How often you sprint matters more than how you sprint

Team-sport programmes spend heavily on running technique and skimp on the exposure that actually protects an athlete at top speed.

A footballer spends an hour a week being taught to run. Arm carriage, shin angle, foot strike, drills with hurdles and wall drives borrowed wholesale from track. Meanwhile he reaches genuine maximum velocity perhaps twice in a fortnight, and one of those times is in the eighty-first minute of a match.

I think the priority is upside down.

Sprinters need technique because their event is nothing but the technique, and hundredths decide it. A team-sport athlete sprints in fragments, from odd starting positions, while watching a ball and an opponent instead of the track in front of him. The clean upright mechanics being drilled apply to a phase he rarely occupies for more than a second or two.

What he does need is regular exposure to high speed, and the reason is protective before it is anything else. Hamstring tissue at near-maximal velocity is loaded in a way nothing else in training replicates. Not gym work. Not shuttles at eighty per cent. If the only time a player touches top speed is in a match, then the match is where his tissue meets its hardest demand cold, and that is a bad place for a first exposure.

The practical version is unglamorous. A short block of proper high-speed running every week, all year, adjusted around fixtures rather than dropped when the schedule is busy. It takes very few repetitions. It is the first thing cut when the week gets crowded, which is precisely when the players need it most.

There is a coaching politics problem here too. Technique work looks like coaching. It photographs well, it feels like expertise, and there is a visible drill to point at. Telling a squad to run fast three times sounds like nothing, and a staff member who proposes it has to defend an hour that appears empty.

None of this makes technique useless. A player who is grossly inefficient will benefit, and there is a real case in rehabilitation, where movement patterns often need rebuilding.

For everybody else, the question is not whether he runs beautifully. It is whether his hamstrings have been to top speed recently enough to remember it.