The block start is a strength problem wearing a technique costume

Coaches spend hours adjusting pedal positions for athletes who cannot yet push hard enough to use them.

Move the front pedal a notch. Then move it back. Then film it from the side, argue about shin angle, and repeat the whole thing next Tuesday. I have watched this ritual on a hundred cold mornings and I have come to think it is mostly theatre for athletes below a certain strength level.

The block start is a shove. The athlete is applying large horizontal force through two feet against a fixed object for roughly a third of a second, and the reason most people are slow out is not that the geometry is wrong. It is that they cannot generate the force in the time available. Put a weak athlete in a perfect set position and they will still be sixth at ten metres, because the position only determines the direction of a force that has to exist first.

Which does not make geometry worthless. It makes it a multiplier, and multiplying a small number gets you a small number. A sprinter who can produce a lot of force in a hurry gets a real return from a better shin angle, a lower first step, a more aggressive rear leg drive. A sprinter who cannot gets a slightly prettier version of the same time.

There is a second thing worth arguing about. The set position that gets copied off television belongs to people built quite differently from the average club athlete. Long femurs change everything about where the hips should sit. Copying the hip height of a world champion because it looked good in a photograph is how you end up with an athlete whose first step lands underneath them, killing the low projection you were trying to buy.

The training that fixes starts is heavy and it happens indoors. Loaded pushing. Split squat work through an honest range. Sled pushes with enough weight that the athlete looks slow, which is the point, because the heavy ones teach force and the light ones teach a rehearsed impression of speed.

Then once a year spend an afternoon on pedals. Get it roughly right. Leave it alone.

The stopwatch at ten metres will tell you which half of the year mattered, and in my experience it has never once been the afternoon.