Boosts athletic performance
Improves body composition
Warm up
“You have to wake up the nervous system that accesses the big muscle fibers — the big motor. When you do that, you can work that musculature,” Rooney says.
Start slow
Maintain your body
You should work on mobility — through stretching and dynamic movements like lunges that improve your range of motion — so you lower your risk of injury.
1. Keep your mechanics tight
The fastest body is the most efficient body, meaning you’re not wasting energy with body parts in the wrong place. While it may seem that running fast is just, well, running fast, then you’re not making the most of your effort.
- Lean your whole body forward. Instead of just hunching your back, Young advises to think of leaning from your ankles up so that your head, neck, spine, and pelvis are all aligned.
- Stabilize your head. “A common error is for the head to flop around from normal postural alignment,” Young says. That means the force transfer from the ground is not transferred efficiently throughout the body. Because the human body isn’t designed ideally for sprinting (we’re too vertical compared to the horizontal position of, say, a cheetah), a wobbling head makes an inefficient system even more so.
2. Accelerate with long strides
That means your first steps are big, long strides — not the short, choppy ones you see some people doing — with big, swinging arms. When you take short steps, you can’t generate a lot of force, because there’s less contact time with the ground.
Having great stride length means longer contact time with the ground — and more force to propel the body forward, Young says.
3. Experiment with intensity
And there are few better movements that train power and speed than plyometrics, which help build explosiveness.
