After a recent discussion online I have found that it is very important that endurance athletes know the importance of sprinting. There is both a scientific and a laymen method to explaining the reasoning behind adding sprinting to your workouts. I am going to begin with the layman method because I have found that I am still some research away from giving you the best possible scientific justification.

In laymen’s terms sprinting makes you faster. That is the gist of it and a lot of endurance freaks shy away from sprinting because they were either never really good at it or just plain don’t like it. Well, if you want to run faster and hit lower mile splits then the best-known way is to do sprint workouts.

When you sprint you run as hard and fast as you can for a very short distance, usually around 100-200 meters, but sometimes even as short as 10-50. In doing so you are using your muscles to their maximum capacity and might actually find yourself not running as fast as you would like to because of some limiting factor. For example you might feel that you can’t get your legs turning over (moving) as fast as you’d like them to or that your arms are tiring quickly because of their sudden increased use to counterbalance your legs. Maybe your otherwise stellar lungs and heart are struggling. These are exactly the reasons why you need to be sprinting.

Sprinting, because of its intensity is much like lifting heavy weights. I will touch on this more in the scientific version, but basically you are using the same effort to run as fast as you can as you would to squat half your body-weight. When you lift heavily your muscles break down and then recover stronger and then in subsequent workouts you are able to lift heavier weights and so on. A similar breakdown happens in sprinting but instead you are targeting the very muscles you will be using in your endurance race or training! Consequently, as you are feeling that aching in your shoulders or your quads, you are actually feeling where your limits in your speed were when running for longer periods.

To build sprinting work into your workouts you can both have entire workouts dedicated to sprinting or you simply work in some sprinting into your existing workout. However, because of the exertion of sprinting I would recommend that you use the former method. This way you can focus on the purpose of your workout – sprinting and building speed.

Try to always begin with a lengthy warm-up of jogging and stretching. If you haven’t been sprinting much then there is a high risk for injury. Once you feel like you are nicely warmed up and have broken a sweat you can get into the good stuff. Since sprints are so short distance, a good sprinting workout will include sets of these short distances. Think of these sets as you would the sets of a weight training workout and each sprint a repetition.

You could, for example, do a set of four x 100m sprints with about 100 meters recovery jogging in between. Doing something like this on a track would be great because you could sprint the straights and jog the turns. If you are on the road then try to find a nice flat, straight stretch of road where you can do your sprints. It especially helps if you can sprint without being interrupted by a traffic light or the like. Another option would be for you to do what is known as a pyramid workout where you increase the distance of your sprint with each repetition up to a desired length. In this workout you would do 100m followed by 200m, 400m, 800m, 1 mile or as high as you want to go, trying to keep the same pace as your 100m. This sort of build up will pay huge dividends as you then bring your speed to your threshold and distance workouts.

There are many other ways that runners (and triathletes, swimmers and cyclists since this applies to all of the sports) build sprinting into their training. Many great training plans include a higher emphasis on speed building later on in the season when you are racing after spending the bulk of your time building your aerobic / endurance base. I would highly recommend integrating some sprinting into your routine, even if it’s a soccer game with your friends where you run your heart out every time your team heads towards goal. After I have gathered more information on a more scientific justification to sprinting I will share my findings with you. Stay tuned!