I work with a lot of younger kids. Various drills are used to teach them how to run correctly and to stimulate the neuromuscular system. I’ve been doing this for 35 years and have found it very important when breaking bad habits and rewiring new movement patterns. You can’t correct poor mechanics full speed with kids who are not genetically gifted. Movements have to be slowed down. Once kids improve their mechanics they get faster right away, but yes I agree that once mechanics are mastered run drills will not make u faster. Yes to get faster you have to do max velocity sprints. Have you tried any post activation potentiation methods?

Askip drill

Table 4. Schematic overview of the progression of exercise selection and instructions on speed development for team sport athletes. Because “tolerance is a proof of distrust in one’s own ideals” (Friedrich Nietzsche), I have successfully cut every single running drill from my program independent of what sport I’ve worked with. After the most general warm-up to increase HR and muscle temperature in the key muscle groups, I usually jump straight into (max) speed work. My athletes haven’t yet experienced any adverse effects.

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Daniel Kadlec is currently the Head Strength & Conditioning Coach for Softball Western Australia. He is also Head S&C Coach for Claremont WFC in collaboration with Edith Cowan University, while completing a Ph.D. in sports science sponsored by VALD Performance. He previously served as an S&C coach in a private facility (PlusD Sports) in Solingen, Germany, for seven years. He has worked with various teams, including professional handball, Germany Women’s Rugby 7s, and the centralized women’s Judo athletes.

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Table 1. Mean (±SD) of the general kinematics for sprinting and drills. Shading indicates the variable is significantly different between the drills and sprinting (p less than 0.05). MHF: Maximal Hip Flexion; TD: Touch Down; COM: Center of Mass; D(TD): Touch Down Distance. Table 2. Mean (±SD) joint angles for sprinting and drills at key events (MHF and TD). Shading indicates the variable is significantly different between the drill and sprinting (p less than 0.05). MHF: Maximal Hip Flexion; TD: Touch Down; COM: Center of Mass. Table 3. Mean (±SD) peak and average joint angular velocities from sprinting and drills. Shading indicates the variable is significantly different (p less than 0.05) to sprinting. TD: Touch Down.

In simple terms, we know that movement is a function of the organism, the task, and the environment, as defined by Newell decades ago with his simplistic conceptual framework of human movement. There are other important constraints influencing the appearance and time course of the movement forms that occur at the psychosocial level, but our industry doesn’t highlight them. Action selection can be conceived as a result of the interaction of task, organismic, and environmental constraints in relation to the psychosocial attributes (figure 1).

The Polish sprint coach Gerard Mach initially designed running drills (A/B/C-marches/skips/bounds) to increase the work capacity of key sprint-specific muscle groups as regular speed work wasn’t possible due to adverse weather conditions in the winter and a lack of other resources. So, because actual sprinting wasn’t possible, athletes needed other methods to ensure (what we now call) adequate chronic workloads of sprint-specific capacities up until weather conditions allowed outside work again at meaningful volumes.

Figure 1. The reciprocity of physical and psychosocial on the emergence of movement patterns. Adapted and modified from Holt et al., 2010. Further, the “constraint optimization” concept states that the behavior of a biological system at any time will always be optimal for the specific confluence of constraints acting on the individual system, as evidence from theoretical and evolutionary biology suggests. So, we must assume that the current movement solution (sprint technique) is the individual’s ideal; however, this is not necessarily related to an optimal performance outcome (better sprint times). But as athletes mature and go through sophisticated training programs, we’ve all seen improvements in sprint performances that come in the presence or absence of kinematic changes. Just because the current movement solution is allegedly the individual’s optimum, doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved.

Runningdrills

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I think it is presumptuous to argue we need to break down a sprinting motion into its parts, learn or relearn the isolated patterns through part-practice, and put it back again into the whole motion. Despite the recent and increasing deterioration of humankind’s physical integrity, bipedal locomotion at a high velocity—aka sprinting—is the most fundamental movement pattern developed through a million years of evolutionary history, which not that long ago was essential to survive. So how can anyone not be able to sprint correctly?

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Hence, the major part of my speed training approach is to rely on predominantly maximal sprints to promote the desired adaptations in the skill and capacity needed to hit faster and faster velocities. In general, the sprint is the first exercise that goes into the training plan and the very last one that gets cut. As the rate of adaptations slows down over time for each method, and the law of diminishing returns manifests itself, athletes need exposure to other specific yet variable enough methods.

As context matters, this is my world: coaching predominantly invasive team sport athletes (Aussie Rules Football, softball, rugby, and handball). I’ve more often than not experienced that neither the ability to execute any running drills (wall drills, A/B/C-marches/skips/bounds, dribbles, scissor runs) nor the qualitative improvement of those drills shares any relationship with sprint performance. So, I started to question how executing one skill has the potential to improve another skill.

We all know one key element to elicit any desired adaptation is the principle of overload. Therefore, we must impose demands that are greater than in the skill that we want to improve. Overload can take the form of any characteristic of force production, such as the peak moment applied around the joint, peak external force applied, size of the external resistance moved, rate of force development, power output, or movement velocity achieved.

1. What is your general warm up? 2. Does your view on A-skips, etc. change for children? I have kids that absolutely love doing them.

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What is a drill? A drill is a repetitive pattern intended to specifically overload a skill. If it is not the competition, then it is a drill. Is the drill transferable. Wickets are a drill because the 100m race is not performed over wickets. According to Anderson wickets train heel recovery, knee lift, shin angle, foot from above, and striking under the hip at max to sub max speeds. The closer the drill is to the actually competition the more transferable. However, lifting weights are a drill to improve strength that reduce injury by 60% (Matt Jordan). Weightlifting sure doesn’t look like sprinting, but it’s still beneficial.

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Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I went through this same thought process about 20 years ago when I saw athletes doing drills beautifully and yet running awfully. All the coaches around me dismissed my ideas as ludicrous. I saw that the transfer from drill mastery to sprinting mastery was pretty close to zero. I now however use drills in a conditioning sense in GPP for lower leg conditioning and hip flexor strengthening in particular. The are a conditioning tool not a technical tool.

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For argument’s sake, let’s assume there is indeed a technical flaw and we have correctly identified it. We then need to ask ourselves: What potential do we have to change or hopefully improve the athlete’s movement pattern while optimizing performance? What amount of resources (time and energy) will it take to optimize it? What methods are the most efficient to do so? Despite the complexity and uncertainty of this question…the answer most likely can’t be running drills, as they simply cannot provide a meaningful overload, as we’ll see next.

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We all agree that the particular gains one individual gets from a distinct gym program won’t necessarily work for another person to the same degree. Yet we assume that a small—likely negligible—part of a holistic track program shares a causal relationship with the manifestation of track athletes’ superior sprint performance and therefore must be equally effective for an entirely different context and cohort of athletes, while ignoring all confounding variables.

Most likely, there will never be an RCT to test my hypothesis, so we need to rely on evidence from other sources and common sense—both areas just don’t have any meaningful and logical arguments for the implementation of running drills in team sports. In addition to reason and evidence, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery).

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How can we examine the sport, and the athlete, and give them what they need? People are complex and very different, so what they need to improve depends.

We know from motor learning and skill acquisition research that task variability (differential learning and constraints-led approach) and implicit communication strategies (instructions and feedback) are beneficial in order to maximize learning and retention. Therefore, we need to deliberately add different methods alongside appropriate cues to challenge the current abilities and ensure a continuous progression in sprinting performance (table 4).

Further, we need to agree that any physical improvement can only manifest itself within the limits of the individual’s adaptative capacity. While everybody can get faster, not everybody will be fast due to the limits of their organismic constraints as we need to acknowledge the inherent variability in anthropometrics and arthrokinematics between individuals. As highlighted previously, not everyone can attain the performance or motor pattern that their subconscious mind tells them to aspire to, independent of how much time and energy they invest to do so. Just because some athletes do attain those shapes, it doesn’t mean everyone has the same potential to get there. Hence, let’s all stop trying to force individual athletes into the same robotic patterns.

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Another argument for the implementation of running drills is their claimed potential to facilitate improvements in rhythm, fluidity, relaxation, smoothness, and/or co-contraction (have any of them been somehow quantified yet?); hence, provide a coordinative overload or an idea how the movement should look. Without going down the rabbit hole of motor learning and skill acquisition, there is more than enough evidence questioning the presence of not just general coordinative abilities but also a transferability between—what I’d like to emphasize—inherent different skills. While sprinting is dominantly a reflexive, innate, violent, and subconscious activity at 100% effort, the aim of all those running drills is to consciously hit and experience several artificial kinematic patterns at 20–50% of maximal velocity.

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Askip drill purpose

Hopefully, the title of this article has already pissed off and confused many of you. Now that I have your attention, let me justify my thoughts and beliefs about the necessity of including running drills in your program.

When we look at tables 1–3 (derived from @DebsSides’ PhD thesis—I recommend it highly!), which describe the kinematic characteristics between a sprint and three different running drills, we see there are more significant differences than similarities. Therefore, we must really question whether running drills have the potential to provide any overload. Finally, we also know how important fun and enjoyment are for skill acquisition and motor learning—never, ever, have I witnessed any athlete enjoying or at least not hating doing any of those drills…

We all agree that speed, or the ability to cover a given distance in as little time as possible, is an utmost crucial feature in many sports. Hence, many methods, traditions, and ideas prevail around this topic. With the increasing amount of information we share nowadays via a multitude of channels, it seems like we get to see a new running drill that “magically” unlocks the secrets of speed on a daily basis. This not only “muddies the water to make it seem deep” (Friedrich Nietzsche), it concomitantly increases our inability to see the forest for the trees when it comes to speed development. We urgently need a call for simplicity.

Further, we must be aware and acknowledge the representative heuristic when evaluating the sprinting performance of our athletes. With that said, we tend to subconsciously compare our athlete against an archetype biomechanical model of sprinting (usually a sagittal plane view) and regard distinct kinematic features of high importance (think high knee position), which we then try to impose on our athletes. However, all we do is just drill them into a robotic and uniform sprint pattern derived from the same set of drills. It doesn’t seem like a step towards antifragility to me. Also, why do we feel obliged to enforce a change to what has been developed over long periods of time?

Before digging into some detailed biomechanical evidence, let me raise this question: How can an activity done at 2–3 ms-1 (in some drills, maybe up to 5 ms-1) come anywhere near the mechanical demands of another activity done at around 10 ms-1? This inherent difference in resultant ground force production entirely refutes the notion that we can improve any physical capacities. Any claims that running drills have the potential to overload any physical capacities mainly responsible for lower limb stiffness and/or ground contact times are, thus, laughable.

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After several extrapolations and misinterpretation of this original idea, we now face a multitude of fancy-looking drills that some training professionals believe will manifest a certain sprinting technique and lead to better sprint performance in the team sport athlete. However, we subconsciously substitute the kinematic sequencing of the sprinting motion with actual sprinting performance. But what is good for track athletes must be good for any other athletes in an endeavor to improve their speed characteristics, so the drills are being blindly applied in team sports in the hope of a similar effect.

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Therefore, our job as coaches is to increase an underlying and possibly insufficient capacity and/or give them opportunities to practice not-yet-experienced motor patterns and thus unlock new possibilities in relation to time. Or, in other words, facilitate the magnitude and timing of each muscle’s force production. As learning often involves breaking out of initial stable states, we cannot expect this to be a linear process. Now, you could argue for the need to shift potentially suboptimal attractors in order to engrain new ones.

I think drills are good from a global view of developing overall body coordination and kinesthetic awareness. For some people, that might translate into better sprinting technique/speed if they are lacking in those two things. I think they are good for younger kids for that reason. However, in terms of being specific enough for someone with overall good coordination and kinesthetic awareness (most kids by the time they get to college athletics) to improve sprint speed, I don’t think they play a large roll. In my view though, they still serve as a good general warmup. That is why I use them, as a warmup and to get the body to explore large ranges of motions. I’m not using them to specifically improve sprint form. From that perspective I think they can still serve a purpose. However, some days I don’t use them and our warmup is ground based mobility drills and then 8-10 buildups with each one increasing speed.

Ultimately, only sprinting itself has the greatest potential to improve sprint technique. When you are not moving at around maximal velocities, you are working on an entirely different skill set while inherently undershooting mechanical demands. So, if you want to get better at the skill of sprinting, you have to practice that particular skill. Specific adaptations to imposed demands 101.

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