What is Real Sprint Training Work?
Speed Trainig for your sprinters
We really have to address what sprint work is. We talked about sprint drills yesterday and you can do those speed drills all day and teach your sprinters and use the other progressions that I spoke of for doing drill work but if your athletes aren't doing real speed work in their training, learning how to do the drills and all that because they're not re‑enforcing it in their actual practice. We have to train fast in order to get fast. I think back to my own athletic career and I think something that you can probably relate to yourself thinking back to the way you trained as an athlete if you're a parent how your kids are training etc. That's just growing up.
I did not do any real speed work ever in my life until I got to college. From age six when I first started playing sports all the way through high school I never did any speed work and the reality is if I didn't do any speed work I know having done consults with coaches and parents and athletes and trainers all over the world haven spoken at different conferences all over the place and work with different athletes and been an athlete myself, if I didn't do it, I know that other people haven't been doing it and aren't doing it.
That's not an indictment of the coaching that's not an indictment of you if you're not using speed work. I understand that you're a coach at the youth levels most of the time you're volunteering. If you're a high school coach, trust me I understand you're not getting paid very much money for the amount of time you put in so again, I say the same thing I say to my athletes all the time. Not a criticism simply an observation.
That being said, with resources the economy not being great, you don't have a lot of money to invest in all this information and it's not that coaching it's simply not having or accessing the information or time I need or the resources available. My goal here is to give you the information that you're gonna need to make sure that you are continuing to put your athletes and your own coaching program on the right path. If I can help you do that, then I've been successful in my opinion. That's my goal is to do and my goal today with this video is to sort of get us on the right page. As I said a bit ago, I didn't do speed work growing up so I know other people aren't as well. I didn't do it until I got to college and my point with that is if you're an athlete, most athletes I should say are not gonna go off to college and compete.
Most sprinters just don't have that ability or that interest so the reality is there are millions of athletes that have come through in the past and still are competing today that will never do speed work in their entire life. If they're not doing speed work, they've gone their entire career without really maximizing their ability so what I want to do today is talk to you about exactly what speed work is. If we can define speed work and we can get on the same page as I look forward and you look at other information as you're out there researching information or trying to find the best program to suit your needs, you can use that as a measuring stick to see where you need to be so let's define speed work right now.
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Speed work is defined as two to eight seconds of full intensity sprinting with full recovery. So two to eight second we're talking in the 20 to 60‑yard range with full recovery being about three minutes between runs. I have a general rule about one minute rest for every ten yards or ten meters run. That's what speed work is. Anything that does not fall in that twenty to sixty yards with full recovery at least doing this between each run. Anything that does not fit that category is not speed work. It's not going to help teach an athlete to accelerate faster and more efficiently. It's not going to improve their fastest top speed. Only work outs that fall into that range are going to do that so you have to keep that in mind. I think that's where there's a little bit of an impasse between coaches sometimes because we don't understand the true sprint work is and if we don't do that, we're not using that as a foundation of the training in our programs that athletes are not going to get as good as they can be. If you're using things like repeat 200s as a work out, that is not speed work. If you're having athletes do repeat 40‑yard dashes with a turn around or walk back recovery or less than three minutes rest between each one. That is not speed work. That is not gonna improve their fastest 40 time.
If you're having your athletes do suicide with short rests or beats or Gassers or all those things that we do in sports like basketball or football, those things are not speed work. They're not going to make your athlete faster. If you're having athletes out there on the track run repeat 100s with a walk back recovery short one, two, three minute rest. That is not speed work either. That is not going to help them get faster. These are things that I want you to think about. Sit back and reassess to see if you're using those kind of work outs and calling it speed training or you're trying to use it to help improve the speed of your athletes, that is not an affective way and that is not going to help them so I want to make sure we understand what that is. So what would be an example of speed work of a true speed workout? Ten times thirty meter sprints at full speed with three minutes rest in between. That would be a good speed workout. A good acceleration work out development.
Another workout would be if you didn't want to do repeat 40 yard dashes. Six to eight depending on the number of is a topic for a number of different conversations of how to assess different volume but let's say six to eight times 40‑yard dash with four minutes rest in between. Going at full speed. That's a speed work out. It's a train fast, it's a train at full speed and get plenty of recovery and that's what dictates speed work that falls onto that range of 20 to 60‑yard range. That's what speed work is. I want you to go back and think about whether that's how you're running your program or how you're running your sprinter training sessions. Let me just give you a quick analogy to highlight what I mean. If you want to learn how to throw a baseball, a fast ball at 95 miles an hour, that is your goal, that was your dream to thousand at 95 miles an hour. Would you go about training to do that by throwing a high volume of balls at 70 miles an hour over and over again? Of course not. You wouldn't do that because no matter how many times we throw a ball at 70 miles an hour, that does not prepare you to throw at 95‑miles an hour.
If you want to throw at 95 miles an hour and you were training to get to that point, you would throw a low number of balls as hard as you could trying to get as close to 95‑miles an hour as you could to improve your fastest top speed. You would of course rest between throws to make sure you have enough energy and were recovered to get as fast as possible because if you're a little bit tired you know that you're going to be going a little bit slower. You can't get to full speed so the same principle applies to sprint training. You have to train at full speed and get plenty of rest if we want to be able to do that and we want to be able to succeed on that level. So hopefully that will give you a little bit of insight as to what speed because in tomorrow video we need to break down the skill of fast and teaching acceleration because acceleration is the most important part of speed training for athletes in any speed based course. We need to get that but we needed to establish what speed work actually is.
If you're not currently doing speed work as I find already, let's take the next day and kind of sit back and reassess the way we're going about things because if you can make that change, you can add true speed work into your program, you're gonna see a remarkable change in the success of your athletes and the confidence of your athletes. I will say it time and time again people have done consults and have complete speed training customers have said on hundreds and hundreds of occasions what an impact it has had on their training so I strongly believe just based on knowing that factually that's the way to go about doing it. When you start doing real speed work so start adding that into your program if you're not doing it. If you are already doing it and that's is the foundation of your program, that's great you're on the right path. I'm going to be back tomorrow with some information that's going to help you critique and break down your athlete ands teach them how to accelerate properly.
