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| Sprint Techniques: Achieving The Max or Increasing Speed |
By Christopher Lyke
Texas HS Football Chief Editor
One of the things many athletes often wonder is, how they can drop the time on their 40 or become a quicker runner in general. Speed is not always the most important skill on and off the football field. A few of the things that speed allows you to do is use your power in tackling, time your plays more efficiently and allow better flexibility at a higher rate.
There are two types of runs that are most notably in the developement of a football player. The first is the velocity. The other developement is acceleration. The key to training for a maximum velocity improves speed by allowing and an athlete to move his limbs at a faster rate and use power through speed. Training for the max velocity possible is just as important as training for acceleration. But acceleration is extremely important as it gives the player the required mechanics to use in repetitive short bursts without major resistence.
The first thing we will go over is the proper techniques in sprinting. Sprinting is the first part of what we could call a speed drill. Once you finish the sprinting drill, the next step will be what is called the the acceleration drill. Before we do go through these steps and techniques, it is important to note that you must use the drills during every phase of training if you want to maintain a consistent speed.
Sprint Techniques
Posture
The facts that your head weighs more than most of your body parts causes a chain reaction. Where the eyes go, the head goes. Where the head goes so does the rest of the body.
With that being said, it is always important that the player keep his eyes on a hortizontal plane.
The abdominal muscles should be tight and hips aligned directly with the torso. The abdominal muscles stablize the pelvis in an optimal position so that the hamstrings and gluteal muscles can apply maximum leg force against the ground, while allowing the hip flexor of the opposite leg the ability to recover for the next stride.
Proper spring form dictates that the shoulders should be slightly ahead of the hips with the shoulders down and not hunched. The player should maintain a tall posture with the pelvis projected forward and upward. The head should be level and the face and shoulder should remain relaxed.
Arm Action
Now that we have covered posture, what about the arm action? The arms play a critical role in sprinting. Incorrect arm action is the most common mistake among many players. Instead of moving the arms across the body, they should be moving forward and backward while maintaining a 90° bend at the elbows.
What you do with the right arm will affect what happens to your left leg and what happens with the left arm does the same with the right leg. The arm action must be powerful to counteract the hip rotation occuring as a result of leg movement. You should drive your arms back as if they were hammering a nail by rotating the shoulders. The arms should swing through eye-level to hip-level range of motion.
Arms recover elastically through the stretch of the shoulder and as soon as the recovery hand is back shoulder level, you should swing it backwards again. The hands are held in a relaxed and natural position unless you are holding a football in the drill.
Leg Movement
The leg action should occur under the body rather than achieving a greater stride length. The foot should be planted as close to the hip as possible or else a breaking force will slow the runner due to over-striding.
As the player's leg recovers after the push off, his ankle should be dorsiflexed with the toes up toward the shin and the heel as close to the buttocks as possible. This shortens the leg level and residual time of the leg behind the body resulting in a faster leg turnover.
As the recovery leg comes forward, the thigh will come to a point where it is parallel to the ground at which point the leg
unfolds at the knee and extension begins at the hip. This extenstion is due to transfer of momentum rather reaching characterized by quadriceps contraction. The latter action could result in over-striding, which has the effect of slowing the player down.
The recovery leg then makes ground contract and strikes the ground in a rather explosive manner under the hip with the extenstion of the ankle in a springboard action. The shorter the ground contact time, the more efficient the force will be.
Acceleration
The characterisics of good starting acceleration are a powerful ful range of action with the arms and legs as well as a low driving posture. The emphasis is generally on the generation of hortizontal forces to overcome the inertia of the body. Once the initial inertia has been overcome, the player must efficiently increase spped and allow for a smooth transition to the maximum velocity sprinting posture. This series of transition is compatitble with good football fundamentals such as a running back coming out of his stance, hitting the hole in a low position and then making the transition to the open field running once he is in the clear.
The foward lean of a player should not occur by bending at the waist. Instead the lean should occur with the body aligned so that a straight line extends from the drive leg to the head. The hips should be over the driving leg or slightly ahead the driving leg. The angle of the shin should be positive, which means that the knee stays in front of the ankle joint. The feet should remain close to the ground during acceleration, and the ankle should remain dorsiflexed until the push off phase of the ground reaction.
Unlike other phases of sprinting, the acceleration phase involves forceful muscular contraction at the hip, knee and ankle rather than an elastic response. A great visual to help players learn the low drive position is to have them imagine that they are pushing a car out of the mud. Once the player reaches the sixth to eighth stride, he must get tall to assume optimal sprinting posture. Stride length and stride frequency increase as you increase speed, but always make sure you do not under any circumstances over-stride.
In our next report, we will go over the various drills that will be comparable for the sprinting and acceleration techniques used in this report.
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