How To Attain A Near Perfect Sprinting Technique

How to get a perfect sprinting form

Head Position

Your head position needs to be upright. It should be in line against the rest of the body. Instead of tense and stressed, your head has to be relaxed and eyes need to be fixated straight on the route that you are following. So, you need to ensure that your head remains in the right position, while facing forward elongating the spine. This position helps in preventing injuries, which could occur when your body’s one side takes more strain than another. When your head is in a forward position, it increases your speed and concentration.

Shoulder Position

Your shoulder position needs to be straight, while fronting the path which you are moving toward. Shave off the sprint’s speed by eliminating the torso’s lateral movement and pump the arm. The body will deplete the energy faster and end up performing more work if it works for correcting the shoulder in bad form. In general, posture remains a vital part of longevity and health. The habits athletes form off the running track affect the performance while they run. So, your body should need to remain close to the body and steady always.

Hip Position

Your hip should remain in a straight line with your shoulders and head, while facing forward. For achieving correct hip height, the shoulders and head should remain upright. If athletes follow many rotation in the shoulders, the momentum of their body is being put in various directions than just forward. So, the main focus of the hip state is to dismiss joint stress and place the body’s impetus in the forward movement. When you reach supreme speed, the body’s trunk needs to be upright at 50 degrees approximately.

Knee Position

For generating power, push the knees forward. Then, bring them high when you sprint. You can also go for a long strike. While taking shorter steps throughout sprinting, you do not optimize the stride’s full length. The high knee enables the leg height for striking out longer distances. For instance, just look at how cheetahs run. At a sprint, their bodies flatten when they take on a stride. Here, we do not have to flatten our bodies but we need to focus on the powerful reach they attain with both their leg sets. Also, we need to follow in through the knee placement. So, we use a high knee state for gathering our bodies for explosive, maximal force using our powerful foot placement.

Feet Position

To achieve maximum sprinting speed, an intensive force yield that produces significantly lesser contact time with the floor and flight time is much needed. With every stride, you need to land on your foot’s middle. When your knee tugs the foot upwards throughout your pace and follows back to the ground, life up the toes toward the shin so that you put the foot’s middle and ball on the ground and not on your heel. Also, your foot needs to be in line and directly under your body, instead of forward to it. The heel should move up the ground and go in a pouncing arc to the hip, with no touching.

Arm Position

At the beginning stage, the arms need to swing contrary to the legs and flex the elbows at 90 degrees, while your fists need to swing towards the forehead. When the arms go back forward, the hands need to drive through to the shoulder level, while moving down they go past the hips. As with your body’s placement above, correct arm movement is significant to drive all power and momentum forward.

How to Prevent Injury Through Proper Sprinting Form

There could be negative effects of improper sprinting form on your long-term physical health. Also, the bad sprinting technique could slow you down. If any position is not apt and you turn out to be a keen sprinter, it could have bad impacts on other joints when you do not realize it. The consistent movement of your shoulders and the head could influence the motion’s range in the hips, which could result in avoidable pain. So, focusing on the above-mentioned techniques will offer harmony and relief to the forward motion of your body. If you come across any technique that results in pain or rare difficulty in achieving, please consult a doctor or physical therapist regarding your condition.

Factors that Affect Sprinting Technique

Here are some factors that can affect your sprinting technique:

Relaxation

While sprinting, you must have seen that most athletes tense their entire body at times. This is not good when it comes to sprinting technique. It is likely to happen when you try too hard for exerting power and generating power. This results in unnecessary tension in your body and thus, leads to bad form. When you over tense, your body become stiff, wastes energy, and is not able to move smoothly.

Posture

It is essential to have good posture for good sprinting. Most athletes tend to lean forward through over flexing at their hips. It is advisable to follow a slight tilt but leaning far forward can slow you down and affect the running mechanics.

An incredible way to make sure that you feature great sprinting posture is to ensure that every drill is finished with a perfect sprinting form like A skip, B skip, and so on. Bad form throughout the drills would transfer into the sprinting techniques. So, it is important that you perform them correctly. So, you need to focus on looking straight ahead, keeping the back straight, and head neutral with the spine. Watch this video to know about sprint technique drills!

Conclusion

If we talk about sprinting technique, it’s all about forward momentum. To prevent expensive displacements of power, momentum, and energy, you need to focus on modifications in the sprinting form in arms, hips, feet, knees, and shoulders. Not just that, but enhancing sprinting form is also valuable to prevent injuries caused by an uneven use of your body’s both sides.

When you implement these key techniques, you can see immediate enhancements in your sprinting form. Maybe you would not win your next race, however, you will feel improve and better. Additionally, you could make further long-term steps via unilateral training. This training could help you in correcting an uneven body use that might be resulting in imperfect forms. With a blend of cross-training and focus on sprinting technique, you could become unstoppable on the running track.

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