The present generation of Nigerian and Ghanian sprinters, in general carry lots of muscle. Does anyone know the strenght-levels of different sprinters from these two countries?
There used to be a common view that african athletes and coaches don’t focus much on max-strength.
I don’t know but I know one thing I’m and african american and I always seemed to be faster than all the white dudes(no offense) ever since I was 2. I wonder why black people seemed to be faster than white people I guess that question has been asked many times before though.
What about the training pregrams used over there. Certainly, a lot of the info there came from the US and Lee Evans.
Many of them trained in US University, so i’m not sure that their strength developpment came from African training methods.
Maybe it’s a morphological body type, East African seems to be thin (ETH, KEN, SOM, UGA…) as opposed as West (NGR, GHA, CMR). That’s probably one of the reason why East produces distance runners and West sprinters.
Any thoughts?
It’s quite simple really. The current generation of Nigerian and Ghanaian youths tend to be taller and bulkier than the previous generation. This is a trend that has been present since the sixties. It’s very visible when you compare photos of national football squads from different eras. It’s not uniquely confined to West Africa either; just compare the average height of contemporary Japanese youth with the average height of Japanese born in the 1940’s.
In addition, West Africans with active lifestyles tend to have very low levels of body fat in comparison with Caucasians, which makes them look much more muscular even though they may have the same amount of muscle mass.
Weight training as an aid to sports is not particularly widespread in West Africa, although the sight of youth bench-pressing on the streets with home-made benches and weights made from wheel hubs welded to iron pipes is not unusual. Some Nigerian universities have weight-training facilities and have produced Olympic-standard weightlifters like Oliver Orok. Strongman-type lifting is also fairly popular, but is not usually practiced by athletes, more usually by naturally strong men who entertain crowds by bending iron bars, pulling cars with their teeth etc.
However track athletes and team sports do not make widespread use of weight training. This is a different story, of course, for athletes who train in the US or Europe.