Athletes come to me to get faster. Over time, we address lots of things, but the big successes I celebrate are athletes running faster times with greater efficiency. At some level, my business exists to prove that speed is a skill and that everyone can improve it.
Recovery behaviors play a big role in speed development. Training dose and frequency also play big roles in becoming faster. But the central task of a speed training program is motor learning. Every body & brain are willing to become fast. Most bodies do not know HOW to be fast. So workouts and training planning only take you so far as an athlete – you have to learn what makes a fast runner fast, develop that skill, then rehearse it until your brain understands what to do and when to do it.
This little series breaks down the HOW of fast running. We’ll explore that how using the elements of the Speed Drill Warmup that every athlete in my program learns.
Full SHIFT Speed Drill Warmup
Part 1, this article, is all about the A Series. Before that, though, here’s the full Speed Drill Warmup , with each drill done over 20 meters except the ones marked with an asterisk:
- Forward Skip
- Backward Skip
- Tall Lateral Shuffle R/L
[easy series] - Stepover Lunge
- Snap Lunge
- Rocket Lunge
[lunge series] - A March
- A Skip
- A Cycle
[A series] - Quick Straight-leg Run*
- Straight-leg Bound
- Bound
[push series] - 5-Box*
- 1-leg 5-Box R/L*
- Big Split*
[bounce series]
Why Athletes Do “A” Drills To Run Faster
In previous articles, I have described how top speed running is about three Ps – posture, power, and purpose.
Posture describes the biomechanics of efficient high-speed running.
Power describes the force production necessary to reach high speed, which is enabled by correct posture.
Purpose describes the psychological & neuromuscular factors that create the forces needed for high-speed running.
(Brief aside: there is no sub-maximal sprinting. Sprinting is maximal effort acceleration up to peak linear velocity followed by an attempt to maintain high limb speeds as long as possible. Anything less than 100% is just “running.” Don’t call your interval work sprinting unless it’s all-out and don’t expect to get faster just by doing interval work.)
A Drills are used to practice posture. That is the foundation of efficient sprinting.
The three A drills used in the Speed Drill Warmup progress from the lowest linear & limb speeds to the highest linear & limb speeds. There are critical parts of each drill and the drills are progressive, meaning those critical parts build on each other.
Technical Cues in the A March
- Head up
- Knee up
- Toe up
- Big arms
- Loud feet
Head up means neutral neck alignment – at no point in a sprint do you tuck your chin to your chest or raise your chin to the sky. But a huge misconception about the angles of acceleration is that you “stay low.” No, you don’t stay low when accelerating. To stay low, as if you were ducking under a tree branch, necessarily limits your force production and available range of motion at your hip, both in flexion and extension. To stay low is to go slow. Head up is the reminder to let your head sit on your shoulders during acceleration the same way it does at top speed and the same way it does walking down the street.
Knee up means the knee in the air (called “swing knee”) rises up higher than your hip joint. Understand that you do not intentionally lift your knees during top speed running. Your knees elevate as a response to violent vertical foot strike against the ground. The harder you strike the ground, the higher your knees will elevate on each stride. So why bother drilling the high knee? So you learn to drive your foot all the way into the ground from a high position, meaning so you practice the correct hip and knee extension (and foot strike) during each stride.
Toe up means a dorsiflexed ankle. Sprinting happens on the ball of the foot, yes. But sprinting is not “up on your toes.” If you are up on your toes, your foot is plantar-flexed. If your foot is plantar-flexed, mechanically, you are inviting massive heel drop during foot strike (if your elastic system is weak) or dramatically limiting force production during ground contact. In either case, pointed toes are slow. Be actively dorsiflexing the ankle (which means pulling your toe up toward your knee), you preload the plantar fascia and Achilles tendon so the additional stretch during ground contact can be returned during pushoff more efficiently.
Big arms means your wrists swing as high as your face cheek and at least as far back as your butt cheek. This is where “cheek to cheek” comes from as an arms cue in sprinting. Big arms also means swinging your hands down aggressively. What your hands do your feet will do during locomotion. Practicing a violent swing downward encourages a violent foot strike. It is necessary to intentionally train this behavior because weak arm swings during acceleration limit your force production, which reduces the peak linear velocity your body can reach. Essentially…weak arm swing makes you slow.
Loud feet is a reminder to be powerful and aggressive and violent while checking all of the above boxes. Loud feet with correct posture is the smallest sprint mechanics-related plyometric action you can do. Marching with big arms and loud feet is the lowest level of tissue conditioning for your feet, calves, hamstrings, glutes, torso, and shoulder girdle that resembles sprinting. Jogging only conditions feet and calves, then it does so at lower limb speeds across smaller range of motion than sprinting. That is why jogging makes you slow when you are still learning effective and efficient sprinting – it is a counterproductive movement pattern. But loud feet while marching demands that you do sprinting things at walking pace, which is the best way for your brain to learn sprint posture and force production in the beginning.
Technical Cues In The A Skip
The A Skip is simply an A March with a bounce.
As athletes progress with the A March, I tell them to march faster and faster. As we add speed, the coordination for loud feet tends to fail first, then the coordination for big arms. As athletes improve their marching motor pattern and can maintain those technical elements at higher frequency, they begin to bounce naturally. This is a good thing because it means force production exceeds the force of gravity. That is the beginning of proper sprinting.
But we introduce the A Skip well before that coordination develops because there are two other cues worth practicing.
- all the cues of A March
- Up, not forward
- No heels
Up, not forward means projecting your body vertically off the ground with each foot strike. No part of the goal of top speed running is to move forward. Forward momentum is created by the angles of acceleration. Forward momentum is most efficiently sustained (aka top speed) by keeping the hips high while running (aka vertical force on each foot strike). So each bounce of the A Skip should go UP with no intentional action forward whatsoever. You happen to travel forward, but that is simply a consequence of the body’s levers; don’t attempt to go forward. Push yourself up.
No heels means powerful and aggressive foot strike should happen on the ball of your foot. A sprinter’s heel should never touch the ground. Heels are for braking. Braking is essential for jumpers to change horizontal momentum into vertical takeoff and for field sport athletes while changing direction. Speed development requires maximum possible linear velocity in order to reach neuromuscular coordination limits, which means speed development requires straight-line sprinting. Straight-line sprinting should never have any heel contact under any circumstances. During the A Skip, you have no heels!
Technical Cues In The A Cycle
When teaching athletes the A Cycle, I joke that it is a high knees run done far, far better.
Most athletes have done “high knees” as a warmup exercise. It is useless.
Generally, they lift their chin and chest, swing their knees forward and up, and barely tap their feet against the ground. Go back to read the technical cues of the A March and A Skip – your knee elevates during top speed running as a consequence of striking the ground hard. At any speed faster than walking, swinging your knee up is useless for learning sprint mechanics. So when practicing the A Cycle, let go of whatever concept of the high knees run you already have. That concept is probably worthless.
- All cues from A March and A Skip
- Fast arms
- Rhythm
Fast arms means do everything from the prior two drills (especially big arms and loud feet), then swing your arms as fast as you physically can. In the same way that A March at the highest technically-correct frequency is basic training for the torsional and vertical loads of sprinting, A Cycle at the highest technical-correct frequency is basic training for the coordinative challenge of top speed running. As 400m athletes know, you can always try harder with your arms. You may not actually be able to increase frequency any more, but you can try harder. Try harder to swing your arms big & fast during A Cycle.
Rhythm means tuning in to the cadence of your arm stroke. Imagine swinging to a metronome. At your highest effort level, there is some stroke frequency which has a steady beat associated with it. Your task is to maintain that beat. When doing speed endurance work (for sprinters) and when attempting to reach top speed during conditioning runs (for field sport athletes), your task within the rep is to fight to meet and hold that beat. Your task over time is to increase the tempo of that beat. This all starts with attending to rhythm in the A Cycle. Holding rhythm over 20 meters is hard enough!
Other Cues In The A Drills
One additional cue applies to hurdlers in the A Drills: “tuck the ankle”.
Tuck the ankle means keeping your ankle slightly behind your knee when your swing knee is up. Doing so teaches you to lead with the knee, which is essential to both takeoff (lead knee attacks the hurdle, not the lead foot) and to landing (trail knee comes up and to the front on touchdown without casting the foot out front).
This cue can be used by any athlete because it is part of effective top speed mechanics but it is far less valuable to non-hurdlers than all the other cues.
How A Drills Relate To The SHIFT Speed Drill Warmup
The task of the SHIFT Speed Drill Warmup is to practice the elements of effective sprinting at paces and in positions which leave you time to think about where your body is in space.
When sprinting, there’s cognitive capacity to think about at most 1 thing. For many athletes, that one thing is just effort. When you become advanced in the motor skill of sprinting, your focal point can be technical like arm swing or foot cycling.
By breaking sprinting down into its component pieces, based on the parameters represented by the three Ps (posture, power, purpose), you can analyze your own performance. You can do, then think, then modify & do. Second only to having a coach present during your practice, this feedback-based progressive method is the fastest way to learn new skills.
And sprinting is a skill. It is a skill in the way a forehand, a drop kick, and a slap shot are skills. Develop it like one – whole, part, whole, using a clear technical model and hundreds of repetitions. Doing the Speed Drill Warmup at least twice per week but up to twice per day is the way to rack up those quality repetitions your brain is hungry for.
Next up: the lunge series – and why hip flexor strength is so important for becoming faster over time.