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How to Quicken my Startup

by Jason
(Centreville, VA)

My name is Jason and I am 18 years old. I play defense in lacrosse for my high school, and next year will be starting college lacrosse. One of my strengths in playing is that I am very fast, once I start going. The problem for me is that it takes me some time to start up and gain speed.

For my position, it is very helpful if one can go from a stationary position to a full sprint quickly. I was wondering what I can do over this summer to quicken my startup speed? I was thinking a combination of lifting weights and conditioning, but what kind of lifting and what kind of conditioning I am unsure of.

I weigh about 160 pounds if this helps at all, and my upper body strength is very good, but have always lacked a little in the legs. Any and all help here would be much appreciated. Thank you. -Jason


Answer by Dominique:


Hi Jason,
Thanks for your running training question.
I am not too sure about the weight lifting. It can help improve your overall fitness, it can help make you leaner. So it probably should be part of your training program, but I'd expect more from the stuff below:

1) Plyometric exercises
These are exercises that help you increase your explosivity. A few examples are double/single leg forward hops or sideway hops, vertical jumps etc.

2) Practise very short sprints
E.g. sprints over 10, 20 metres or so. Just practice going from stand-still to full motion over and over again. This in itself can be seen as a plyometric exercise.

3) Reading the play
The key to getting faster to the ball or to where you need to be is sometimes not in being faster but leaving earlier, i.e. reading the play better than your opponents! This is of course less easily trained, although there are plenty of ideas out there about visualisation, concentration exercises etc. which can help make you that little bit more alert.

I am more of a long-distance runner so feel free to browse around or get some other opinions on the matter, but I am pretty sure that many sprint / speed coaches would advise you to do plyometric exercises.

Hope this helps.
Best of luck.
Cheers,
Dominique