I disagree when it comes to running though. I wish T0oday still posted but he made a lot of posts about sprinters with awful techniques that still had incredibly fast times. Speed is power to weight ratio. Top speed is often considered genetic but it can be improved by working on your top speed through drills and building speed endurance. Running is natural. It's best not to overthink it. Keep it simple. By all means use a few ques like keeping your head straight and chin slightly down and arms relaxed but there's no need to over analyse. Effort>technique. If you run 200m tempos your body is naturally going to find the most efficient way for you to run and achieve the times with the least effort. That's building technique. I know my explanation is shit and I can't word it that good but focus on putting in the work, running high intensity, and building up your work capacity and that will make you achieve far greater than a smaller workload with more emphasis placed on technique.
Don't get me wrong, I believe you can still get incredibly fast with imperfect mechanics. But even someone like Bolt who runs with a loose upper body and has a poor start where he drives his knees improperly I believe still has great and maybe even exceptional mechanics in other areas. Just because he is the fastest in the world doesn't mean he couldn't benefit from hitting his limiting factors hard like his upper body stability and working out the issues with his form. He originally had bad all-around form but you might have heard how his coach pretty much completely rebuilt his form, which is exactly the sort of transformation I'm talking about:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/usain-bolt-worlds-fastest-man/0/glen-mills-the-man-behind-usain-bolts-record-shattering-career/After a disappointing showing at the Athens Olympics, crashing out of the heats in the 200m, Bolt sought out Mills as the man who might enable him to finally fulfil his youthful promise. Mills was well aware of Bolt’s natural ability, but also of his poor technique - a backwards running style and lack of core strength triggering a series of hamstring problems. He undertook a two year project of pulling apart the sprinter’s technique, painstakingly breaking his bad habits, and then reassembling it all into today’s world-beating form. It was a repetitive and challenging process, often requiring hours of video analysis to help correct the minutiae of Bolt’s individual race stages.
There's a more detailed article about it somewhere this is just the one I found right away.
I think we agree to some extent though because you are saying to use drills and cues are acceptable strategies and I think they are great strategies and really the whole point I was making was to use cues to improve form. I don't sprint as much as I would like but when I ran track my form was still bad even though I was running a lot. If I "run naturally" I don't cycle my legs at all, I just kind of drive my knees forward which takes away the hamstring stretch reflex you are supposed to get with good form. Your form might improve a bit with high volume but I don't think you can reach your potential peak form without doing a lot of stuff to improve your technique especially if it is bad to begin with. Ideally you would do both: lot of high intensity running + a lot of technique work.
For sure. I think the big question though is, whether or not someone can truly spot inefficiencies in their mechanics and do the right drills to correct them. This is where I think most of it falls apart. Getting instruction from coaches with incredible amounts of experience, and perhaps having things analyzed in a performance lab, are probably good steps .. actually, more so for coach, less so for performance lab. Performance labs in universities for example, have lots of "brainiacs" but perhaps not the proper levels of actual experience, correcting technique/movements for real athletes. But legitimate coaches with impressive histories, probably are the highest up on my list. Though, you may still get advice which is aimed at "turning you into someone else", turning you into athletes they are more familiar working with.
To my first point, I imagine scoob is telling his girl to get her knees up etc .. I can picture someone forcing their knees up while running, and just wrecking their mechanics. I've seen people do this IRL, it looks absolutely insane. For some reason, they are convinced that forcing their knees up is the right thing to do. I once did something similar with cycling my trail leg, I forced it, stupid idea. The best way to get your trail leg to cycle better, is to go faster. The best way to get your knees up, is to go faster. The best way to get your shoulders/arms pumping, is to go faster. etc.
As for your quad dominant top speed mechanics, does manually focusing on your cycling technique help more than primetime sprints (stiff leg bounds) etc? You've done all kinds of things, so I imagine you know best. But, I think before people resort to form changes, they should try and focus on doing the activity more (in most cases), but also incorporate assistance exercises aimed at strengthening those weaknesses, without having to manually think about them during the actual movement. I mean, that's the route *I prefer*. Sometimes you just have to focus on something to fix it, there's all kinds of specific cases so there's lots of caveats.
I agree, it's really tough to figure out what technique fixes you need to make for your specific body type+characteristics. You would need a great coach. But there are hella videos on YT of top-of-the-line coaches explaining common technique issues.
Yeah I think I should sprint more before working in technique stuff. The assistance exercises are an exceptional tool (most likely the best tool) and probably better for avoiding injury but like you said it can be hard to figure out what exactly is holding you back/the problems with your mechanics and how exactly to fix it cause you have to take into account stuff like : joint angles, speed of movement, direction the force is applied. Supertraining "Dynamic correspondence of strength training". I'm not sure just doing basic strengthening is an effective approach unless you are a novice.
I think forcing your knees up can be a bad cue if the ideas behind it aren't understood which might be the case with scoobs gf:
-one of the reasons for it is because after lifting your knee up you extend at the hamstring, giving you a greater stretch reflex
-focusing on driving your knee helps emphasize front-side mechanics which is good for "strength runners" who have long GCT and lower stride frequency that kind of drag their foot behind them and do a butt kick in the recovery phase and end up with poor cycling. Dan Pfaff and Jonas Dodoo talk about this a lot
Also, as for your quad dominant top speed mechanics, there's also the possible scenario that continuing to use that technique for many years, the hamstrings/glutes would still catch up because of the speed improvements over time. ie, you might hit your ceiling with natural form, but then if you just keep hammering it, you may get more contribution from p-chain since you're hitting higher speeds at your ceiling. You would know better than me though that's for sure.
This is hard to say, cause it's such a unrealistic hypothetical situation. But I think if you don't cycle properly like me with my quad-dominant form, you are getting very little contribution from the hamstring stretch reflex I mentioned and If I kept running with my form the disbalance would get larger if my form didn't change at all. But my form would change, just very slowly and inefficiently so you're probably right. I still think just running with optimal form to begin with is more effective at the cost of you being slower for the first few weeks/months as you adapt to it.
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