Sprinty, what is that? No I have not lost it yet, don’t run
to your Oxford English dictionary for a definition, you won’t find one. Sprinty
has been in my coaching lexicon from the time I started coaching my daughter.
She
used " sprinty" to describe how she felt when things were humming, when she was explosive,
light, fast, quick like she was floating over the ground. I noticed this quality
with her as I had noted with generations of other athletes before her. When she
was sprinty, ground contact was quieter; every movement was more connected and
flowing. There was a sensation of minimal effort. Kristen did a great job of
articulating, in one concise term, a phenomenon I had seen over the years. I
wish I had a good scientific definition for you, but I think sprinty falls into
the art of coaching realm. We need to learn to recognize it and then build on
it. I know it is easy to train out of the athlete by trying to do more, that is
for sure.
In the training process you can’t always be sprinty, that would be unrealistic but you don’t want to get too far away from it, because if you do it is tough to get it back quickly. I have found that I need to so something that elicits sprintyness as part of each training session – something that excites the nervous system, something that gets them wired and connected each day. It does not have to be much, but it needs to be sharp and contextual. I want to have the athletes leaving the workout more often than not like big butterflies, light and bouncy rather than like ponderous elephants, slow and heavy. If each workout is an end unto itself and they are constantly being hammered in workouts, then they will be slow, unresponsive to the ground, disjointed and out of sync. Sound familiar, we have all done and call it a good training sessions. No, that is not the way to do it, get them sprinty and to quote Muhammad Ali, they will ” Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”