What Sprinters Actually Need
A return to nuts and bolts, because the science is too good not to share:
THE BARBELL ETHOS | SPRINT TRAINING SERIES: PART 1 OF 3
I’ve spent a lot of time lately writing about the human side of sport. The bamboo tree moments. The things that stay. The quiet lessons that don’t show up on a stat sheet. And I believe all of it.
But sometimes I just need to nerd out and talk about the weight room.
So for the next three weeks, we’re getting back to the nuts and bolts of the science and practice of strength and conditioning.
Specifically, I want to walk you through how I’ve approached strength training for our top sprinters at Johnston this season: what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what the science says about all of it.
Because if you’re a high school strength coach working with track athletes, you’ve probably felt the tension. The track coach wants them fresh. The athletes still want to lift heavy. And you’re standing in the middle trying to do right by both. I’ve been there. This is what I’ve landed on.
Start With the Demand
Before you can design a strength program for sprinters, you need to understand what sprinting actually demands from the body. Not in a vague, ‘they need to be fast and powerful’ way. In a specific, mechanistic way.
Elite sprinting is fundamentally a high-force, high-velocity event. The difference between a 10.8 and an 11.2 hundred meters often comes down to two things: how quickly an athlete can produce force, and how well they can apply that force into the ground. We’re not talking about maximum strength in isolation. We’re talking about Rate of Force Development (RFD), the speed at which a muscle goes from zero to maximum contraction.
The research on this is clear. When ground contact times are measured in fractions of a second, the ability to produce force fast matters more than the ability to produce a lot of it slowly. That distinction between strength and speed of strength is where a lot of programs miss the mark. They train the former and wonder why their athletes don’t get faster.
The race can be won or lost in fractions of a second. Training has to develop qualities that operate in fractions of a second.
There’s a second piece that’s easy to overlook: arm drive. The relationship between arm swing and leg drive is more than a coaching cue about looking good on film. The science on sprint biomechanics shows that arm mechanics contribute directly to stride rate, ground reaction forces, and propulsive efficiency, particularly during the acceleration phase.
Restricting arm swing raises metabolic cost measurably and degrades sprint performance. Training the arms isn’t supplementary to sprint training. For our purposes, it is sprint training, and Part 2 will show you exactly why.
Once you understand those two demands, RFD and upper-body contributions, your programming decisions start to make a lot more sense.
The In-Season Problem
Here’s where coaches can run into trouble. During the offseason, we have time. We can build a base, develop maximal strength, and accumulate volume. We can take our time.
In season, the calculus changes completely.
Your athletes are practicing four or five days a week. They may be competing on weekends. They’re in school all day before they ever step in your weight room or on the track. The margin for error, the line between primed and fatigued, becomes very thin.
Often the instinct is to back way off. Drop the weights, reduce the complexity, keep everyone fresh. I understand that instinct. But there’s a problem with it.
If you drop intensity alongside volume, athletes can go flat. The nervous system, which is what’s actually running the show in a sprint, needs to be stimulated to stay sharp. Weeks of light movement prep is not stimulation. It’s maintenance at best. Detraining at worst.
The goal isn’t just to rest them. The goal is to prime them.
That’s the concept that changed how I think about in-season training. Priming the nervous system means delivering a brief, high-quality stimulus that elevates neural drive without creating the kind of metabolic fatigue that bleeds over into the track session.
Low volume. High intensity. Maximum intent on every rep.
That’s the framework.
Coming in Part 2: How we structured our 3-Circuit Performance Pattern Cycling plan: what each day is targeting, and why the sequence matters. I’ll show you exactly how we’ve built it out, day by day, circuit by circuit.
Until next time,
References: Part 1
Maffiuletti, N.A., Aagaard, P., Blazevich, A.J., Folland, J., Tillin, N., & Duchateau, J. (2016). Rate of force development: Physiological and methodological considerations. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 116(6), 1091–1116.
Macadam, P., Cronin, J.B., & Feser, E.H. (2018). Arm mechanics during sprinting: A systematic review of the literature. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 40(1), 21–28.
Pontzer, H., Holloway, J.H., Raichlen, D.A., & Lieberman, D.E. (2009). Control and function of arm swing in human walking and running. Journal of Experimental Biology, 212(4), 523–534.