Thanks =) I am doing what I can to improve things.
I am running in Greece, a couple of preliminary meets in the beginning of February and nationals on Feb.27th. (travelling back and forth from Milan)
Luckily I will be in Greece for a month starting Dec19th, because it’s getting COLD here… and there are no indoor facilities. brrrr… :o
Stefanie
Your a skip was much better.
try not to get overly stressed about it. You are doing a great job.
Feed back has been pretty good but you can not listen to everyone and you know drills are the corner stone to speed development and sprinting. Who told you that?
I am trying to get some drills filmed for you to take a look and for others to comment.
take care
Angela,
it would be very nice.
I’d like to see if possible also some less known drills, such as ankling, quick leg drills and C drill.
In the speed and strenght video the drills A and B are well explained, with a beautiful discussion about the dynamic and bioenergetic correspondence of those drills.
Other people may also have a look on youtube to drills performed by Powell and Sanya Richards. Also Clyde Hart has a good video of drills. But I much prefer Charlie and Angela perspective.
That would be great Angela.
Yes, I was told by Nikoluski also not to get obsessed with these :o, which I am not, I just figured since I do them every day, I might as well do them right!
I agree there are lots of comments here; for the time being, when I execute them I just think to raise my knees lower (at hip height) and use the arms some more.
Another question I have is who are you training with when you get to greece? If I may ask? I totally understand training in the cold. Trust me I’m in michigan. Thankfully I had sorta a indoor track near me. I always had to go back to mich state or eastern mich to really train.
I train alone at this point, but I hang out with 2-3 coaches that I know, who help me out.
I don’t think you would know them, but one is Gravalos’ coach (national 4x4 team), we are good friends.
But now that I’m often in Athens, I’m meeting some people there too…
And Nikoluski of course … I think we trained twice together :o
Why so much debate over sprint drills?
Maybe because is an element present in a lot of sprinting programs. Maybe because Stephanie, like many others, perform them every (or almost) training day and having a good technique is the right way to go (they have a purpose). Maybe because, without gettig obsessed, doing better is better than doing worse. Gerard Mach had a very good insight when he first proposed these drills.
A physio goes through a series of drills when treating injured bodies, all aimed at increasing the range of movement.
I have never heard of Gerald Mach, the only drills I have seen are speed dynamics and when I started using them 15+ years ago the athletes ran slower and started getting injured. Doing a drill for the sake of *** is a waste of time. I stopped using stretches and replaced them with exercises/drills and have not had an athlete get injured because of doing so.
I used a few simple rules, muscles don’t stretch, balance is important, start the drill slow finish the drill slow. Drills are a motor skill, running fast is a series of motorskills at speed.
CF.com is the best recourse for running fast that I have come across and a thank’s to nanny69 for pointing me here.
LOL! Let’s make it three then! 
stilljd_5, part of Charlie’s work has been influenced by Gerard Mach. It would definitely be worth having a look at the latter’s manual.
Myyyyyyyyyyyyyy pleasure!
Speed dynamics took several of Mach’s drills, and aded some crazy one. Charlie’s favorite was the suitcase! I remember on a visit to see him we laughed so hard about the suitcase.
What does it look like?? Can you post a video please? :o
Are you referring to Kathy Freeman and the shakeups drill?
I will second that
I don’t mean to be critical or disrespectful but I just did a google and found the A drill, it is the same stuff I saw in the 90’s at a course hosted by Lauren Seagrade. The first thing I picked up was heel up, toe up, in Charlies mechanics of running he states that the toe is dorsiflexed before ground contact. Over the years I have found that if dorsiflexion is constant then shin soreness is severe where dorsiflexion before contact avoids pain.
The Seagrave version of the a-skip is not the same as the original Mach version. You’d have to check some of the speed dynamics sprint videos especially Drills for Speed to see. What you saw from the google search is not the original Mach version.
Loren’s version, as Winckler calls it, is a velocity a-skip. That is they actually step over the opposite or support knee and step down quickly. That is they are doing the drill, in part, to replicate some of the step-over mechanics exhibited in max. or near max. velocity sprinting.
Winckler(though I don’t know about others) refers to the original Mach version as an acceleration a-skip. Whether or not that’s what it’s designed for would be a good question for Mach himself or Charlie but the execution for the the Mach and the Seagrave skips are not the same.
The original Mach version has the foot directly or nearly so below the knee with the lower leg in a fairly straight line-perpendicular to the track so there is zero folding of the leg to step over the opposite knee.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ConsgMIiUjA
I taped the 2 hour session demonstrated by lauren and it is now in my archive.
What that guy is calling a Mach drill does not really look like that when viewed, for example, on the CF GPP video. I don’t think the marches-not shown on the video but shown in Mach’s book (thanks, number 2!)feature the stepping over action and the a-skips definitely do not in the GPP video.
The guy who did this youtube video is much more in line with Seagrave, and other’s version of the drills despite his tagging the name Mach to the clip.