100m Help! (Read 104 times)

not much of a sprinter but I did a google search and came up with this.

http://www.elitefts.com/education/training/sports-performance/top-six-ways-to-increase-your-sprint-speed/

www.reddit.com/r/sprinting

is a good source to ask question or search for previous discussions.

Folks there are mostly very nice and friendly with a few smug comments here and there.  Likely always, treat all answers you got from the web with a grain of salt and see what make sense to you.

If you have a really explosive start but sputter out, it seems like you need to do a couple of things:

1) control yourself out of the blocks

Obviously the 100 is a short sprint, but if you run it like the 40 yard dash then you will burn yourself up pretty quickly.  Just watch Bolt race.  He is rarely the first out of the blocks and rarely not first across the line.  Explosive is good but you want smooth acceleration for 50-60 meters.

2) work on relaxing

Make sure you can relax at full speed.  Your jaws should be loose (cheeks should actually shake at full speed) and your hands should be relaxed (as if holding a potato chip).  If your relaxed you'll move faster and much more efficiently, allowing you to maintain your speed.  You can work on this by doing tempo work.  These are fast runs anywhere from 100-400m at 70-90%.  In other words fast but not necessarily hard.  The focus of these runs is relaxing and feeling good.

3) speed endurance work

Toward the end of your season, maybe the last 3-4 weeks for a middle schooler, you should do some speed endurance work.  These will be 150-200m sprints at 95% or NEAR race pace.  Take full recovering so maybe do 4 x 150 with 5-6 minute breaks.

I coached track for 8 years (3 years of middle school and 5 years of college), spending much of that time working with sprinters.  The advice I gave you is very general, which is the best I can do over a internet forum, but if you work on those three things you should see your 100m races improve.