Importance of Arm Drive To Sprinting.

[Paul Henry]

Read some Kookey comment earlier this week from a source who according to their history of posting should have known better. The postulation was that "arm drive is overated" in sprinting to extent that VCB was used as an example to say that given her accolades in sprinting with less than optimal arm drive, it stood to prove the Kookey statement true. I had begged for some proper validation or correction be made to the statement but I find it necessary for it to be a thread.

That statement in my opinion has bafooned all conventions of thought behind sprint coaching and proper running and also the physiology associated with human locomotion.

Smoke & Marlow I respect your particular input in this regard Eldrick, yours too.

[Daisy]

Re: Importance of Arm Drive To Sprinting.

The postulation was that "arm drive is overated" in sprinting.

Obviously you need some arm drive. The interesting thing is how much should it be emphasised. From my non expert seat it seems that upper body strength is a benefit to sprinters. Is that due to the importance of arm drive?

[Speedfirst]

Arms are more for balance, your arms always lead first, but certainly from a mechanical/form/technique perspective, you want your arms not to go across the sagittal plane..

[Paul Henry]

The two last views are how see it and how it should be logically and scientifically. I think in the situation of the 200m and 400m the arm drive cannot be over emphasised.

[mojo]

Basic biomechanic principle:limbs in opposition.



It is not the hands that are important (though this straight stiff hand thing people do is nonsense-you want to be relaxed not tense) but the range of motion through the upper arm-ie. you want to drive the elbows back and keep the arm bent.

There are many variations for the hand-some bring them high in front of the face and other more out front and low.

Move your arms quickly and the legs follow.

[lonewolf]

Non-scientific observation. Circa 1947-48, a sprinter from western Oklahoma, who ran erect and motionless from the waist up with arms dangling straight down, won the state small school sprints (only two classes in those days). As I recall he ran about 9.9y. It was curious, almost cartoonish to watch but it was good enough to beat me in HS. He walked on at college but his style did not hold up. His father was a doctor. He dropped track and went into pre-med.

[Speedfirst]

Basic biomechanic principle:limbs in opposition.



It is not the hands that are important (though this straight stiff hand thing people do is nonsense-you want to be relaxed not tense) but the range of motion through the upper arm-ie. you want to drive the elbows back and keep the arm bent.

There are many variations for the hand-some bring them high in front of the face and other more out front and low.

Move your arms quickly and the legs follow.

The emphasis for the arms and what I cue as a coach is puliing action, let gravity take over. Your backswing, my cue is like running downhill. But again arms pertain more about balance, which will help you run more linear, which certainly is very important, getting back to the sagittal plane aspect.

[Marlow]

Re: Importance of Arm Drive To Sprinting.

Of course arm-drive, in terms of how high to drive fore &aft, and in terms of helping set the stride frequency (I find that at the end of a 400, they do need to consciously pump their arms faster to keep the turnover from slowing to a glacial pace), and in terms of creating good posture and balance by not swinging them across one's torso, is very important and needs to be 'taught' to young sprinters and monitored even in advanced sprinters.

Terry Long coached Dix for a while and saw that his arm-drive was indeed problematic and worked extensively with him to correct it. One also notices that females seem to have more arm-drive 'issues' then males - I have beginning girls who literally fling their arms around as they run. Any time 'sprint technique' is being emphasized in a training session, a coach MUST look at that too.

But . . . there is more than one way to skin a cat. Some elites DO swing their arms around 'oddly' and one one would think that their success is despite the flaw, and they would be even faster if the flaw were corrected, but that is NOT always the case. Sometimes an athlete has an eccentricity that is part of the total package of success and to change it would not be beneficial, even if only because of its psychological implications. You do not, for instance, want a 100-meter sprinter to be thinking about their arm-drive throughout a race. One would hope you could correct it in practice so that it would be extinguished in a race, but experience tells us that is not always true.

So . . . in a nutshell, I DO work on it, but I don't obsess about it.

[Spickard]

I'm not sure how convincing this will be, but here goes:

I went to USATF Level II coaching school this summer in the jumps. Our instructor, Boo Schexnayder, was, shall we say, NOT a big fan of cueing with the arms. It got to the point where he stated, after a thorough and detailed explanation, that he didn't want to waste any more time talking on it. Someone questioned him on it, inevitably, and awkward hilarity ensued as he re-explained with exasperation.

I'll do my best to translate: Basically, biomechanics and proper neuro-muscular firing orders indicate that what we see visually with the arms is simply this: a reaction to movements that originate in the pelvis. The arms merely counter the lower body. When you see "bad" arms, you are seeing the symptom, not the disease, and therefore you shouldn't spend time trying to cure the symptom.

Additionally, while there is such a thing as "bad" arms, arms like VCB's are not "wrong". She is countering oscillations in the pelvis. These oscillations are more pronounced in some athletes (VCB) than others, and are NOT a hindrance. If arms DO need to be "fixed", you should be fixing the things that are wrong below the waist and having to do with forces created during ground contact. Regardless, you should not be cuing arms.

(Hopefully I didn't screw that up too much, Boo.)

I, myself, have always mildly cued arms but I have never cued them independent of other things. I walked out of Level II believing that all the running form I "fixed" with arm cues had been fixed for reasons other than the arm cues. There was some discussion among us afterward that it might even be a semantic thing, but I'll approach it differently this year and see how it works. The one exception will be when I get a 14 year old who has spent her life on the couch and appears to be so uncoordinated as to be tossing pizza dough when she runs; you have to get her in the ballpark first. But, for the rest of it, I now agree with Boo.

[Speedfirst]

It really comes down to each individual athlete, if it's a problem and it impacts performance than it's something you can address, worst case scenario everything stays the same. Even if nothing else, it now is no longer a mental stumbling block, because for some athletes it is.

If you make it a big deal, guess what, it's a big, it's all in how you view it. Don't make it a big deal.

[mojo]

I used to tell athletes to just think about their arms when they tire n the homestrecth in say a 400.

DH now tells me that is wrong (or at least not effective).
He instructs athletes to think more about keeping the rthymn and turn over going. Slight difference I guess.

Anyway I agree with all who say arm action should only be changed if it is dramatically affecting an athletes performance. It doesn't have to look pretty to get the job done.

I know a few coaches who are all about what their athletes look like when they run. They spend so much time on running technique that the athletes aren't doing the hard fitness work.

Also- running in slow motion to fix any running fault is a complete waste of time-it does not transfer to running at speed.


Hell I can look good doing slow motion A and Bs.


To learn to run well fast you must run fast.

[imaginative]

While I do not have the knowledge to judge the fine details,
I would like to suggest an experiment: Put your hands in
your pockets and go for a brisk walk (or run if you prefer).
Then just remove hands from pockets and let your arms
swing naturally. Observe the difference.

[Speedfirst]

While I do not have the knowledge to judge the fine details,
I would like to suggest an experiment: Put your hands in
your pockets and go for a brisk walk (or run if you prefer).
Then just remove hands from pockets and let your arms
swing naturally. Observe the difference.

That's the balance aspect of it.

[SQUACKEE]

My coach would yell on the last lap, "Use your arms"! It did help. If you can move your arms faster, the legs will follow.

[Speedfirst]

My coach would yell on the last lap, "Use your arms"! It did help. If you can move your arms faster, the legs will follow.

That's not what you want at the end of the 100m, legs going faster, now you're decelerating faster. I assume you're talking last lap of the 400m. Using your arms in the last lap of the 400m, helps you with your cadence, with your energy distribution. Some sprinters, use their arms more at the 250m mark. You can see them with their arms higher on the 1st 200m and then again 250 and going in, lower the arms.