What exercises help to run faster?

What are some track exercises that will help me run faster?

• Answer:

  There are several things you can do to improve your speed, some having to do with mere mechanics rather than exercising, but for a first step it can be very helpful to lengthen your stride. One way to do that is to make sure your leg muscles are well stretched and strong. Put extra time into your stretching routine and even try to turn it into a medatative sort of thing, like yoga or martial arts. The more in tune you become with your body, the more you will understand what it needs to improve performance. This is the routine I used to go through every day before practice or a meet. It took about 20 minutes to a half hour: Stretch slowwwwwly. Concentrate on the feeling in your muscles as they are strained. You will be able to tell what parts of which membrane is tight and needs to be (gently) extended. Don't bounce, but do lengthen your reach in increments, starting where the tightness begins. Think of your muscles as ropes being pulled more and more taut by a lawn mower. Not a fast jerk, but an exaggerated pull. You don't want the rope to snap; you want it to get longer. After pushing a bit beyond comfortable when stretched out, stay in the extended position, but concentrate on letting your muscles relax in that position. Then push a little past that point. You can't go on at this forever, and your body will tell you when it can't take more, but measure in your mind how far you've stretched today, and expect to at least reach that point again tomorrow. There will be days when you just can't, but you should have days where it feels easy to pass that mark. It's then you will know you're getting somewhere. The first improvement may not come for a week or more, so stay at it. Do this in all the standard stretches -- hurdler's, toe touching, spreading your legs to each side and touching the ground below you. Add to that touching each toe when you're standing. Do this with knees straight and legs parallel to each other, then with one leg crossed over the other and the outside of your feet together; then do it with the other leg crossed over Stretch with your legs spread, coming over the top, trying to touch your head to your knee (again, slowwwwly). Then twist your hips and torso so they are perpendicular to your feet (your head too) as if you are in an exaggerated stride. Stretch every muscle you can find this way by putting your weight forward -- again trying to touch your head to your knee -- or back so your front leg is straight and your rear is bent at the knee as far as it will go. This will be hard to do. It takes balance and strength, two things that will help you run better. Also do your butterflies (sitting, knees out) the same way -- slowwwwly. Stretch your back, shoulders, arms, neck and ankles too. Your entire body is used when you run. Then during practice do 5-10 strightaways with an overextended stride. These will go slower than a sprint because you won't be able to drive down with your legs. It will feel weird and look funny too, but it will help teach your body to take a longer stride when you do sprint. Triple and long jumpers often do exercises like this, so ask if you can join in with them. In the end you want to take in more yardage with each stride than you did before, but in about the same amount of time. Just think, if you add 10 centimeters to a meter-long stride you'll be going 1.1 times farther, equivilent to 1.1 times faster with every step. Also do 5-10 straightaways driving your knees to an exaggerated height. Learning to keep your knees up will help near the end of a race when you're body is running out of energy. That old saying of "dragging your feet" is actually about not lifting your knees. When you don't lift your knees you take shorter strides. To run faster with shorter strides, you would need to move your legs faster. Taking a longer stride is easier than moving your legs faster. Once you've extended your stride, you want to add power to it. This is where the exercises come in. Strength comes from breaking down muscle tissue and rebuilding it. To break it down you need to push it beyond its current limits. You do this with weight training, the same as the body builders do. However you won't be going for muscle mass like they do, you'll be going for power and endurance. I'm really not an expert in this area, so someone else can give you better advice. But I do know the standard leg presses, leg extensions and leg curls will help. You will also want to strengthen the rest of your body too. Arm swing is important to a good stride, especially near the end of a race. In fact, that's a good thing to remember as you're hitting the home stretch: keep your arms pumping. Don't lose the momentum you've built up by letting your arms drop. Again, practicing those exaggerated strides will get your arms used to pumping in rhythm with your longer stride, but your arms may tire faster. So lift arm weights too. Strengthening your back helps by allowing you to hold your torso as upright as possible. It's natural to slouch as you tire, but you want to keep your shoulders and back high as you run to assist in breathing and balance. Give your lungs room to fill and make it easier to keep those knees high by not bending too far forward in your stride (unless you're a hurdler, but then only over the hurdles). Strong stomach and back muscles will do this, so sit-ups (or whatever is recommended these days), hip lifts and anything else that works the abs, back and glutes will be in order. I don't know where the current thinking is, but back in the day we ran a lot of stairs to build power in our legs and upward drive for our knees. Ten to 15 minutes of 15-step stairs should be a good place to start. A half hour would be better. We were taught "hard up, easy down", meaning to drive your legs hard on each step when going up the stairs, but to relax and catch your breath on the way down. Of course it seems like you never catch your breath, but that's building up the strength of your lungs too. It may seem counter-intuitive, but anything that pushes your endurance -- even running cross country distances -- will help a sprinter run faster. If you can make two miles feel like an easy distance, 400 meters will be a breeze. But you want to burn all your oxygen in that short distance by lengthening your stride, pounding downward with more force, driving your knees back up high again, and doing the entire cycle faster than you did before. That's how to run faster.