Sprinting for Better Health
FAST … FASTER … FASTEST
What is up folks! Coach Milo here!
Look, we need to stop sleeping on the benefits of sprinting.
Seriously, if given one exercise, of the litany of them available to help a person become physically better overall, sprinting is that exercise. Everybody I have ever trained learns better sprinting mechanics. I am talking about athletes competing in football, softball, basketball, hockey, swimming, golf, tennis, triathlon, baseball, wrestling, volleyball, cycling and more. I’m also talking about firefighters, physical therapists, lawyers, financial advisors, police officers, web designers, teachers, lifeguards and military service members.
Through sprinting, all of these folks have:
· Lost body fat
· Become better athletes
· Gained more explosiveness
· Built more muscle
· Enjoyed the benefits of a revved-up CNS
· Built more aerobic endurance
· Built better anaerobic conditioning
· Improved glucose and insulin control
· Become all around bad asses!
I probably should have prefaced all of this with fact that I do not do distance running.
At all.
Like none.
As in zero.
In fact, I only see three reasons why people run long slow distance (LSD): 1. It is what they do for competition. 2. LSD wakes up their ethereal spirit being which elevates them to a selected celestial oneness with the universe. 3. Their coach does not know any different, and thinks the copious amounts of LSD laps are going to give the team the endurance needed to run fast.
To the sports coaches reading this, sorry to throw out the truth. But seriously, ask yourself, how many times in your coaching career have you told an athlete during competition, “Ok, jog over this spot … jog with the ball over there … you are going to jog here, get the ball, then jog over there with it?”
How about we just say, NEVER. You want them to get there quickly. You want them to sprint. So, stop teaching them and instructing them to move slower.
For those folks wanting to “tone up” or “lean out” a bit, answer this one: do you want to have a body resembling an Olympic sprinter on an Olympic marathoner? I have asked that question for years and not a single person has said marathoner. Yet, so many want to do what marathoners primarily do to shed the fat.
Anyway, sorry for the slight digression.
Sprinting and fat loss.
As evidenced by thousands of DEXA scans from numerous studies, sprinting burns more fat than LSD. Most of this happens because of EPOC –excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. That essentially means your muscles use a lot more calories after the sprint workout is complete than they do after an LSD workout. Finish an LSD workout and you are pretty much finished burning calories from that workout. Finish a sprint workout, and you’ll continue burning calories for hours.
To further explain EPOC: muscles need to recover after a workout. They need to return to their resting state. That journey includes cellular repair, “refueling” the muscles’ energy stores, muscle growth and refueling the phosphagen system - a system that synthesizes energy into a form that muscles can use.
All that takes calories to perform. We use our muscles at maximal or near maximal efforts while sprinting. Doing so breaks down muscle. Jogging does not produce the same, or even similar, outcome – especially for the amount of time put into both.
Also, the body has an amazing ability to adapt to LSD. Jog a 10- or 8-minute mile today. Train jogging that mile for a few months. The body’s energy expenditure, in jogging that mile, will reduce over time. Even if the time needed to run the mile decreases, too, the energy needed finish the mile would still decrease.
On the opposite end, sprint 100 meters today. The body can train for that 100 meters for a year, and at year’s end, that 100 meters will still require a similar amount of energy as it did when the training started. That’s what happens with maximal-effort work.
So, if fat loss is the goal, it would be more advantageous to substitute sprinting or some HIIT work in the time set aside for jogging or other LSD work.
AGREE? DISAGREE? HAVE QUESTIONS? COMMENT BELOW, AND WE CAN CHAT!