't do anything afterwards, they just go home. And they're certainly not doing any ab work.
So we have to make sure that you're doing all the different things that are going to address this technique. But first and foremost, the A run which is kind of like a hybrid between a high knee and a butt kick. But I don't teach high knees or butt kicks; that's a topic for a different day. But if you want to get your athletes in this position here, it starts with teaching for application first, engaging in technical feedback with your athlete so they know what they're supposed to be doing. Because if they don't understand pushing down, they're certainly not going to understand recovering that leg or bringing it back up into a good position.
So teaching your sprinters how to run is crucial. If you're just having athletes go and run a fly 30 and wait five minutes, do another one, I'll be over at shot-put, that's not a conducive way to teaching your athletes the skill of sprinting. They're going to just reinforce bad habits by running as fast as they can for the prescribed distance but with bad form. So you're only making it more difficult to teach.
So quick review. Your athletes' problem is they have too much back-side mechanics because they're not flicking the heel or recovering the heel fast enough and putting themselves in a good mechanical position to drive down to the ground. If you want to fix that, it's more than just a drill, it's more than just mobility exercises, it's more than just doing speed work. It's putting all these things together and teaching them in a pattern or an order or a system of teaching these things so athletes get it. Because if they don't understand why they're doing it and they're not continuously practicing it with good feedback from the coach, they're never going to get it.
So that is the fatal flaw in your sprinters' running. Take a look again, watch the video. Think about what your athletes are doing. If you get them on videotape, film them so you can see them in slow motion, then you will get a lot more out of it in slow motion, they will get a lot more out of it seeing it in slow motion than trying to do it all in real time.
So those are the basics of what your athletes are doing wrong primarily. If you can put your athlete in a position to get good lift here so when they're running, they're in this position as opposed to this position, then your athletes are going to get faster. And faster equals PRs. PRs equals wins. Wins equals titles. Titles equals good times.
All right, everybody, thanks for watching. Of course, post your comments below and we'll talk about it.
