When was the last time you had to sprint? Heart pounding, legs burning and going as fast as you could?
If you can’t remember, then you’re missing out on one of the best tools to challenge your body and improve body composition. Sprinting is arguably one of the most essential training tools for athletic performance.
If you are going to work sprints 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 improvements in your body’s ability to perform.
What are the benefits of sprinting?
Enhances athletic performance
Sprinting carries over into every sport because of its strength, power and speed benefits. “Because it’s so explosive, it activates almost every muscle in the human body,” he says Mike Young, Ph.D.director of the Athletic Lab, which focuses on speed development and athletic performance. “Not too much in the fitness world involves every muscle group acting as aggressively as you see in sprinting,” says Young.
Improves body composition
Beyond athletic performance, the benefits of sprinting carry over to the physical properties of the body, Young says.
“You get the benefit of high intensity through body composition and lean mass—more athletic glutes, hamstrings, and quads,” he says. “That’s why you see elite sprinters looking the way they do — really lean and muscular. Some of it just comes from the act of sprinting.”
How to acclimatize your body to sprinting
Sprinting is an intense, high-intensity exercise. To protect your body and get the most out of your sprints, follow these tips.
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When you start sprinting, start with a quick warm-up like high knees and lunges to loosen up your body and prepare for the sprint. Then start with the basic movement, acclimating your tissues, muscles, and even bones to the tension, Rooney says. Even sprinting in place can be a good starting point as your body gets used to the movement.
“You have to wake up the nervous system that has access to the large muscle fibers – the large motor. When you do that, you can work that musculature,” says Rooney.
Start slow
If the last time you sprinted was in high school gym class, don’t go right out and do 100 meters. You just want to start moving quickly again, he says Martin Rooney, CSCSfounder of Training for Warriors.
This could be taking quick steps through a speed ladder or taking steps a little faster than you are comfortable with. While there is no “perfect” sprint distance, aim for 30 yards or so when you first start out.
Maintain your body
You should work on mobility — through stretching and dynamic movements like push-ups that improve your range of motion — to reduce your risk of injury.
And if you’re overweight than you should be, your diet and weight loss will improve your ability to sprint, Rooney says.
4 Sprint Tips for Faster Paces
If you want to make sure you get all the benefits of sprinting, here are four tips to help you do it the right way.
1. Keep your mechanics tight
The fastest body is the most efficient body, meaning you don’t waste energy with body parts in the wrong place. Although it may seem like running fast is just running fast, then you’re not getting the most out of your effort.
Your Anatomical Checklist for Great Sprint Technique:
- Lean your whole body forward. Instead of just arching your back, Young advises to think about leaning from your ankles up so that your head, neck, spine and pelvis are all in alignment.
- Stabilize your head. “A common mistake is for the head to fall out of normal postural alignment,” says Young. This means that force transfer from the ground is not efficiently transferred throughout the body. Because the human body is not ideally designed for sprinting (we are very vertical compared to the horizontal position of, say, a cheetah), a wobbly head makes an inefficient system even more so.
2. Accelerate with big strides
Good sprint form is all about how you accelerate on the run. “The physics of running haven’t changed: If you run in a world governed by physics, you don’t reach top speed without acceleration,” says Young.
This means that your first steps are big, big steps — not the small, unsteady steps you see some people take — with big, swinging arms. When you take short steps, you can’t generate much force because there is less ground contact time.
Having a long stride length means more ground contact time — and more power to propel the body forward, Young says.
3. Experiment with volume
When most people hear the word “sprint,” they think “all out.” That doesn’t have to be the case, says Rooney. You can aim for 70 or 80 percent of maximum effort in your workouts — and play around with combinations of different distances and intensities.
“When we say sprint, it doesn’t mean it has to be like a tiger chasing you,” says Rooney.
4. Strengthen your sprint muscles
Your glutes and hamstrings—and all the muscles in your posterior chain—serve as your engine for speed, Young says. Deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, glute raises and step-ups are great for strengthening these muscles to help with sprint performance. Any single-leg exercises will also be helpful, Young says.
And there are few movements that train power and speed better than plyometrics, which help build explosiveness.
