SPWeek 3 / 6 · Acceleration50 min
Acceleration
| A | Bounds | 4 × 20 yd |
|---|---|---|
| B | Starts from blocks | 6 × 20 yd, full rest |
| C | Broad jump | 4 × 2 |
Coach’s note: every rep timed. If the 10 yd split slows, we stop.
The first ten yards
Dani Reyes, coach · 4 min read
Most people think of speed as something you have or don’t. Over the first ten yards it’s mostly position: where your body is, where your feet land, and which way you’re pushing. Fix those and you get faster before you get fitter.
We run the same three drills before anything is timed on The Lane.
Why ten yards
Most sprints in sport and in life are short. You chase a ball, a bus, a kid running at a road. You rarely reach top speed. What decides those moments is how fast you get going, and that happens in the first ten yards.
Acceleration also asks for different things than top speed. At full speed you run tall, and your feet land under you. In the first steps you lean, your feet land behind your hips, and every step is a push backwards into the ground. Train only the tall running and you get good at a speed you rarely reach.
The Lane is forty yards of turf with a line every five. For the first weeks of a cycle, we only use the first two marks.
Wall drills
Hands on the wall, body at a lean, one knee driven up. You hold the position, then switch legs on the coach’s call. It teaches the angle you want in your first steps: pushing back and down, not up.
A-skips
A skip with the knee driven up and the foot landing under the hips. Twenty yards, walk back, again. It’s the rhythm of acceleration at a speed you can control.
Falling starts
Stand tall, lean until you have to step, and go. Ten yards, full rest. The fall does the first push for you, so all you have to do is keep up with it.
What the coach is watching
From the side of The Lane, Dani is looking at three things.
The angle. Head, hips and the pushing foot should make one straight line, leaning forward. If the hips sit back, the push goes up instead of along.
The shin. On each step the shin of the landing leg should point forward, roughly parallel to your body. A vertical shin in the first steps means you’re reaching, and reaching brakes you.
The arms. They drive hard from the shoulder, front hand to about chin height, back hand past the hip. Arms that cross the body twist the trunk, and the legs follow them sideways.
Nobody gets all three on day one. We pick one per session and say it out loud before every rep.
Posture first. Fast comes later.
How the cycle builds it
Week 1 is positions: wall drills, skips and falling starts, nothing timed. Week 2 is first steps, long and low from a falling start. Week 3 puts the stopwatch on every ten-yard rep, and the set stops when the time slows. Week 4 is flying sprints, a build-up and twenty yards at top speed. Week 5 brings race starts from blocks and a three-point stance. Week 6 is the test: the timed 40 from your Baseline, split at ten and twenty yards, best attempt written down. Week 7 is tempo runs, and nothing fast.
Every rep is followed by a full walk back and rest. Speed is a quality you only train when you’re fresh. Ten tired sprints teach you to run slowly.
What a faster ten looks like
On the log, the change is small. A tenth of a second over ten yards is a lot. Two tenths across a cycle is a very good cycle.
On The Lane, it looks bigger. The first step lands further back, the lean lasts longer, and the runner arrives at the five-yard line already moving. People usually notice it before the stopwatch does. The number follows a few weeks later, and once it moves, the drills stop feeling like a warm-up and start feeling like the work.
If you haven’t sprinted in years
Most adults haven’t run flat out since school, and the first sessions should respect that. Hamstrings and calves are the usual complaint, and they come from doing too much, too fast, too soon.
So the first cycle stays short. Drills, falling starts and runs at about seventy percent effort, building to ninety by week 4. Flat shoes with a firm sole work best on the turf. If something pulls, stop the rep, tell the coach, and walk it off; there is always another session. The point of week 1 is to arrive at week 2.
Only after the drills do we put a time on a sprint. By then you know what the first ten yards should feel like, and the stopwatch tells you whether it did.
