[quote]beans wrote:
peterm533 wrote:
WRcortese5 wrote:
"…if you are training for sprints, you are going to get lean regardless. Have you ever seen a top sprinter that WASN’T ?
I disagree.
Of course “top” sprinters may be lean but it is totally illogical to assert a generalisation that sprinting therefore makes you lean.
I am afraid that you are simply associating the fact that successful sprinters are lean (and of course young)and drawing a causal connection.
Of course you do not want to carry extra weight as as a sprinter and so you would expect successful sprinters to be lean.
However, there are a number of older adult sprinters at my local track who are not that lean simply because they do not expend sufficent calories.
As further evidence plenty of soccer players at various levels carry more body fat than you might expect given the time they spend sprinting.
Successful sprinting requires low body fat. It dose not necessarily cause it.
Sprinting is a tool, just like weight training. If you lift weights with the right parameters, your muscles will grow. If you sprint with the right parameters, you will get lean.
Achieving leanness totally depends on the type of sprinting you’re doing. The shorter sprinting (30-60m dashes) is more about power and muscular explosiveness. Shorter sprinting is great for really hitting your posterior chain muscles with some excellent stimulus. Also, you’ll notice short-distance sprinters at all levels can still carry quite a bit of fat. For leanness though, look at the longer sprinter. You’ll see far fewer thick 400M runners that you will 100M runners.
To really start to noticably lean out overall, you have to train at or above your anaerobic threshold, or lactic threshold. This can be accomplished by manipulating three key variables in a sprint interval training program: pace, distance, and rest interval. Your body can produce energy anaerobically for about 25 secs at an all out sprint before reaching the point where it can no longer clear the lactic acid from their blood. This is known as the Onset of Blood Lactate Accumulation (OBLA). Of course this varies depending on how trained you are. World class 400M runners can probably maintain all out sprinting for about 30 secs, before hitting OBLA. The whole trick to long sprinting is to increase cardiovascular conditioning in order to push the point of OBLA as far out in time as possible, increase your footspeed so you can cover more ground before you hit OBLA, and then have the strength to prevent a massive dropoff in performance after OBLA.
To get significant benefit from sprint interval training in terms of leanness, you have to train at or above that OBLA for the workout.
And your rest intervals have to be just short enough to allow your body to not quite clear your lactic acid. For example, if you can run a 25sec all out 200M dash, then a good interval training workout might be to run 6x200’s at 30-32sec pace with 2 minutes in between each one. This will get you right up to OBLA with each run, and by the end of the workout, you might be up over OBLA by the end of each 200. As you gain speed, fitness and strength, you can move up to 300’s or 400’s, eventually working up to something like 3x400M at 60-65 sec pace with 2-3 minutes rest. But trust me, if you start right away with 400M, your pace will quickly be a lot more synonymous with a distance workout than a sprint workout.
You can do this with shorter sprints, like 50-100M, but because the duration of each run is so much shorter (less than 15 sec), you HAVE to really shorten your rest time to get your body up to OBLA by the end of the workout. So that kind of interval workout might look something like 8x100M with 1-1.5 min rest, or 8x50M with 30-45 sec rest.
I’m just throwing a bunch of examples of workouts, but there’s a lot of stuff out on the net about lactic threshold and OBLA in relation to interval training. You’ll be able to find all kinds of recommendations in terms of rest intervals, pace, and total workout distance covered.
Its just like set/rep/load/tempo combinations for weightlifting. You can vary all parameters for changing stimulus. I’m sure any of the books mentioned will give you a good start too.[/quote]
Why is OBLA necessary for burning fat ? My understanding is that alot of the extra calories burnt from sprinting occurs during EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption).
I’m not sure about short distance sprinters being less lean than their long distance counterparts, most elite 100m sprinters have been around 6-8%. 400m runners tend to carry less muscle mass rather than less fat mass.
Apart from that, excellent post with good recommendations. I also will add that reading through Charlie Francis’s books/forum is a good idea.