These are the Top 10 principles I use to program my Spriint Fit workout. From my experience it’s what’s helped me continually and sustainably increase my speed, muscle development and fortify my body against injury.
- Listening to Your Body: Don’t fight through pain, fatigue or tweakiness. Trying to be “tough” causes injuries and setbacks, slowing down progress. Listen to your body – If something doesn’t feel right, don’t ignore it, your body’s trying to tell you something. Make the appropriate adjustment.
- Proper Form: Proper form is more valuable, has more compounding effects and prevents injury than just working harder and trying to force yourself past limits. (Continuous forward movement will sustainably move you past your limits.)
- Avoiding Overwork: Overwork is an indiscipline – embrace progressions, high frequency repetitions, incremental improvement, scalability and sustainability. 1 day is better than 0. 3 days is better than 1. Everyday is better than 3-4 days. Get more repetitions, emphasize frequency, high value reps more than over-exertion and failure. Don’t be so wiped out, you couldn’t do a second workout or finish the rest of your day with good energy. Intensity, capacity and duration will naturally increase over time. Adapt to a 24 hour recovery cycle. Condition your body, workouts and rest to only need a 24 hour recovery cycle. I don’t think Cheetahs need a recovery day.
- Optimizing Training: Optimize training for speed, strength, plyometric ability, explosiveness and power. Getting faster, building muscle, getting lean, burning calories, increasing energy and health, relieving stress and good moods will follow.
- Speed and Ground Force Production: Speed requires generating maximum ground force production, from body to ground. This requires total body control from your head, torso, core, legs and feet. Your body, joints and tendons have to instantaneously become rigid at point of impact to deliver back all the energy the muscle produces into the ground to return in it back into the body. Then back to being fluid again, this is viscoelasticity. Some people’s tendons and joints might feel gooey, but with training they can go from rigid to elastic like a light switch in fractions of a millisecond.
- Muscle Development for Explosiveness: Muscle development and growth for explosiveness requires recruiting and firing every muscle fiber instantaneously, this requires specific training and mind-body stimulus to build those motor neuron connections to every muscle fiber and high intensity energy to fire those signals.
- Flowstate: Accessing Flowstate is the goal. Sprinting requires the mind and body to fire together instantaneously. Sprinting hyper primes the mind body connection.
- Mobility: Mobility above all. Mobility is length in the tendons and connective tissue, strength in the end range positions. Flexibility is length in the muscles. Greater flexibility can actually be increased just by gaining greater mobility. Many times the limiting factor in flexibility are shortened tendons.
- Prime Your Readiness: Aim to reduce and require less and less warmup and stretching. Use the 1 minute Resting ATG squat to maintain your mobility, prime your athleticism and adapt your body to require almost zero warm-up and stretching. I’ve never seen a gazelle stretch before being chased.
- Progression and Momentum: Building speed is slow. Patience. Consistency. Humility. Momentum over motivation, over discipline, over will-power. Build progressions and scalability – everything is a building block which becomes the foundation