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 using the elements of the Speed Drill Warmup that every athlete in my program learns.
[Part 1: A Series] | [Part 2: Lunge Series] | [Part 3: Bounce Series] | [Part 4: Easy Series] | [Part 5: Push Series]
Full SHIFT Speed Drill Warmup
Part 2, this article, is all about the Lunge 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 Should Do Lunges To Run Faster
Lunges are useful for all athletes. They are a variation of the human gait pattern, involve multiple balance elements, and are as easy to load with external weight as they are to do in large volumes for muscular endurance. Being capable of lunging is essential for motor control and indicates a certain degree of big toe, ankle, and knee health.
But the lunges in the Speed Drill Warmup aren’t about any of that. The lunges in this series are about teaching cycling mechanics, which are how your foot, ankle, and knee should move relative to your hip. These lunges are also about building hip flexor strength and power that is specific to acceleration.
Lunge Drills are used to practice acceleration mechanics. That is a (somewhat obvious) prerequisite to running with greater top speed.
The three lunge drills used in the Speed Drill Warmup progress from slow and methodical to dynamic and powerful. There are subtle details to each drill and the drills are progressive, meaning those details build on each other.
Technical Cues in the Stepover Lunge
- Heel to butt (or “close the knee”)
- Knee to the front
- Fall, don’t step
Close the knee means drawing your calf and hamstring together before the swing phase of your thigh moving from behind you to in front of you. There is a unique degree of hamstring strength required to do this and cramping is common when athletes learn these drills while fatigued from other training.
Strictly, you don’t want to “lift” your foot during acceleration, so you wouldn’t actually close the knee while accelerating. If you do, you’ll have a back kick during acceleration, which usually results in landing flat footed on your next drive step, which is slow. But during effective acceleration, you have to be strong enough to hold your knee angle isometrically while your thigh swings through – and the strength required to do that exceeds the strength required to do this stepover lunge correctly. The stepover lunge, then, is a low-level training exercise.
At top speed, by the way, this cycling motion is essential to maintaining a high stride frequency…but doing so is a consequence of power production and hamstring elasticity and quad flexibility. You shouldn’t bother trying to train cycling for top speed.
Knee to the front is actually the same cue as “knee up” from A Drills. Your swing knee should arrive in front of you higher than your hip. I phrase it slightly differently during lunges because I introduce lunges later than those drills since hip flexor strength develops slowly. When a new athlete’s focus during lunges is knee UP, they tend to rush the swing, pull their knee really high, then lack the strength to hold it there while dropping into the next lunge. Knee to the front slows athletes down during this drill, so they hold a mostly-correct position for much longer. Over time, the other Lunge Drills teach the correct position without much talking from me.
Fall, don’t step means to drop your hips into the next lunge rather than reaching your heel forward like a step. To drop your hips, you push your stance knee forward (literally, your knee slides forward of your ankles; work on that ankle rocker!) at the same time you allow it to bend. By doing this, you fall into the lunge position. Imagine doing split squat jumps without switching your legs. That is falling into a lunge position. The reason you shouldn’t step is because striking the ground from a high position (what you practice during A Drills) is nothing at all like kicking your heel in front of you. Heels are for slowing down!
Again, I introduce lunges after A Drills. So head up and toe up still apply here, meaning you DON’T look at the ground as you fall to it and you DO land only on the ball of your foot.
Technical Cues In The Snap Lunge
The Snap Lunge is simply a Stepover Lunge at high speed. In my own training, I continue to practice the Stepover Lunge so I’m polished at demonstrating it, but for SHIFT athletes, it tends to fall away as the Snap Lunge is emphasized.
The Snap Lunge develops specific hip flexor strength in a low-leverage position – flexing your hip when it is almost maximally stretched. Only two cues are added with this Lunge variation.
- all the cues of Stepover Lunge
- Snap
- Lift
Snap means pulling your knee to the front as fast as you are capable. With the back leg’s hip flexor stretched in the lunge position, this is poor leverage for that muscle. By emphasizing the speed of contraction, you start patterning powerful hip flexion. Understand that hip flexion at top speed is completely reflexive – it happens because of the huge stretch your hip flexor and quadriceps and all the associated tendons experience as your hips project forward of your toes during toe-off. But also understand that this powerful elastic flexion depends on both eccentric and concentric strength in your hip flexors! Most of that strength is built with jumping exercises which pull your knees toward your chest (broad jumps, tuck jumps, box jumps, and bounding), but some of the basic strength and foundational coordination can be developed with much lower impact using this drill.
Lift means pushing yourself up onto the ball of your stance foot as you swing your knee to the front. This is low-impact coordination practice. In sprinting, you strike the ground almost vertically using the ball of your foot. This causes your heel to drop slightly while your Achilles tendon and plantar fascia stretch. While those elastic tissues then shorten, your hips are traveling forward and advance beyond your foot. The result is that your ankle plantar flexes (toes pointed) during toe-off. None of this is conscious. But the sequence is still a motor pattern and you can still make the entire pattern smoother by intentionally pushing your body upward (aka pushing DOWN into the ground) while your swing knee comes to the front. Lift within the snap lunge is a chance to practice that motor pattern – plus, it sets up the pushoff you need during a Rocket Lunge.
Technical Cues In The Rocket Lunge
You might assume from the video that the goal of a Rocket Lunge is to jump while doing the Snap Lunge. That would be incorrect. Even athletes who work with me and hear my cue to get as high as possible may think the goal of a Rocket Lunge is height. Nope. The goal of a Rocket Lunge is resisting impact. The higher you fly, the harder you will hit the ground. When you hit the ground, holding the correct positions builds exactly the strength we’re after.
- All cues from Stepover Lunge and Snap Lunge
- Knee up
- Stiff ankle
Knee up, just like “knee to the front”, is exactly the same position from the A Drills. But when you’re falling from a height then trying to freeze yourself in the A position, a lot of new things are happening. The A Skip approximates this, but falling from a greater height in the Rocket Lunge exaggerates it. Lifting your knee higher than your hip requires a certain amount of force at the hip flexor. Swinging your knee higher than your hip requires greater force and greater power. Freezing your knee higher than your hip after swinging it there requires even greater force and good timing. Freezing your knee higher than your hip after swinging it there then holding it there when your body crashes into the ground requires extreme force. That is the amount of force at the hip flexor you have to be capable of developing for your body to accept the power requirements of elastic contraction during acceleration (force-dominant) and top speed running (frequency-dominant).
Stiff ankle is actually “no heels” from A Drills, just in a powerful disguise. Again, no heels at marching pace or under the relatively low impact of A Cycling is simple to execute. You only need roughly 150% of bodyweight levels of force production in your calf and foot to keep your heels off the ground in those drills. That isn’t much more than you require to walk up stairs. But to hold your heel off the ground as your entire bodyweight falls from between 2 and 10 cm during a Rocket Lunge is specific training for your elastic tissues and the timing of your muscles. The landing of a Rocket Lunge is actually a small, cyclical depth drop. The Rocket Lunge is elastic power development, dressed up as a warmup drill. Sneaky, sneaky.
Why Other Lunges Are Not Included
You can and probably should do lots of other lunges in your training. Split squats in every position, B stance squats, step-ups, lateral lunges…all useful. But notice the details in these three Lunge Drills. It’s not about the lunge. Lunging just happens to be a convenient way to travel 20 yards while focused on little things that make powerful acceleration and safe sprinting possible.
How Lunge 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, the force and timing requirements are almost unbelievable. Your brain and spinal cord are coordinating near-limit forces during ground contacts measured in hundredths of a second at frequencies measured in whole cycles per second.
By practicing the sequence and magnitude of those forces at far lower limb speeds, you can analyze your own performance. You can do, then think, then modify & do again. 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 bounce series – and how plyometrics have been abused by sport coaches to the detriment of a lot of would-be Fast Kids.
Looking for the last installment? Here’s the A series.
[Part 1: A Series] | [Part 2: Lunge Series] | [Part 3: Bounce Series] | [Part 4: Easy Series] | [Part 5: Push Series]