may 2019 is when i decided to take sprinting seriously and learn everything
i could about it although i'm not an olympic sprinter nor
am i even trying to get to that level as of today september 22 2020
i know a thousand times more than i did before and my intentions for this video
are one show you what real mistakes look like
from a real person learning how to sprint and
two show you how i solve these issues so that you can save time when fixing them
yourself mistake number one having the arms too
tense let's take a look at the clip
you can see that my arms are way too tense especially if you look at my hands
it looks like i'm on my mr miyagi
mr miyagi relaxing is important because in order for your body to move fast
your muscles have to lengthen and contract fast
which is hard to do if your body is stiff and tense
i found that instead of holding your hands like a karate chop
or fist curling your hands like you're about to hold a cup of water
allows you to relax your hands and also the rest of your arms mistake
number two landing instead of striking this is one of the most
common mistakes unless you've worked on it already you're probably making this
mistake right now let's take a look at the clip
how i was letting my foot just land into the ground out in front of me
this results in braking forces which push me backwards and slow me down
i'm not gonna lie this one took a while for me to fix in this clip
you can see the difference you can see that
in the air i was driving the leg back to strike the ground
although my technique still isn't perfect here you can see i'm actively
striking instead of just landing into the ground
it finally clicked for me when i started doing this drill called leg cycles
essentially what it does is it trains your legs to move in a circular motion
so your foot drives back towards the ground i got a whole video on that
called sprint workout for beginners link will be in the description mistake
number three neglecting hip mobility pretty much all of us can benefit from
doing more stretching especially if you're doing sprints which
requires your body to be both mobile and strong in this clip i
was first learning how to do the a-step
which is a very basic sprint drill yet you can see that having tight hips
created two major issues in my technique one i was
struggling to keep the bottom leg straight
two my back was rounding like crazy here's how i fix this mistake
apart from doing the obvious and stretching my hips more
the main thing that helped was doing the drill itself but
super slow i'm talking matrix level slow
technically speaking this is a form of active stretching
which means performing a stretch with no assistance
like a partner equipment or momentum it's much harder than doing it quickly
because i have to actively contract my quads
glutes to keep the legs straight while actively using my core to lift up
the knee the benefit of using this method is that i was able to improve my
hip mobility and strengthen supporting muscles in a
relatively short period of time mistake number four doing too much too
soon i won't even use the word over training
because it's so controversial i want you all to know
virgin training is fake news it's fake phony fake
however we could say i was doing more sprint training than my body could
handle when i first decided to take sprinting
seriously and learn everything i could i was trying out new drills i was
analyzing technique and i was doing some form of sprinting about
five days a week in this clip i was talking about a pinch feeling i was
getting in my quad during sprints you need your quads to be
flexible in order to allow your hips to hyper extend
and strong enough to absorb impact when you land
at this point i'm pretty sure that i was lacking in both
areas and it eventually caught up to me in order to solve this issue i did three
things one i paused sprinting and focused only
on drills two i strengthened my quads and three
i did self myofascial release until the pain went away which
i believe it took about three weeks and then i was feeling a hundred percent
again
mistake number five is doing drills without understanding them
in this clip i believe i was doing butt kicks
and i was thinking that i was gonna improve my leg recovery by doing this
and eventually i realized if you look at the lead recovery
the knee and the hips they bend at the same time
with traditional butt kicks only the knee is bending after that rather than
blindly doing drills i found online for every draw i make sure to understand
exactly what it's for and why it's useful this way i have a
good reason for everything i do in my training on that note if you found
this video helpful in any way hit the like button for me
and let me know in the comments what issues or mistakes have you
encountered in your sprinting thanks for watching and i'll see you
in the next one