Possibly the most useless, mundane, “miss the boat by a thousand miles”, irrelevent peice of information I have read this year on sprinting. I wasn’t expecting anything else really, I’m suprised I even bothered to look.
All these “experts” that live in gyms next to their calculators, and they tell us that all we have to do is strike the ground with a lot of pressure, and they tell us the only way to do that is hit the weights room.
No doubt it is the same sort of person that would tell you to get in a gym and do lots of heavy barbell squats and powercleans because “they build explosiveness” or something. They haven’t got a darn clue.
How hard you strike the ground is more to do with forward leg swing speed (of other leg), and a foot that can handle the impact force. It has not got a lot to do with sprint technique drills or weight training.
And how fast the forward swing leg swings forward has a lot to do with spinal posture at that moment and a number of different things including power from hip flexors and adductors.
I hate it when all those website gurus jump on the latest super star name in sport (e.g: Usain Bolt), and then they go and preach something from a book that is 30 years old as if it is the gospel of reality. They say it is the reason “superstar” is so good. But they don’t point out any of the intricasies. Thye don’t talk about Usain Bolts narrow pelvis. They don’t talk about his broad shoulders and narrow hips helping him to controll hip stability better than others.
Niether do they mention that Usain doesn’t really care much about weight training, and he just goes through the motions in the weights room.
I remember reading a mixed martial arts magazine the other day, and some self proclaimed fitness guru, said he looked at Usain Bolts strength program and he declared: “it was the most naive program I have ever seen.”
It was the martial arts strength coach (who has nothing to do with Usain) who is naive.
He probably was expecting Usain to be doing “drop - cluster - pyramid - matrix - super set - with bands - westside - flying spaghetti squats with chains” or something.
Sorry guys, I got the hump cause I’m moving home, but even so, I thought I’d give my two pennies worth on that link to the supposed “super” training site.