Acceleration is crucial to winning performance across numerous sports. Forget just running at your top speed. Athletes that can increase their speed, which is what accelerating is, more rapidly than their rivals can gain an incredible performance advantage. The most obvious example is the 100m sprinter, who might not attain the highest top speed, but reaches the finish line first because they are able to attain their top speed before the other competitors. The event may be won or lost, in the first ten or twenty meters.
The purpose of acceleration is to analyse what makes for a quick getaway from a technical point of view, and identify the best training methods to develop this crucial aspect of sport performance.
Track coach, Owen McGregor trains his athletes to run the first 30 meters of every race. He believes very strongly that a race can be won or lost in the first 30 meters. If you are running a 400, you are on a stagger start. Which means since you are running around two turns, you need to try and catch the person infront of you. If you catch the person infront of you in the beginning, you have strengthened your lead.
Acceleration drills can be done with or without tape. Coach McGregor puts down about 20 pieces of tape all about a yard from each other. Try and run as fast as you can and step of every piece of tape. This will also help lengthen your stride pattern.
A stride pattern is important and instead of trying to explain it to you, the assistant track and field coach at Western Michigan University, does a great job doing so in this article.
1 comment:
This is a great blog with heaps of cool/useful info :) thanks for taking the time to post it all online :D I'll be reading over the posts over the next couple of days :)
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