The need for Speed! Part 1

Magnus Agren
www.magnusagren.com

Everybody who has ever been involved in some sort of sport knows the need of speed! In almost every sport it is a necessity in order to become successful. Even our ancestors were in need of speed, or they got eaten- or beaten to death by the enemy. So it´s in our blood. But even though it is such a necessity in sports I often see people who don’t have it developed to their full potential. They may train their strength (often focused around their legs), their agility, run their sprints and so on. But in order to become the fastest you can be you have to incorporate a lot of things and know a bit about how the body works and the mechanics of sprinting. In this article series I am about to share with you the things I consider to be of importance and try to make this complex and widespread area a bit more accessible to you. And just for the sake of confusing you (just messing around) I will go from upper body to lower body in this article series and finish up with a bit of training methodology for speed.

First and foremost I would like you to understand that the body works as a whole, and in sprint you need it to work in the forward direction and in a relaxed manner. Anything that deviates from this will to a certain level decrease your quest for optimum speed. I often see this in the upper body, both unnecessary rotational movements and tensing up. To clear things up a bit let us examine the upper body´s effect on sprinting.

Start with the shoulders, they should be able to move or “roll” fluently forward and backward with each stride, working into the opposite direction of the hips and legs. So if you don´t relax your shoulders but pull them up towards your neck, you will DIRECTLY affect your hips and sprinting abilities. This means you need to keep your shoulder girdle loose and relaxed to be able to generate maximum speed, this goes in all sports. It also goes for the “see saw” movement- technique I often see in many athletes while sprinting. Another problem that starts in the shoulder girdle is the see-saw movement across the body. This will transfer the force that is generated into an exaggerated rotational movement of the upper body, which will have several negative inputs on their running. First of all the core will have to try to stabilize and lessen the rotational force deriving from this movement, keeping it from translating through the body. This energy loss will also affect the core in its ability to stabilize and keep optimal alignment throughout the spine and the hips, for optimal sprint posture and mechanics. The core acts as a transition between the upper and lower body while sprinting and should also be trained accordingly – see earlier article.

So what then causes this faulty, energy wasting technique? As you may have observed a lot of athletes are “naturally” forward and inward rotated in their shoulders. This faulty alignment will of course also affect their arm movements, hereby making the see-sawing movement “natural” for them. Not good in any way! So if you recognize yourself then the first step here is to plan a corrective phase for your shoulders in order to (re)establish a natural pattern that is more in line what the body was designed for. I would start off with stretching the short muscles around the shoulder joint and then strengthen the muscles that are elongated and weakened. I would assume that some of the muscle on your short list would be chest, lats, front deltoids and biceps, while the rotor cuff, the middle and lower trapezius and the rhomboideus are weak and elongated. So if you start with checking them you should be on your way. I will address the training for speed part later on in this series, so stay tuned.

On to the arms then! The arms are important in developing speed. They actually precede the leg action when sprinting. So you need a strong upper body to be fast, just look at today top sprinters – not exactly what you would call sissies, are they!? This does not mean however that you should curl ´til you die; the muscles you need to train are the muscles around your shoulder joint. Which brings me to this week’s lesson- Which muscles attach and work around the shoulder joint?

Until next part train smart,

Magnus Agren
MFT Sport Specific Guru