This is also posted in my training journal, but for those that don’t read it, hopefully you can comment. Hopefully I’m not being too much of a jerk for double posting.
A - Skip = your just going through the motions. Put some effort down, get some hip height, extend into the ground (so to speak) or, push into the ground (to achieve hip height)
- arms are not good either, you need to keep them tight too, keep the 90deg angle solid here, failure to do here, = failure at speed when your not thinking about it.
Hard to tell with that loose as shirt, but check your hip alignment when doing them too, it appears your not holding your abs tight enough and your back is bowing, not much, but a little.
A - run - seems similar. As you tire, you lean back and back to try and keep knee height - you need to keep you posture and once form is lost, stop. I would look at doing say Half the distance Now, and well, then slowly extend out further as your form stays strong.
20m sled = way too heavy a sled. It looks like your pulling a car out of a ditch… Your arm mechanics are vastly different, in a good way.
Your legs are all infront of you, there is No drive, your reaching for the ground and clawing it back. Knee height is good - you just need to extend your legs and drive with the hips, really Snap that last bit to drive some power down.
20m acc - again, your reaching for the ground. You do have long long levers, but your fighting against them. You’re landing way too far infront of your COG and Pulling yourself along. You’re extending at the hip now, but in doing so, your arm mechanics are following and continue driving backwards far too far.
I would imagine, with your limb lengths, your upright running, say some footage from 40-50m side on, would look a great deal better?? At a guess.
Video footage was great - pretty easy to tell whats going on.
Things to perhaps work on
1 - Holding hip posture during drill and practice
2 - Increase core strength that controls hip alignment
3 - Foam roll, thighs and hip flexors weekly - tight hip flexors will lead to lack of Extension as i was mentioning before. Foam roll and stretch.
4 - Work on arm mechanics - even infront of a mirror, 30sec on 30sec off, perfect form as fast as possible.
5 - before being paralyzed with too much info, fix that - re video new some more drills and runs etc - i would give maybe 2-4wks of the above then re-tape.
if you don’t have a foam roll, you can use a 2kg med ball, one of the hard bouncy one’s
Sled might not be heavy but keep in mind grass will increase the resistance vs on the track. Sled does look too hard
Thanks for the detailed comments!
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I totally agree about the A-skip. I’m also pushing forward too much I think.
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I will definitely focus way more on core strength this year. I’m way too weak in my core to control my freaky long limbs.
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I’ve been foam rolling regularly (and getting lots of massage) since early summer. By the time summer ended (this was shot in early August) I was a lot looser than where I started out.
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Arm mechanics, will do!
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The sled was way too heavy, I remember that day well. The grass was really making the difference I think, it added a ton of drag.
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The amazing thing is that even though I’m landing too far in front of my centre of mass now, you should have seen me before! Yikes! I’ll try to scare up some old video, but it was far worse, with my shin angles being really frighteningly bad. What can I do to get this right? Is there a cue I can use? What should it feel like? Falling?
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I didn’t start feeling really good doing the A-skip or A-run until really late in the summer, so they did improve somewhat. I’ll take some more video when I get into my GPP in a couple of weeks, and I’ll wear a tighter shirt.
I’ll put up my 100m time trial shortly, it has a decent shot of me between 45m - 55m so you can get an idea of how I look upright.
Point no 6 - I find for some, learning to do the A + B skips correctly greatly helps.
Break down the A and B into One leg at a time, really get the feeling of your foot landing right underneath you. Do it also holding onto say a post, and don’t move, just standing there. Your foot just scraping the ground directly underneath you. That will give you a feeling.
slowly progess that into walking, still one leg at a time.
progress into two legs with a 3 step walk inbetween
progress into two legs constant
some people get this quick, some take weeks, or months even…
As -knee never higher than hips.
Sled -you probably need a longer rope.
Always start running drills with a straight back and head alignment.