Hamstrings and Sprinting Performance

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I just wanted to just share with you quickly a simple lesson I learned from some personal experience in my training over the last few months. First a quick history. I am a jumper in every respect. I jump much better than I can run relatively speaking. According to jumping tests I should be able to run 100 meters in about 10.6 seconds, which is not anywhere close to happening. Also, as a jumper I am a bit quad dominant, and this is where I tend to feel muscular fatigue in my sprint workouts.....in my quads. I also have historically lacked a bit of frontside mechanics in my sprinting (can't get my knees up).

Anyways, over the past couple years I have become more and more aware of the importance of hamstring activation in sprinting (good sprinters will feel sprint fatigue in their hamstrings), and also that of evenly based frontside and backside leg swing mechanics in sprinting. For my GPP on Wilmington's track team I have had the sprinters do hill work 2x a week. They have also been doing a decent amount of work on the glute-ham machine. I have been doing all the workouts I write for my athletes this year, and also did a large amount of hill work this summer.

To make a long story short, I ran 4x300 extensive tempo with the team on monday (first day of official practice) and for the first time in my life I felt the fatigue from the sprints in my hamstrings. Every time I have done this workout previous to this year I feel the lactate formation in my quadriceps or sometimes inner thighs. So I guess this means that I have been making good strides in improving my sprint speed. I feel like hills are really invaluable in building sprinters, and especially those intermediate level sprinters who might not be optimally activating their hamstrings to create a "pulling" type stride rather than pushing down on the track. It isn't really rocket science of any sort, hills are sprints that force your posterier chain to work a bit harder and if you do it enough, you are going to start to wire it into your system.

Oh, not to mention, I am also faster this year than I ever have been before.

Although this is a jumping based blog I hope you might have learned something useful from it.

Joel