1. Proper Posture- If your athlete is running with his arms swinging from side to side, he is suffering from the teenage kid syndrome. This means he spends too much time working on the muscles in the mirror, bench, curls, and abs and not enough on his back, glutes, and hamstrings. He also slouches a lot and walks with his head down all the time. This will cause a severe pronation of the scapula and will turn their knuckles facing inward which will cause them to swing their arms side to side. How to improve the player’s posture relies heavily on the player and not so much with the coach. You can do what you can with the limited time you have with the player, but the real improvements come when he is on his own. At the gym you can have him work on a lot of scapular retraction movements and stretching out the pec with static movements. A great exercise is to have your athlete’s deadlift with their hands in a supinated grip, which means their palms are facing away from their body. Deadlift with light weight and really retract at the top position and hold for about three seconds. This and many others are great exercises for you athlete to improve posture, but like I said an athlete has to work hard on his own to alleviate the problem. Everywhere he goes he should be sticking his chest out and trying to retract his shoulder blades. He also needs to be sitting up in class and retracting his shoulder blades. Try these out with your guys and see their forty times improve.
2. Stride Length- This is easy, the fewer steps you take the faster your forty time will be. To improve this many coaches tell their players to do high knees, but that is the wrong information to give. You need to have your players drive their legs back. This will cause the player to lengthen his stride and it will also increase his rate of force development. This can be achieved by hill sprints or sled drags.
3. Proper Shin Angle- the players shin should be at a 45 degree angle when lifted up in a dorsi flexed manner. This is like loading a spring and as soon as the foot hits it will spring up cause the rate of force development to increase and will help your athlete increase your hip flexion.
4. Rate of Force Development- This is easy the stronger and more explosive your athlete is the more force they will generate. So get them in the weight room lift heavy things and out on the field doing explosive plyometrics and med ball throws.
5. Decrease Body Fat- You can’t move fast if you are carrying extra fat. This is common knowledge. So make sure you are eating right and fuel your body with healthy food. The days of eating food because it tastes really good are over, that will lead you to a slow forty and a weak vertical jump.
6. Strengthen Your Hip Flexors- The hip flexors are the key to sprinting faster, but are usually neglected in the U.S. The top runners in the world are from Jamaica and they focus their training on the hip flexors. They do this by Sprinting Hills, Weighted Spread Eagle Sit Ups, Leg Raises w/ Bands. These are just a few examples, but anything that involes hip flexion will work. They did a recent study with the fastest Japanese runner and Asafa Powell from Jamaica, one of the fastest man on the planet and the only difference was the cross section of the Iliopsaos, which is your hip flexor. The bigger the muscle cross section the more force it can generate.
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