Originally Posted by
Farmer
It involves a lot of things, and funny enough, it is trained ineffectively (or not at all) in most "ball-sports" for a lot of the same reasons as strength training is done wrong.
In Sprint Training, you want to sprint as fast as possible, as often as possible, as fresh as possible.
A real simple place to start, is people can only maintain a maximal effort doing anything for only about 6 seconds.
After doing that, you might have to rest 5-7 minutes (or more, depending on distance/time you just ran) before you do another maximal rep.
This should sound very familiar. (ATP recharge; CNS recovery; etc)
Workout can either be focused around maxV, or acceleration, or both.
Next, you probably only have so many of those maximal attempts available to you in a given day or training session.
Just throwing numbers out there, maybe only 3 to 7 maximal sprints .... those are max velocity sprints.
So low volume. (sound familiar).
How you do know how fast you are sprinting?
How you do know if you are slowing down from rep to rep and the end of the workout?
And keep in mind we are talking about timing maybe the fastest 10 to 30 meters in maxV, or a 50 to 60meter acceleration?
You are talking about timing ~1 sec (10m fly time) to 6.50-7.50 sec (n a 60m acceleration).
You are going to need electronic timing; stopwatch isn't going to cut it AT ALL.
This would be analogous to knowing how much weight is on the bar.
As far as staying fresh.
Maybe you can do these max velocity sprint workouts 2-4 times per week, if you want to run as fast as possible.
That's going to mean you are going to have to watch your fatigue, fatigue from sprint workouts, weight training, conditioning, and sports-ball practices.
Most coaches won't allow their athletes to train for speed this way.
Just like most coaches won't allow their athletes to weight train to get as strong as possible.
A lot of the same problems.
Beyond what I outlined above, once you've improved your speed a bit, THEN workouts like conditioning, sprint-endurance, and being able to withstand lactate, etc figure in when running a 60, 100, 200, 400 etc.