Sprinting: I Put That on Everything

Why the fastest athletes in the world are the blueprint for explosive performance.

We've all heard it before.

"He's just a natural athlete."

"She's gifted."

While genetics certainly play a role in athletic performance, we often overlook one of the most common ingredients in the development of explosive athletes:

Sprinting.

Over the last fifteen years, sports performance has evolved tremendously. Athletes are running faster, jumping higher, and producing performances that once seemed only capable of professionals. Strength training has undoubtedly contributed to that progression, but strength alone isn't the answer. The best athletes don't just lift.They sprint. A lot. They jump. They compete. THEN they use intelligent strength training to support those qualities.

At Tempo Sports Academy, we don't view strength and sprinting as competing philosophies.

Strength builds capacity. Sprinting teaches athletes how to express it.

Before we really get into this, here’s something to consider:

The strongest athletes aren't always the most explosive. But the fastest athletes are almost always incredibly explosive.

Im not saying that every athlete needs to become a Noah Lyles but its an argument that almost every athlete can benefit from developing the qualities sprinting demands.

All Roads Lead Back to Sprinting

Power, Elasticity,Coordination, Rhythm, Sitffness, force production are all the qualities nearly every athlete is trying to develop:

Every ground contact requires an athlete to produce significant force in an extremely short period of time while coordinating the entire body at high velocity. The weight room allows us to isolate and develop many of these qualities. Plyometrics allow us to emphasize others. Sprinting asks the athlete to put everything together. That's what makes it such a valuable training stimulus.

Capacity Before Expression

I want to be very clear when I say this: Sprinting shouldnt’t replace strength training but its a by product of what the weight room has allowed you to effectively accomplish.

If an athlete doesn't possess adequate strength, tissue capacity, mobility, or work capacity, they may not have the bandwidth necessary to consistently perform high-quality sprint work.

Side note: This always reminds me of the Marshawn Lynch clip where he says, “I’m going to run through his face… over and over and over and over again.” Funny enough, that’s a perfect example of what I mean by bandwidth. It’s one thing to produce force once. It’s another thing to have the capacity to reproduce that same level of physical output over and over again. That takes bandwidth.

This idea is very similar to how I approach base training with my track athletes. The more capacity and bandwidth an athlete has to produce quality repetitions, the more productive practices and ultimately competitions become. If a training protocol calls for a specific number of 60-meter sprints at a certain intensity and quality, but the athlete can only execute three or four before their mechanics and output begin to decline, they simply don't have the bandwidth to complete the intended stimulus yet. That's why strength training becomes a prerequisite to expression: we first build the capacity necessary to repeatedly express speed, power, and technique at a high level.You can't express what you don't possess.

Build capacity → develop elasticity → express it at speed.

For Hoopers, Sprinting Is Jump Training

This conversation becomes really interesting when we look at basketball players especially one-foot dunkers.

A two-foot and one-foot jumper don't necessarily solve the jumping problem the same way. A two-foot jumper typically has more opportunity to decelerate, absorb force, load the lower body, and redirect that force vertically. The one-foot jumper operates differently as they don't want to spend much time on the ground. They want to apply force and get off of it!

That starts looking a lot like top-end sprinting.

Great one-foot jumpers don't completely kill their speed before takeoff. They preserve it and redirect it.

I post videos all the time of my hoopers running on the curved treadmill. If you've ever run on one, you know exactly why I believe it's one of the best tools for teaching elasticity. As the self-propelled belt gets faster, the demand to strike the ground and get off of it becomes greater. If you don't, you might find yourself face-first on the treadmill. During the elasticity and expression phases of development, athletes can benefit tremendously from this stimulus. The torso stays stacked, the hips remain tall and upright, and the athlete learns to apply force quickly without spending unnecessary time on the ground. That's that Zach LaVine type of bounce.

That's Why I Put Sprinting on Everything

The goal isn't to create a bunch of track athletes. The goal is to develop athletes who can produce force and then actually use it. Athletes who are stronger faster more elastic and better coordinated are capable of expressing those qualities in extremely small windows of time.

That's where sprinting becomes difficult to replace.

So whether I'm developing a sprinter, a football player, a volleyball athlete, or a basketball player trying to put somebody on a poster, you'll probably see sprinting somewhere in the program.

I put that on everything.