Popular speed training myths

Being relaxed is one of the keys to fast running

Strength-training will make women muscular too

“Many women are afraid that strength-training will make them bulky “They think strength-training is only for men.”

Women naturally have less bone and muscle than men, so they need to take care of what they’ve got. . That is why women are at greater risk of osteoporosis than men. And lost muscle puts women at greater risk of disability as they age. And don’t worry about looking like a bodybuilder. “Women don’t have enough testosterone to create big, bulky muscles, to become a bodybuilder, women have to do a lot of weird things that most strength-training programs don’t do.

You have to be aggressive to run fast.

This is the complete opposite!! You have to be relaxed to run faster. When you hear aggressive, you end up trying harder. When you try, you tense up your muscles, and then end up fighting the movements. You want to get to the point where you feel like you’re not running at all, because then that is when you’re actually running.

You need to strength train several times a week to see benefits.

A very small amount of strength training can stimulate tremendous benefit. Strength train only once or twice per week. More is not better. The total weekly strength-training time commitment should be 30–60 minutes.

Flexibility won’t help get you faster

Flexibility doesn’t make me run any faster, until one actually puts time into stretching. The biggest problem area for those looking to increase their speed is the hips. If your hips cannot reach full range of motion, this inhibits the top speed you could achieve. If the hip flexors have poor flexibility an athletes’ stride length appears dramatically short. Flexibility is such fundamental component of speed training that athletes often forget about. Be sure to stretch after each practice, when the muscles are loose and warm.

Younger athletes shouldn’t do this type of training

Nowadays, younger athletes NEED to do this type of training. Kids are getting traumatic injuries at younger and younger ages (the specialization of sports at younger ages is one of the reasons). So, if these kids are going to start training year round for one sport, then they need to start working with people who help them in reducing the chances of injuries happening.

You can’t be trained to run fast

There is a big misconception where a lot of people think that you either are fast or you are not and that it can’t be improved. A person’s speed can always be improved. I can get anybody faster than what they are, what I can’t get them is Olympic speed fast if they don’t already have some initial talent.

Interval Training is the same as Speed Training

Speed training consists of 2-8 seconds of maximal intensity sprinting with full recovery. This probably goes against what most coaches think, but this is the only way to become faster. Running repeat 100s or 200s does not improve your speed…at all! If you don’t recover from each interval, proper form decreases, intensity decreases, and then there is no consistency and no improvement.

The harder the workout, the better the result

Some athletes (and coaches) have this mentality that if a workout doesn’t reduce them to complete exhaustion and/or make them vomit, that it wasn’t an effective workout. I can tell you that those who have this mentality probably see a lot of injuries and frustrating performances. The purpose of a workout is to stimulate an adaptation by the body. If the body is forced to do too much work in a given time period, it will break down. The skill in coaching is to stimulate the adaptation in the body, without reaching a point of diminishing returns.

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