Sprinters Nervous System Pre-school

Sprinters need to train steadily throughout the year for more strength and then train in ways that let their nervous systems learn how to use the extra strength and convert it to power. It’s not enough to lift heavy weights or lift weights fast. Muscle contractions are far faster than any lifting that can be done. See every activity as a way to let the brain learn, just like when you learned to walk.

If you do too much high-quality training,

Heavy lifting, max powerlifting, max speed running or max acceleration & your nervous system will be overloaded, and your sprinting improvement will go stale. You will learn to run slower. Some squads do this all year, every year!

There are probably superstars in those squads that have their potential destroyed, just like a talented singer pushing their vocal cords too hard too often. They will end up with no exceptional talent showing itself.

Some theories say to lift weights & run in the same session. There are a few ways to do this:

• Lift specific heavyweights in small volumes first, then sprint flat out shortly afterwards. The best specific weight exercises are single-legged step-ups on a low box.
• Lift weights straight after the sprint session. This creates more recovery for the nervous system for the following quality sessions.
• Mixing some bounding with alternate legs is a good way to link strength training to sprinting.

The main thing not to do is do volumes of half-effort sprinting and think that is sprint training. It is only conditioning and filling in time. Done too fast, these will spoil speed development as well, and doing them in volumes will only convert fast twitch fibres to slower ones.