Finally gave up on dbhammer?

Also, do you have short arms? Deadlift seems kind of low compared to your oly squat.

RJ welcome back man.

I just want to say I really appreciate your work since the days you posted on Charlie Francis's forum.


You looking to get back into sprinting?.

You know Barry Ross (Allyson Felix's coach)  recommends the deadlift for his sprinters.

Don't you ever feel you might have short changed yourself not concentrating on the deadlift for sprinting?.

Or did you see something in the deadlift which might potentially impede your sprinting potential?.

Definitely. My lower body strength training is now going to be centered around building the abs, hip flexors, and p-chain. Training frequency will be upped to 6-7 times per week. I'm going to put a premium on developing flexibility. Sprinting will be done as often as possible, though not always at 100%. There might be other things, but that looks like most of it.

welcome back man, ltns

i disagree here though:


i see that you might get back into the short sprints, 30-60m.. nice.

Quads play a very active role in early accell, especially < 20m, do you not agree? Also, as for squat, it definitely can target the glutes very well, but in my opinion, that's not as important as just overall nervous system arousal and recruitment of large amounts of muscle mass. The three exercises you mentioned, which are very important for the muscles involved in sprinting, do not address the CNS to the extent heavy squatting would. Beyond squat being so important for quad development, it is also incredibly important for CNS development. RDL/SLDL/ab wheel rollouts cannot address neural drive like some heavy squat singles for example.

IMO, deadlift or squat has to be in any sprint/jump programming, how you incorporate it can vary, but in order to break those CNS-barriers and tap into protected motor potential, people are going to need to phase in some intense squatting or deadlifting.

as for your own training, if you do decide to get into the short sprints again, i'd really up the frequency of your sprint work. Every day some kind of sprint work, nearly always incorporating some kind of max effort work (or close to it), even if it's just max effort 10's etc.. Has to be fun though :F I love jumping, taking a rest day is so damn hard for me now, I want to dunk every day... i'm forcing myself to take rest days, but for example, I dunked every single day of May, max effort jumps, from full runup or short runups if i felt stale.. hah.. i'd approach sprinting the same way honestly.. hamstrings/hip flexors/cns can get really beat down with sprints greater than 40m, but I could do max effort 10's/20's every single day, makes me feel great too and still provides that needed stimulus.

aight pC man

SV, SLDLs and RDLs are an economical way to tax the p-chain. There's nothing special about them besides the fact that they're convenient and they work. It's the same for ab wheel rollouts, they train both midsection stabilization and hip flexion simultaneously. Again, economical and effective. As for flexibility, there's no confusion in the literature. Frequent ballistic stretching through as full of an ROM as possible yields flexibility results, as do ISO holds at the end of the ROM. Simple.

Andrew, yes the quads are important to deceleration and early acceleration purposes, but centering a program around the squat is still misguided for a sprinter. As for training neural drive, top speed sprints and altitude landings should more than suffice. Also, I totally agree with your views on frequency. If you want to get good at something, do it as often as possible.

Raptor, thanks. I'm not 100% sure why I left either.

Haha, that was a dumb thread. All that needs to be said about flexibility and sprinting is that flexibility determines whether or not one is able to hit the correct positions throughout the sprint cycle. Stride length is dependent upon ground reaction forces during the ammortization phase, which, in order to be optimized, require optimal body positioning, and therefore a rudimentary degree of flexibility.

Basically, more flexibility doesn't allow one to "take longer steps," it allows one to hit the proper positions necessary to optimize stride efficiency, and even then, one doesn't have to be very flexible.