How to Get Faster

Any athlete or sports coach who is serious about performance is constantly wondering and searching for useful information on how to get faster. After all, speed is the number one characteristic that separates superior athletes from the pretty good ones. It’s the skill that defines champions from ‘also rans’ and is very likely to be the difference between an athlete earning playing time and riding the bench or a team making it to the post season or watching the playoffs from the stands.

The first place to start when learning how to get faster is with your warmup. If you aren’t properly warmed up for each workout that you do, you can’t expect to get much out of your speed training and therefore you won’t get much faster. When doing your daily warm up, you should start with slow basic movements like jogging and skipping. Slowly progress to faster, more intense warm up drills as your muscles get warmed up and loose. If you don’t focus on this part of each practice or competition, then any information you discover on how to get faster will be wasted.

Another component you must focus on is developing flexibility. Range of motion is important for several reasons. First, if muscles are naturally very tight, athletes can expect to suffer a higher percentage of injuries. As athletes try to run fast and react quickly and explosively, tight muscles are more likely to strain and pull. Even if athletes don’t get injured, they’ll definitely take longer to recover from workouts, games and competitions. That means it will be more difficult to get quality work in during each practice and performance will suffer. In addition, a more flexible athlete will cover more distance with each step, but without exerting any extra effort. The benefits to this are clear. If athletes cover more ground with each step, not only will they get to where they want to go quicker, but it will also take less steps to get there, which means they save energy. Of course this will pay dividends later in the game, practice or race. Also, when athletes are able to go through the full range of motion required to run faster, they will be able to take full advantage of their strength and power.

Here is the number one factor in understanding how to get faster: faster running speeds come from applying greater forces to the ground. A good warm up and consistent, daily attention to flexibility will help aid in this skill and is guaranteed to improve any athlete’s speed, regardless of current age or skill level.

When it comes to flexibility, just remember that athletes should not use static stretching as part of their warm up. Like I said at the beginning of this article, the warm up must contain dynamic exercises that simulate the types of movements athletes will go through in their practice or competition. Save the static stretching for after practice or competitions when muscles are warm and loose. This is where athletes can expect to make the largest gains in flexibility.

As you can see, if you really want to know how to get faster, it involves developing a number of skills that aren’t entirely related to learning what speed workout to run or how often to do it. By adding these two simple components to your current training, you are already setting yourself up to get faster.

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