When was the last time you had to sprint? Heart pumping, legs burning, going as fast as possible?
If you don’t remember, you’re missing out on one of the best tools to challenge your body and improve your body composition. Sprints are undoubtedly one of the most important training tools for athletic performance.
If you are going to make a sprint into your routine, you need to consider the best ways to approach them to maximize their use and protect yourself. When you do, you will see an improvement in your body’s ability to perform.
What are the advantages of Sprint?
Improves athletic performance
Sprints carry over to all sports due to the benefits of power, strength and speed. “It’s super explosive, and it activates virtually every muscle in the human body,” says Dr. Mike Young, director of Athletic Lab, which focuses on speed development and athletic performance. “In the fitness world, not too many involve all the muscle groups that act proactively as you would see in the sprint,” Young says.
Improves body composition
Beyond sports performance, the benefits of sprinting pass on to the physical quality of the body, Young says.
“You can benefit from high strength through more exercise grooves, hamstrings and quads, including body composition and lean mass,” he says. “This is why we see elite sprinters see their way. They’re really lean and muscular. Some of them come from the mere act of sprinting.”
How to adapt your body to sprint
Sprints are intense, shocking exercises. Follow these tips to protect your body and get the most out of your sprint.
warm up
Once you start your sprint, start with a quick warm-up like a high knee and a lunge, then loosen your body into a sprint. Then start with basic movements and adapt your tissues, muscles and even bones to strength, says Rooney. As your body gets used to movement, sprinting properly is also a good starting point.
“You have to awaken the big muscle fibers, the nervous system that accesses the big motors. When you do that, you can work that muscle tissue,” says Rooney.
It starts slowly
If you last sprinted, or were in high school gym class, don’t go out and do 100 yards right away. Martin Rooney of CSCS, founder of Warriors training, just wants to start by moving faster again.
It may allow you to walk through a speed ladder or take a pace a little faster than you feel comfortable. There’s no “perfect” distance in the sprint, but when you first start, aim for around 30 yards.
I’ll keep your body
You need to tackle mobility – improve the range of movement through movements like stretching and movement – reduce the risk of injury.
And if you’re at a higher weight than you should be, dialing your nutrition and losing weight will improve your sprinting ability, says Rooney.
4 Sprint Tips to Get You Faster
If you want to make sure you’re experiencing a sprint of all the benefits, here are four tips to help you do it the right way.
1. Keep the mechanic firmly
The fastest body is the most efficient body. This means that you are not wasting energy that has body parts in the wrong place. Running fast may seem like, well, running fast, but you’re not making the most of your efforts.
Anatomical checklist of excellent sprint techniques:
- Tilt your whole body forward. Instead of just gesture your back, Young recommends leaning from his ankles and thinking that your head, neck, spine and pelvis are all in place.
- Stabilizes the head. “The general error is floping the head from normal posture alignment,” Young says. This means that the movement of force from the ground is not efficiently transmitted to the entire body. Because the human body is not ideally designed for sprints (for example, it is too vertical compared to the horizontal position of a cheetah), a wobbling head further strengthens the inefficient system.
2. Accelerate with long progress
A great sprint form is about the method of acceleration that is being performed. “The physics of running have not changed. If you run in a world dominated by physics, you won’t reach top speed without acceleration,” Young says.
So, your first step is not a big, choppy thing, but a big, long walk, with big, swinging arms. Taking a short step will not produce much force as it will have less contact with the ground.
The greater the length of the stride, the longer it will contact the ground, and the more force it will propel the body forward, says Young.
3. Experimenting strength
When most people hear the word “sprint,” they think “full.” That doesn’t have to be true, Rooney says. You can play with a variety of distances and strength combinations, aiming for 70 or 80% of your biggest workouts.
“When we say sprints, that doesn’t mean the tiger has to be chasing you,” says Rooney.
4. Strengthen the muscles of the sprint
All the muscles in the glute and hamstrings, and the rear chain, act as engines for speed, says Young. Deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, Grootham pay raises and step-ups are perfect for strengthening those muscles and helping them perform as they gallop. According to Young, single-leg exercises are also helpful.
Also, there are few better moves than plyometrics that help to build explosiveness.
