Technique is critical in developing speed and acceleration.
The formula for speed is stride length times stride frequency. We need to practice both skills in order to maximize our ability to generate better acceleration and faster speed.
Posture is the first element that athlete must understand. You need to run like you walk. Nice and tall and relaxed, not hunch over. We do not want the center of mass of the body to have to go up and down by flexing at the lower body. We want to stay tall like looking over a fence.
What happens if your ankle joint is critical to unlocking you speed potential? When you push off the ground, this is what we called ‘Plantar Flexion’ extension. This transfers to extension at the knee and the hip. So we get triple extension. It starts down at the ankle.
After plantar flexion or push off, we go to what we called dorsiflexion. Loading the ankle by pulling the toe up toward the shin, that helps to enlist the lifting action of the knee up in front of the body.
The hip joint—I believe is the area that ‘will make you and brake you.’ It is vitally important that you develop the hip so that it flexes to recover the leg in front of the body.
Too many athletes run behind them self, not able to generate force and power. You need to think about opposites. The hip flexor flexes the lower back, flexes the whole good posture to transfer force down to the ground.
The hip joint is also critical for recovery. What do we mean by recovery? Simply this—after push off, recovery happens when the foot is off the ground. We do not want to recover back here behind the body. We want to recover by cycling the leg. The heel collapses, we shorten the lever and then we come to a full loaded position in the front to step down to the ground. Half of movement is the up face though. The other half is back to the ground.
Your arms are critical to unlocking speed. You can gain critical tenths of a second in a short period of time by simply doing this. Drive your elbow back behind your aggressively. These enlist the knee to come up in front of the body for recovery. Action-reaction, this is now action for the reaction of force going down to the other leg into the ground. Boom! That is where your power is transferred in the force moving the body explosively.
We need to understand how to apply force to the ground to move the body. The key elements is pushing the body’s mass, not pulling it. To run straight ahead, we push down and back. So after we come up, we go down aggressively putting force at an angle that moves the mass forward. Going back ward is a reverse. We push away creating this angle that moves the mass backward.
Laterally, it is the same principle. It does not change. We do not want to reach and pull. We want to push and drive the mass away from the direction we want to go.
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