When Your Fly-10s Aren’t Flying Anymore

If you are a “Feed the Cats” coach, the fly-10 is the base of your program. Your Freelap or Speedlight timers are set up on your fly-10 day and things usually get better every week. A President’s Day here and Snow day there provides a perfect form of wave loading. Meets take care of speed-endurance workouts. When it’s is all said and done, the variability of the workout schedule creates different stimuli to allow the body to continually adapt to max speed sprinting. In addition, the high school athlete has lots of room for improvement when it comes to finding that top end speed. You change the surfaces from a track to a football field on that rare warm day.  When the winter weather returns and you go back to the hallway. Even changing from spikes to flats on different surfaces can create a different environment that can effect change in your athlete. But, what happens when you run out of variations? What happens when your veteran sprinter has seen it all and doesn’t get the response and improvement he once earned?

One avenue worth exploring is overspeed training. The concept is quite simple. Pull someone slightly faster than they can run and they will learn to run faster. From a scientific standpoint it is much more than that. There are a couple of things that happen when we train overspeed. First, the athlete is challenged by the environmental stimulus. The increased speed challenges the normal pattern. Challenging the normal pattern puts the body into peril, so adjustments are made to keep stay safe. For example, if a sprinter has a less than perfect foot departure, the body doesn’t have time to compensate the departure, so it has to be become more efficient or the sprinter will fall. If the brain senses the chance of tripping, it tenses the limb or causes a “brisker flexion”. Brisker flexion is a tumbling corrective reaction: a phase-dependent compensatory reaction during locomotion. (Forssberg H., 1979) With the increased speed which creates a stiffer limb, the body will increase ground reaction force. To summarize, the body is forced to organize its parts to accomplish the task. In an athletic sense, this would incorporate navigation, slack control with co-contractions, and a target. In order to challenge this process, we can make things happen faster so the body has to prepare faster or fall (managing reflexes). When challenged, the body will learn to stiffen faster to prepare for the unexpected. This translates to the actual movement because the body will find that it becomes more efficient when it’s stiffer and stable.

If overspeed training improves the ground reactive force (GRF) and challenges the environment, how do we do overspeed training? The simple solution is to buy a 1080 Sprint. The 1080 is a perfect machine to pull the sprinter slightly faster with perfect accuracy. I know, not everyone has that kind of money ($19.3K). What else is there? Glenn Messemer and I have experimented by using a string of sprinter bands to pull the athletes for 6-8 strides. Check out the following data using a Freelap Timing System.

• #1 Tues 8/29  1.31 // 1.29 // 1.30 // AVG 1.30
• #2 Tues 9/5  1.31 // 1.26 // 1.29 // 1.27 // 1.27 // AVG 1.28
• #3 Tues 9/12 1.26 // 1.26 // 1.25 // 1.24 // 1.25 // AVG 1.25
• #4 Mon 9/18 1.29 // 1.29// 1.23 // 1.21 // 1.28 // AVG 1.26

♦ The first four sessions – 18 reps, 1.27 average, best time – 1.21

• #5 Wed 9/20 OVERSPEED 1.20 // 1.16 // 1.16 // UNRESISTED 1.20
• #6 Sun 9/24 1.21 // 1.19 // 1.17 // 1.19 // AVG 1.19
• #7 Sun 10/8 1.21 // 1.22 // 1.19 // AVG 1.21
• #8 Fri 10/13 1.19 // 1.20 // 1.23 // 1.19 // 1.16 // AVG 1.19
• #9 Wed 10/18 1.20 // 1.22 // 1.22 // 1.19 // 1.16 // AVG 1.20

♦ The next four sessions – 18 reps, 1.20 average, best time – 1.16

Not thrilled with pulling someone? Do you have fear of your athlete getting pulled into a scorpion on FailArmy? If we apply the principles of overspeed training, forcing a pre-tension in the limb to prevent tripping and forcing the gait cycle to speed up, we can use other tools to help get to this point without pulling your athlete.

One thing we can do is raise the surface. If the ground comes faster than it is supposed to, the ankles will stiffen and we will get a similar response to running faster. I have found The Flop by Sorinex is a great mat to use. I will space the 1.5″ thick mats throughout the fly area and hope that they might hit some. To make it more measured, we will sprint 100% through mini-hurdles (wickets) and I can place the mats in between. In a perfect world, the edges of the mat would be beveled. Or, use a mat that is thinner. I go out to tracks that are being resurfaced and take scraps to use for this purpose.

Another alternative is to use kids play mats, they have some give to them in a couple of different ways. First they are softer. When the brain senses that there is give below, it will force the ankles to stiffen more when running at top speed. In addition, the mats slide. When the body figures that out, it will force a contact under the center of mass. The brain won’t let you reach on soft slippery surfaces. Here’s another way to look at the instability concept – when one part is unstable, it forces the rest of the body to be stable.  If you are into instability, try sprinting or doing wickets over Airex Mats. Here’s my favorite – sprinting or doing wickets with Ultimate Instability Aquabags over your head or on your shoulders.

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All of these concepts will be further examined at TFC 7, June 8-9. So, come on out to help your athletes get past the fly-10 barrier.

Chris Korfist