Interesting article on Plyometrics

[ATZ]

http://www.elitefts.com/documents/speed_development_technique.htm

Found it trawling about on Elitefts, in short, there have been no found scientific links between sprinting speeds and Plyometrics, or of those studies done they found plyometrics to be no better for sprinting speed than actual (yep you guessed it) sprinting itself.

[chi]

This was also an interesting article on plyometrics, especially his comments on the volume to be performed each week.

http://www.michaelboyle.biz/joomla/dmdocuments/plyospb.pdf

[BFT]

Is it me or has he conluded the opposite of what the studies he referenced have shown?

This study seems to have been the bone of contention:
Rimmer and Sleivert (2000) compared the effects of sprint-specific plyometric training against traditional sprint training on 10-meter and 40-meter sprint times. The plyometrics group showed significant decreases in both 10-meter and 40-meter times. However, these improvements weren’t significantly different from the sprint group. In their conclusion, the authors state that sprint-specific plyometrics can improve 40-meter sprint times by the same extent as traditional sprint training possibly through decreasing ground contact times.

However I believe it to be a little missleading, comparing plyometrics and traditonal sprint training resulted in similar improvements. What about the addition of plyometrics to traditional training, would that not produce the best results?

[ap]

I was talking someone about plyometrics the other day who owns his own private strength and conditioning gym, and he works with professional sports teams (the likes of Bath RFC and Chelsea FC). I remember him saying something along the lines of how some short plyometric training before the actual sprint training (almost used as a 'warmup' of sorts) can act positively on the speed of muscle fibre contraction, which will bridge over into the actual sprint sessions.

So, I guess if this is true, plyometrics could have their place, yet still within the framework of 'you need to sprint to sprint quicker'

[DelBoy]

Interesting, I spoke to my friend who is a female 100m sprinter (going to Bejing Olympics for GB team) and she says she doesn't use plyometrics as a mainstay of her training, as AP stated, she does a very little amount due to a lot of the exercises high impact nature, she does more bounding and leaping combined with depth rebound jumps and little else.
She says that people would make much quicker improvements to their speed through technique work rather than weight training or plyometrics, so those who have a serious desire to increase their speed are better off seeing a running coach rather than attempting to perform a heavily structured speed program, which makes sense because there is no point in generating extra force if the force is not used efficiently for motion.

[ATZ]

Well bouding, leaping and depth rebound jumps are plyometrics by definition but I understand the point you were trying to make! :)

[DelBoy]

she says she doesn't use plyometrics as a mainstay of her training, as AP stated, she does a very little amount .

:031:

Going to a running club is something I am going to do, will help massively to improve my speed. Is the same with all sports, technique improvement is required to make improvements, but many people forget this with sprinting.

[ap]

Agree Delboy - The guy I was talking about above concurred with this, and said that for teaching speed and agility, he doesn't look at times as a progression for these drills, he looks at form and efficiency of movement, especially for lateral agility.

[DelBoy]

A guy who I used to occasionally train with, Brimah Kebbie, ex england rugby player discussed at length the importance of lateral movements in sport and training methods for these, primarily aimed at why he thought Dwain Chambers would struggle in rugby. He mentioned that NFL use a lot of good drills for developing multi dimensional speed and agility and gave me some good sites to look at.