INSPO Fitness Journal August 2017

SPEED
DEVELOPMENT
for athletes
BY KRISTINA DRILLER
This month I caught up with
track athlete and strength
and conditioning specialist
and sport science researcher
Hayley Gilchrist and we
talked all things speed
development.
What are the main areas you recommend to
focus on when developing speed in athletes?
There are a number of areas we could branch
off into when talking about speed. With the
developing athlete; it may be more important
to promote skill learning and rhythm,
with the experienced athlete; trying to
improve speed further, things tend to get a
bit more creative.
For the developing athlete, education is
a key part of training. Understanding why
they are learning a particular drill is really
important when they are learning what the
‘ideal’ movement should be.
Initially, sprint drills are quite difficult and
require co-ordination and rhythm to feel like
you aren’t going to get your legs tangled up.
In young athletes, it can often be a barrier to
try harder at something so technical.
This can especially be the case when they
turn up to training and may have grown a
few centimetres or weigh a kilogram heavier,
totally changing the way they move compared
with the last session when they were
moving well.
This is why expecting a standard of
movement is not always best practice when
working with young people as their bodies
are regularly changing.
Sprint drills are really important for all
levels of speed development. They are often
used in warm-ups to learn the movement
patterns of sprinting. There is never a point
in time when a sprinter no longer needs to
do sprint drills.
How is flexibility important for athletes to
move faster?
That depends on what you mean by flexibility;
being able to do the splits or turn yourself
to a pretzel probably won’t be too helpful. In
terms of sprinting, we think about mobility
and tendon strength.
If your range of motion is limited and
stops you from achieving desirable body
positions for directing your momentum,
working on mobility may help improve
performance.
Sprinters work on mobility through specific
warm-up and rhythm drills. The other
side of the coin is stiffness; tendon stiffness
is extremely important for improving sprint
speed.
Without getting too technical, force
travels faster through a stiff strong tendon
rather than a floppy loose one. Joints moved
by muscle action pulling tendons, to rapidly
transfer force from the hip joint (powered
by the mighty glutes), through to the knee
(transferred by the quads and hamstring
muscles), and through to the ankle to the
ground (by the calf musculature), we need a
smooth pathway with little interference and
energy leakage.
Stiff tendons reduce energy leakage lost
as energy is transferred through each joint
structure. Range and force production is a
very individual consideration in training,
there is no one size fits all approach.
There is of course desirable mechanics
to replicate, but that may not fit the way
one athlete may apply force compared to
another.
Flexibility or range of motion is also a
great recovery tool or something to monitor.
12 INSPO – FITNESS JOURNAL AUGUST 2017