Collegiate Strength and Conditioning

[James_Smith]

@speedcoach

I have trained hundreds if not thousands in speed over the years and even at a young age, kids tend to land on balls of feet as a natural action. In my experience, those who land heel to toe tend to be the slower, heavy footed runners. Plus, I was always of the belief that in all drill work, you should perfect your running technique. Shorten the lever on recovery and pre load for push off track to avoid the natural collapse that seems to happen when athletes run without pre loading foot for strike.

@lr1400

I don’t think it matters too much, it’s really just a dynamic drill/warm up thing anyway. To each his own. You can’t argue with Pfaff’s success or influence over other track and field coaches in multiple events. It’s kind of like should you put the feet high on the pedals or put the feet with just a little touching the track…WR holders have done both.

Remember, as Charlie often noted, there’s a different between what’s effective for the best in the world and the rest of the general population.

Thus, on the one hand, you could certainly make a case for ‘it doesn’t really matter’ when you’re dealing with a drill that is not performed near race speeds for the sub 9.8 people of the world.

On the other hand, for the other 99.999999999% of the athlete community I believe something as seemingly rudimentary as power speed is critical to perform in a way that promotes, as speed coach noted, proper sprint mechanics; thereby making it more than just dynamic warm up/rudimentary drill work.

The sensation of performing the drills as speed coach and I are describing them is something I need my players to feel as a fore-brain activity before it can become an unconscious aft brain activity. due to the slow horizontal speeds they are very conducive to fore-brain activity because there’s plenty of time to think and feel how you’re moving.

Remember, most younger/low training age athletes are unconscious-incompetent (they’re unaware that they don’t know what they’re doing)

4 stages of motor learning:

1. unconscious incompetent
2. conscious incompetent
3. conscious competent
4. unconscious competent

or in my friend Dave Tate’s words:

1. shit
2. suck
3. good
4. great

Those of us working with populations other than the T&F elite, are dealing with people who are, at best, level 3 in terms of physical preparatory training (not to be confused with their sport skill)

As I’ve noted before, T&F is physical preparation at its finest; thus the higher the level of your T&F qualification the better you are at sprinting/running, jumping, and throwing.

sprinting/running, jumping, and throwing form the basis of much of what I do with my athletes and, sadly, require a great deal of instruction for most in order that they are done with mechanical and orthopedic efficiency while maximizing output potential.