When was the last time you really had to sprint? Heart pumping, legs burning, and going as fast as you possibly could?
If you can’t remember, then you’re missing out on one of the best tools to challenge your body and improve body composition. Sprinting is arguably one of the most essential training tools for athletic performance.
If you’re going to work sprints into your routine, you need to consider the best ways to approach them to maximize their use and to protect yourself. When you do, you’ll see improvements in your body’s ability to perform.
What Are the Benefits of Sprinting?
Boosts athletic performance
Sprinting carries over to every sport because of the power, strength, and speed benefits. “Because it’s super explosive, it’s activating practically every muscle in the human body,” says Mike Young, Ph.D., director of Athletic Lab, which focuses on speed development and athletic performance. “Not too much in the fitness world involves every muscle group acting as aggressively as you see in sprinting,” Young says.
Improves body composition
Beyond sports performance, the benefits of sprinting carry over to the body’s physical qualities, Young says.
“You get the benefit from the high intensity through body composition and lean mass — more athletic glutes, hamstrings, and quads,” he says. “This is why you see elite sprinters look the way they do — really lean and muscular. Some of that simply comes from the act of sprinting.”
How to Acclimate Your Body to Sprinting
Sprinting is an intense, high-impact exercise. To protect your body and get the most out of your sprints, follow these tips.
Warm up
When you do start sprinting, start with a quick warm-up like high knees and lunges to get your body loose and primed to sprint. Then start with the basic movement, acclimating your tissues, muscles, and even bones to the intensity, Rooney says. Even sprinting in place can be a good starting point as your body gets used to the movement.
“You have to wake up the nervous system that accesses the big muscle fibers — the big motor. When you do that, you can work that musculature,” Rooney says.
Start slow
If the last time you sprinted was in high school gym class, don’t go right out and do 100-yarders. You just want to start with moving fast again, says Martin Rooney, CSCS, founder of Training for Warriors.
That could be taking quick steps through a speed ladder or doing paces slightly faster than would feel comfortable. While there’s no “perfect” distance to sprint, aim for 30 yards or so when you’re first starting out.
Maintain your body
You should work on mobility — through stretching and dynamic movements like lunges that improve your range of motion — so you lower your risk of injury.
And if you’re at a higher body weight than you should be, dialing in your nutrition and losing weight will improve your ability to sprint, Rooney says.
4 Sprinting Tips to Get You Faster
If you want to make sure you’re experiencing all of the benefits sprinting, here are four tips to help you do it the right way.
1. Keep your mechanics tight
The fastest body is the most efficient body, meaning you’re not wasting energy with body parts in the wrong place. While it may seem that running fast is just, well, running fast, then you’re not making the most of your effort.
Your anatomical checklist for great sprinting technique:
- Lean your whole body forward. Instead of just hunching your back, Young advises to think of leaning from your ankles up so that your head, neck, spine, and pelvis are all aligned.
- Stabilize your head. “A common error is for the head to flop around from normal postural alignment,” Young says. That means the force transfer from the ground is not transferred efficiently throughout the body. Because the human body isn’t designed ideally for sprinting (we’re too vertical compared to the horizontal position of, say, a cheetah), a wobbling head makes an inefficient system even more so.
2. Accelerate with long strides
Good sprinting form is about how you accelerate through the run. “The physics of running has not changed: If you run in a world governed by physics, you don’t get to top speed without acceleration,” Young says.
That means your first steps are big, long strides — not the short, choppy ones you see some people doing — with big, swinging arms. When you take short steps, you can’t generate a lot of force, because there’s less contact time with the ground.
Having great stride length means longer contact time with the ground — and more force to propel the body forward, Young says.
3. Experiment with intensity
When most people hear the word “sprint,” they think “all-out.” That doesn’t have to be the case, Rooney says. You can aim for 70 or 80 percent of max effort in your workouts — and play with combinations of different distances and intensities.
“When we say sprint, it doesn’t mean it has to be like a tiger is chasing you,” Rooney says.
4. Strengthen your sprint muscles
The glutes and hamstrings — and all the muscles in your posterior chain — serve as your engine for speed, Young says. Deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, glute-ham raises, and steps-ups are great for strengthening those muscles to help with sprinting performance. Any single-leg exercises will also be helpful, Young says.
And there are few better movements that train power and speed than plyometrics, which help build explosiveness.