100m training tips, advice, equipment, gear, and more.

Best running watches

December 4, 2019 by Editor

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. However, the experiences and recommendations are my own.

I’ve been doing athletic running activities since the early nineties and one of the items that always came in handy was an electric watch. We would either use a stopwatch or a wristwatch to help us with our training activities, which mainly revolved around tempo running, pace, speed, acceleration, and interval running.

With the development of smart watches, people can train with more insights and data to enhance their performance.

I bought an Apple 3 watch a few years ago and it has been an incredible investment for my athletic performance. There are others on the market.

In this post, I’ll share some insights into the best running watches for people that plan to train for sprints, middle, or long-distance running events.

Apple watch

I own this watch and I wear it every day. I would consider this a very good all-round watch for runners and athletes that want to track their runs and their lifestyle.

Tracking your runs is important. But monitoring your non-running activity is just as important.

The amount of applications available and the ability to sync the data to your iPhone is really beneficial as well. The things I like about this watch include:

The heart rate monitor (Which is fairly accurate)
The ability to record your running distance and time.
The smart sensor to alert you to track any running activity that you are doing.
The ability to link the data to your health application on your iPhone.
It’s water resistant (Very useful when getting sweaty or running in cold, humid, or wet conditions)
Time-tracking settings

Prices for the Apple watch start from $449.99

Click here to buy an Apple watch from Apple on Amazon.

Garmin Forerunner watches

If you plan to do long distance runs or training that will regularly be 1-3h, then you will want to opt for the Garmin watches.

They offer the same running functions as the Apple Watch, but with more accuracy. For athletes training over longer distances, the accuracy becomes more important since training for 5 or 10km; or even marathons require the athlete to maintain their stamina over the distance that they are running.

Garmins are for the advanced runner that wants practicality.

Different Garmins also have additional functions such as music playback.

Prices start from $349.95

Click here to buy the Garmin Forerunner 245 on Amazon.

Click here to buy the Garmin Forerunner 645 on Amazon.

Sprinting on a treadmill

December 2, 2019 by Editor

Treadmills are a great option for running and will provide you with a sprinting option, however sprinting on a treadmill won’t provide as many benefits compared to sprinting on a solid surface such as grass or a track.

Treadmills force you to use your entire body when running, which means your body will be moving and you will be able to reap cardiovascular strength, stamina, and tempo.

Sprinting sessions that revolve around these will be useful on a treadmill. Where you will notice the setback is improving your acceleration and power on a treadmill.

Depending on the treadmill that you are using, there are some sprinting exercises that you can do. These include the following.

Tempo runs

This is where you run on the treadmill at a certain speed for a certain amount of time. You should also use the speed to track your average steps (turnover) per second.

Treadmill push

This is where you keep the treadmill switched off and you push against the resistance from the surface of the treadmill. You want to try to be as explosive as possible so you can improve your acceleration and drive. It should mimic the sled push drill.

Interval runs

This is where you sprint for a short amount of time at 80-100% of your maximum intensity. This will also train your body to maintain a fast tempo and it will improve your cardiovascular strength, which will also condition your body to not decelerate as quickly, which will make you run faster.

Depending on what you need to achieve with your sprinting training, a treadmill can be handy. However, you shouldn’t prioritise a treadmill over running on a solid surface.

A treadmill should be treated as a “substitute” option based on the training circumstances.

Sprinting form

December 1, 2019 by Editor

Alot of athletic coaches will focus on sprinting form. It’s important, but what is more important is to have the strength, power, conditioning, and speed turnover that will allow you to run fast.

No matter how great your sprinting form is, it will never allow you to outrun another athlete that has more speed, power, and explosiveness than you.

So you need to ensure that you do the following.

Develop your explosiveness and power so that it is superior to the other athletes that you will be competing against.
Develop your speed endurance so that you can run at a more intense speed for a longer amount of time.
Develop your sprinting form and technique so that you can run as efficiently as possible.

Please pay attention to point number 3. As you develop your conditioning, you want to minimize the amount of wasted energy so you can run more efficiently, at a higher intensity.

Things that you will need to consider in your sprinting form depends on how you plan to execute the race that you are about to run.

What are the factors in the sprinting form that you need to consider?

Starting phase

You will need to train with reverse lunges, reverse lunge bounds, and reverse lunge sprints to train your muscles to explode out of that position.

Drive phase

You need to be able to explode outwards and drive your body forward. This means your body will be on a 45 degree angle for the first 20-30 metres of the race.
Your sprinting form and conditioning needs to allow you to project force pushing you forward. This means you need to train the muscles (quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, and hip flexors) to explode in a way that activates those muscles to drive.
Sled runs (Pushing and pulling), single leg glute bridges, and explosive lunges will help with developing the power needed for your drive phase.

Acceleration phase

Acceleration will rely on your hip flexors. Conduct bounding training for distance to maximise your power from every step. Glute bridges, squats, power cleans, and lunges will also help you with your acceleration.

What should you keep in mind with your sprinting form?

Project your force in a straight line.

You want to power the force behind you.
You want your arms to move in a straight line going forward and behind you.
You want your knees and ankles to rotate in a straight line in front and behind you.

Keep your ankles above your knees when you sprint.

This will help you to extend your stride length.

Condition your body to run intensely over distances longer than your race.

This will help you to maintain your form, since your form will breakdown as your body fatigues.

If you run 100m or 200m sprints, condition your body to maintain a fast sprinting pace over 400m. This will allow you to maintain form and finish strongly in the race.

Should you get indoor track spikes?

October 13, 2019 by Editor

The quick answer is you don’t need to get another set of spikes to run indoors since the surface will be similar to what is used outdoors. The main thing you will need to account for is that there are no weather conditions affecting the track since it is indoors.

So a few things that you should keep in mind is that:

The surface will always be dry.
The surface won’t be affected as much by heat changes compared to tracks that are in direct sunlight.
Wind won’t affect the way that you are running.

You will mainly need to think about the way your foot and spikes strike the ground.

It is worth practicing in your spikes in an indoor track. If you do want to get a separate pair for indoor competitions, you can if it is a preferance.

Explosive speed workouts

October 13, 2019 by Editor

If you want to get fast quickly, you need to improve your explosiveness. And to do this, you need to develop power by conditioning your body with explosive speed workouts.

You need to increase your stride length, and turnover speed in order to run faster. To increase your stride length, you must increase the horizontal force with each stride that you take.

The way you will do this is by:

Increasing the strength of your muscles.
You will need to do this with progressive overloading of the muscles.

Increasing the speed in which you drive your strength, which will increase your power and stride length.

What type of workouts can you do to improve your speed explosiveness?

Skipping

Do single skipping to start with, but do it in high volume. Your aim is to maintain a quick reaction off the ground for as long as possible. This will see you do 200-1000 reps of skipping in a single session.

Ideally, you want to make sure that it is unbroken.

You also want to do the same with double-under skipping for as long as possible. And then increase it to triple or even quadruple unders if you are able to.

Single leg skips

Do single-leg skips for at least 100 on each leg. Progressively overload the reps with an ideal goal of 1000 reps. This will safely overload the muscle.

If this becomes easy, then you can switch to single-leg double unders.

Knee to chest skips

Do single or double-under skips with your knees to your chest. Aim for at least 100 reps.

Hurdle jumps

Jump over a series of hurdles. Maintain a height of at least 30 cm and then increase the height as you become more explosive. Aim for reps of 8-10.

Single leg hurdle jumps

Hop over the 8-10 hurdles as a single hop. Aim for a quick reaction time off the ground.

Single leg bounds

Do bounding over 30-60m for distance. Focus on accelerating off each bound. Make sure to measure the distance and increase your average with each stride.

Explosive reverse lunge jumps

You can use this exercise to focus on the explosiveness in your glute. You can easily improve the progressive overload simply by holding dumbbells.

Aim for 12-15 reps. And explode up quickly.

You can also opt to do alternating reverse lunge jumps

Explosive squats

You can do explosive squats for height. Aim for reps of 12-15. Use dumbbells to increase the intensity, whilst allowing you to maintain the form of the exercise.

How to breathe while running.

September 6, 2019 by Editor

Many people that start running find themselves short of breath and unable to maintain the intensity that is required for their run. There are a couple of things to this.

Your body will adjust and you will develop a breathing pattern that will suit your running style and intensity demand.
You will use a rhythm to control your breathing while running.

How can you improve your breathing technique while running?

Inhale through your nose

You want to inhale as much oxygen as possible in through your nose. This will go into your body and muscles, which will help you perform.

Inhale steadily so you can feel the air fill up your lungs.

Exhale through your mouth

Exhale air through your mouth (not your nose). Exhale as much of the carbon dioxide out through your mouth so you can inhale the new oxygen through your nose to fuel your body and your muscles.

Inhale and exhale based on your stride pattern.

You want to inhale and exhale steadily. E.g. 1 second in, 1 second out. 4 seconds in, 4 seconds out, etc.

You will need to train your body to control your breathing pattern.

It is easier to inhale and exhale based on your striding pace. So inhale on steps 1-4, then exhale on steps 5-8. Then repeat.

As you build up your cardiovascular endurance, you will be able to increase the inhale and exhale timings and pacing.

Running and lower back pain.

September 6, 2019 by Editor

It’s really important that you understand how your body works so you can minimize the risk of injury. One of the things that runners will experience is lower back pain.

Unfortunately, runners won’t understand why or how they are getting the pain in their lower back. And when the pain comes, what they need to do to resolve the pain.

When lower back pain comes, people think that they need creams, ice packs, pills, or physio.

It’s more likely that the lower back pain is coming from tightness in your muscles. There are things that you can do to prevent this, without having to opt for expensive treatments.

If your lower back is sore, check for tightness in the following muscle groups.

Sore lower backs usually occur from tightness that pulls the muscle attached to the lumbur spine. The muscles pulling muscles that will affect the tightness will either be:

Hamstrings
Glutes
Hip flexors
Quadriceps

The first thing you need to do is work out if the muscle groups are tight and if they are responsible for pulling the muscles in your lower back.

If you have tight hamstrings, it isn’t the hamstrings that need to be stretched. It is actually the hip flexors or the quadriceps that need to be stretched since they are rotating the hips forward.

Stretch your hip flexors

You can do this by doing lunges on the ground. If you are unable to go forward, your hip flexor is too tight. So you need to work on getting the muscle to relax.

Stretch out your quadriceps.

A quadricep stretch will help. Sometimes, you need to keep on stretching and waiting for the muscle to relax over a few hours or days so that it stops pulling on your spine.

Stretch your glutes

Stretch your glutes and also get them to relax.

Do dynamic stretching with lunges.

Simply lunge forward until your knee touches the ground. Then stand/power straight up so that the movement goes through your glute. This will dynamically stretch the hip flexor, quads, and glutes.

Do weight training to help you overcome any lower back pain.

Squats, Deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, and reverse lunges are great for strengthening the core and stretching out the muscle groups. Even though you will feel the pain and you think you won’t be able to do the exercises, it is actually one of the best ways to help you recover.

You will need to strengthen your abdominals and hip flexors for running.

It’s likely that you’ve got a sore back because you are weak in your abs and your hip flexors. This means you need to do core exercises that will allow you to build the strength endurance with these muscle groups.

Hanging leg and knee raises will be key, but you will need to train them so you can do them at a high volume.

Once those muscle groups fatigue when you are running, it will incorporate other muscle groups including your lower back, which will lead to lower back pain.

Train yourself to run with high-knees

You can focus on developing your running technique so that your abs and hip flexors won’t tire and start using your lower back muscles. A simple trick is to keep running with your ankles going over your knees.

Pay attention to make sure that your lower back isn’t being used. If you find that your lower back is being used, lower your knee movement and running pattern. Make sure that your core remains engaged at all times.

Running to lose weight

September 6, 2019 by Editor

Is it really effective to do running exercises to lose weight?

The quick answer is yes. But it isn’t as straightforward as running and losing weight.

You can maximize the intensity of your exercise by doing running activities. The more intense you do the running, the higher your heart rate will be. The longer you can maintain the exercise, the more calories, fat, and weight you will lose from your body.

However…

You will only be able to lose weight from the running exercises that you are doing if you do the following.

You track what you are consuming in your nutrition. You need to know the macros and the calorie intake and burn that you are doing to ensure that you are in a calorie deficit. If you are not in a calorie deficit, your body won’t burn the calories which will make you lose fat.
You need to track the amount of estimated calories that you are burning from your running activities. This means you need to track the time, the distance, and work out the intensity of your run. Ideally, you will be able to track your heart rate to see the rate that you are able to maintain during your run. Ideally, you will be able to keep your heart rate above 160bpm to burn your body fat aggressively through running.

However, you should still be able to achieve good results with a 130bpm.

Resources

Nutrition for a vegan diet

Nutrition for a vegetarian diet

Nutrition for a cheap, healthy diet

There are a few things that you should consider when running to lose weight.

It will originally be difficult on your joints.

Because you will have to put so much stress and intensity on your muscles, you will get aches and pains. You need to progressively load the muscles and the joints so that they become used to the intensity that’s required to run.

You will get better over time.

As your body becomes lighter and you start to get used to the biomechanics of your body, and you will end up running with better technique, efficiency, and intensity.

Sprint starts

September 6, 2019 by Editor

Getting a great start in a race will put you at an advantage. Once you are in front at the start, the rest of the field has to play catch-up with your pace, speed, and deceleration.

If you have done the right speed-endurance conditioning training, your competitors will find it difficult to catch you if you have got off to a blistering start.

There are a few things you can focus on to improve your start when sprinting so you can gain the advantage needed to excel in the race.

You need to be able to explode from the start position.

In the sprints, you will be in a crouching starting position. But you won’t be able to get the full advantage if you aren’t able to explode using the power in your hips, glutes, hamstrings, calves, and ankle flexion to get out and into your acceleration mode.

Rather than focusing on the starts solely, work on the explosive exercises that will allow you to get your body in the right position so you can power out of the blocks successfully.

What exercises will you need to do to help you improve your start?

Reverse lunges.

Do these to train your muscles how to explode from a low single-leg position. The emphasis will fall on your glutes as you power up.

Squats

Aim to do this with good technique and ideally in barefeet. Aim to do full squats to get your muscles used to exerting power from a low position.

Deadlifts

You want to get your body exerting power through the complete hip hingement. Progressively overload the muscles using this exercise and explode so that you will be able to generate more power on the track.

Weighted hip thrusts.

These will help you build strength and power, which will see you improve your horizontal acceleration, speed, and stride length.

Bounding from a static start for speed and distance.

You want to get your body used to exerting power. So you will need to do bounding from a static starting position (ideally in a low position to simulate the starting position, such as a 3-point start) and then power through for maximum power and turnover.

What starting drills should you focus on?

You want to focus on the first 20-30m of the race, which is the power phase, which will transfer into the acceleration phase.

You will be taking the power development that you have been doing at the gym and with plyometrics and put it into a real-life racing scenario.

You will also train yourself to improve your reaction time. However, it is more important for you to drive out of the starting position comfortably and with quick turnover.

Your quick turnover won’t be any good if you don’t have the power to lengthen your stride. So make sure you continue to develop your power and stride length as it will be important in the latter stages of the race.

Starting drills – 20m starts.

Have someone start a timer and record your 20m speed times. If you have access to an electronic timer, that would be ideal as you will be able to record more accurate data and eliminate the human error with the timings.

Conduct each start (at least 10) and aim for 95% intensity since you want to focus on developing your technique, power, turnover, and control.

Sprinting start running angle.

You will be powering out on a 45-60 degree angle until you reach the end of your acceleration phase. You must train your body to power horizontally whilst your body is at that angle.

Speed endurance and technique

August 31, 2019 by Editor

Have you considered how much your speed endurance and running technique impact your running performance? Especially with sprinters that seem to accelerate towards the end of a race, they are actually slowing down at a rapid pace due to their muscles fatiguing.

The only way to overcome this is to build your speed endurance.

If you look at some of the best sprinters or runners in general, you will see that when they were at their peak performance, they had a phenomenal amount of speed endurance.

For example.

Usain Bolt in the years leading up to the Beijing Olympics where he broke the 100 and 200m world record was actually training as a 400m sprinter and clocked 45 seconds for the race around the track.

He said it in the video below.

Michael Johnson trained mainly as a 400m sprinter and broke both the 200m and 400m world records.

Wade Van Niekerk trains as a 400m athlete and holds the world record for the event, but has run sub-20 seconds for the 200m.

Speed endurance with the right technical training works.

It allows the athlete to hold their form and to execute more horizontal force at a higher intensity during the race.

What’s needed for athletes to execute this?

Athletes need to factor in speed endurance training into their program and they must excel in the speed endurance events so their muscles can execute more power for longer during the race.

What kind of training is required?

Realistically, you are looking at speed endurance over 200m, 300m, 400m and 600m to maintain speed.

Doing the training at no more than 95% of the maximum speed is key to building the strength endurance. This means the athlete needs to know what split time to run in order to maintain their technique over the distance.

For example, if you run 10 seconds for the 100m, you would aim to do speedwork at 10.5s for 95% intensity.

If you run 25 seconds for the 200m, you would aim to do speedwork at 26.25s for 95% intensity.

Get your best time and multiply it by the following. (You can use this calculator)

Intensity	Time multiplier
95%	Multiply your best time by 105%
90%	Multiply your best time by 110%
80%	Multiply your best time by 120%
70%	Multiply your best time by 130%

You can also use this calculator to get the speed metric that you need to maintain based on your personal best time.

100m time	Intensity time
10 seconds	10.5s
11 seconds	11.55s
12 seconds	12.6s
13 seconds	13.65s
14 seconds	14.7s
15 seconds	15.75
200m time
21 seconds	22.05s
24 seconds	25.20s
27 seconds	28.35
30 seconds	31.5s
400m
50 seconds	52.5s
60 seconds	63s

Resources

David Rudisha training discussion

Kenyan running training program

David Rudisha training discussion

Michael Johnson’s training discussion

Clyde Hart – Coach to Michael Johnson