As I worked this week with an athlete who wanted to improve his acceleration, it would have been easy to say all you have to do is correct the first step and you are good to go. As Lee Corso would say “NOT SO FAST!” (No pun intended.) If you really look at the individual and their mobility or their unloaded movement patterns you can see a whole world open up. Hip mobility and abdominal control are essential in creating an acceleration and drive. Most athletes are anterior-chain dominant, meaning their quadriceps and hip flexors are overly tight or overactive during running movements. As a result, extension of the ankle, knee, and hip when attempting to generate force from the ground is not as efficient as it could be. A classic example involves skipping. When you watch an athlete skip, most will as I like to term it “skip up” instead of pushing down into the ground to perform the movement. The skip up motion, the leg on the ground hops up to create the motion as opposed to the up leg driving down to the ground to create the pop or skip. You should hear a popping sound when a proper skip is executed. Changing the skipping pattern from a skip up to a drive down can be accomplished through cross crawl training, teaching the athlete how to extend when jumping and linear wall drills. Proper movement progressions are the key to improving first-step acceleration.
The specific goals of these progressions are threefold:
- Teaching the athlete how to utilize their edges of their feet for proper acceleration.
- Teaching the athlete how to “explode” into their acceleration quickly.
- Teaching the athlete how to minimize their steps for maximum efficiency.
Proper training or firing pattern recruitment is essential to ensure these patterns are retained. These patterns include:
- Glute firing, which also involves decreasing the activation of the hip flexors and quadriceps
- Training abdominal control, teaching the athlete how to fire their stabilizers during movements both standing and seated
- Cross crawl movement patterns, which is as the right arm extends the left leg extends.
Make sure that you start with these “6 steps” in addition to correcting the “first step” and you should be on the way to improving your or your athlete’s acceleration.
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