Do you think that explosive bag kicking helps with explosiveness on the track?
can you explain what you mean? would it be similar to a medicine ball drill, where the athlete lies on there back with their knees and feet up. the ball is tossed from beyond the feet and the athlete kicks the ball back to the catcher.
Well I suppose I’m talking about both side kicks and front kicks.
Here is an example of side kicking:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8347530053736527855&q=bag+kicking&hl=en
And here is an example of front kicking (also known as “teeping” in muay thai):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v0DnZAiJUo
(no need to watch the whole videos, you get the idea)
I am not quite sure about the med ball drill, is a video handy?
I’ve tried all this kicking lark before, it did not improve my sprint speed.
I thought it would becuase of the tension I felt in the muscles.
Kicking is very differant kienesology to sprinting.
E.g;
Hip-flexors work harder at begining of forward leg drive in sprint drive, but in kicking the hip-flexors only work hard at top of kick/movement.
The hams of support leg can feel pretty good tension depending how you kick, but again, it in now way teaches you to express hamstring power over the longer length of the sprint stride. The hamstrings must contract (including eccentric & concentric)powerfully over more of the range of a sprint stride than of a kick.
yeah i see what you mean now. i’m not sure how much relevance that would have to sprinting though, it’s more of a cardio activity i would argue. not sure about a video of the medicine ball drill, i’ll try and find it, but i’m not that good on internet things!!!
I’m pretty sure Ben Johnson did the following exercise according to something Charlie wrote a few years back.
Lay on your back. Straight legs.
Put med-ball between feet (or lower legs if less strong). Raise legs fairly straight and then lower.
(how high he went I don’t know, but I think raising to 45 degree would be plenty, and then lower. I would keep both arms on floor at your sides, hands face down beyond hips where thighs lower too. If you find this is not enough support, you can hold ANOTHER med-ball or weight discs in hands behind over-head./ not above head!) This would become a leg-raise with isometric crunch. Don’t rock the upperbody on this one, isometric crunch with this, just moving legs up and down. VERY INTENSE, don’t do it if you’ve allready got sprints and plyo’s and weights in your program,
or C.N.S will get moody.
Could do it without any added weight, like I do them.
I think it would useful for flexability.
yeah possibly, but i would think there are better ways of training flexibility, even dynamic felexibility, rather than using all that energy expenditure by kicking a bag.
I think that allmost if not ALL dynamic flexabitly could or should be done in the running session where it would be more spacific and be part of a good warm-up. Doing it in same session rather than as a seperate session.
Never really thought about it, but I would be inclined to agree with you on that one. Static flexibility on the other hand I tend to do after a track session (later in the day). I don’t do it after weights because if there is microtrauma I wouldn’t want to risk damaging an already slightly damaged tissue. Don’t know what the research says about that, but that’s just my theory.
kicking has neither a positive nor a negative effect on sprinting performance.
Your instinctive theory is shared by some others. A well known trainer on the web, who is well known for training football players for the combine, he does not allow static stretches untill several hours after the training session.
Can’t remember his name of the top of my head, but if anybody else needs, I’ll do a google search.
I was thinking along the lines of hip strengh.
Since a technically correct kick requires very good hip rotation and strengh, and since sprinting also requiries strong hips, I thought maybe there would be some kind of correlation there.
??
That’s what I used to think, but the kicking did not improve my speed one bit, and it interfered negatively with the kienesology of sprint stride.
Kicking does not improve sprinting rythm, and you will find that rythm is where strength is better expressed for sprinting.