Top speed is a rhythm problem more than an engine problem

Two sprinters with identical strength can be half a second apart because one cannot organise the timing.

Put two athletes on a force plate and you can get nearly identical numbers out of them. Same peak force, same rate of development, same jump heights. Then send them down a straight and one runs eleven flat while the other runs ten five. The gym did not lie. It simply was not measuring the thing that separated them.

Running fast is a timing act. The swing leg has to be repositioned and already driving downward before the foot arrives, the hips have to stay high through the contact, and the arms have to do something useful rather than fight the rotation the legs create. All of it inside a window of about a fifth of a second, repeated forty times, with nothing arriving late. Miss the timing anywhere and force that exists in a laboratory never reaches the track.

Which is why I get impatient with strength as the explanation for everything. Strength is a permission slip. It sets what is possible and it does not set what happens. A sprinter who has added twenty kilos to a squat over a winter and run the same time has not wasted the winter, but they have found the limit of that particular lever, and the next gain is coordination.

Coordination work is where coaching gets contentious, because it means drills, and drills have a mixed reputation for good reason. A drill that does not resemble the timing of running teaches a rhythm you then have to unlearn. Marching skips at walking pace share almost nothing with the neural demand of a leg cycling at speed. I would rather use short flying runs, wickets set to force a particular contact pattern, and sprints down a slight incline where the athlete has to organise themselves quicker than is comfortable.

The uncomfortable part of my argument is that some of this may not be very trainable in adults. Athletes who move well tend to have moved well since they were twelve, and the ones who learned it late are rarer than coaches like to admit. I still think the ceiling sits higher than most people assume.

You will not find out by adding weight to a bar, though. That question was answered two winters ago.