#1 Speed Training Question to RunningThe number one question I get from coaches and parents and trainers. And that is what is step over, drive down and what does it mean and why is it so important because it's a question I talk about all the time. Pretty much every article I've read, every program and resource that I've created, I refer to this idea of step over, drive down all the time.
So what I want to do is show you what step over, drive down is, what it should look like, and why it's so important. And in order to do that I'm going to have to get up from behind the desk is. So that can only mean one thing, my friends. Field trip! Okay, so we're going to talk about step over, drive down today. And we could get all technical and complicated, but I'm just going to break it down to its most simple form in a way that's easy to understand and easy to teach to your athletes because that's the most important thing. So when you think about it in basic terms what we want to do when we run, this is our free leg when we're running, we want to bring that – recover our heel up underneath our butt and drive the foot right back down into the ground. That's how we want to run. The more force you can apply to the ground, the farther and faster you're going to go. It's Newton's second law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And that's the principle we're trying to apply here. And so what we're trying to get our athletes to do no matter what sport they play is to be able to put themselves in the most mechanical and efficient position to apply that force to the ground. So the problem that you're going to see in most of your athletes and you'll start to see this next time you go to practice is that a lot of times athletes have too much back-side mechanics meaning they run, all the action takes place behind them, looks like they're doing a big hamstring curl behind them. So by the time they get their leg back around, all they can do is drop the foot underneath them. Right? And so they're running like this. You see athletes running a little bit forward and running back here and dropping that foot. You see that a lot of times in like distance runners and soccer players that have been doing too much distance work instead of doing a lot of speed work or running on the balls of their feet. So when you have athletes running like this, you're not stepping over the opposite knee and driving the foot in the ground, they're slow. End of conversation. The other problem you see a lot of times with young athletes is they have too much front-side mechanics. I had this problem when I was growing up. The high school and colleges never identified it and that's why I always had hamstring problems. So when you have athletes who have too much front-side mechanics, you run into similar problems. That is, they're going to be slow. Now because what a lot of athletes do is they come out and that foot strike takes place out in front. So if you think about it, you were to pause where their foot strike takes place, this is not a powerful position to run in. You can't run fast from this position. I don't care what sport that you play.
So you have a lot of athletes landing with their foot strike out in front of them and so now they're putting a lot of pressure on their hamstring and now they have to pull themselves just to get back to the position we wanted them to be in in the first place which is foot strike taking place underneath their hips so they can maximize their force output. Remember, we're trying to get athletes to extend through the hip with every step they take no matter what sport. Hip extension, the ability to drive that foot down and get extension to the hip, that's the most powerful force that the human body can create, hip extension. And so we want to as mechanical and efficient as possible when we get that hip extension and apply that force. So you have an athlete with too much back-side mechanics and they're dropping that foot, it's slow, it's inefficient. You have athletes with front-side mechanics landing like this, it's slow, it's inefficient. You have athletes that also run heel to toe where they land like this where the heel comes down first. I don't care what sport you play, I don't care how good you think you are, if you land on your heels first, you're slow. End of conversation. You're not stepping over and driving that foot down into the ground like you need to. That's how you run fast. You watch any good athlete in any sport, the fastest ones recover that foot, step over, and drive the foot down into the ground. If you can teach your athletes to do that, they're going to be faster. From a mechanical standpoint, from a coaching and chewing in practice standpoint, that is what you need to do, teach your athletes how to step over, drive down. So the question becomes, well, what can you do in order to teach that skill. Well, the first thing that you can do, of course, is just drills. Speed drills. Your A skips and your fast legs and your A runs. You teach your athletes how to re-train the way their bodies move. If they've been doing the same thing, running the same way for five, ten years, you can't expect them to be – just erase that and fix it all in a week. So you have to teach them speed drills the correct way in order to make that happen. You want to teach your athletes how to get triple extension. Well, how do you teach triple extension? Doesn't matter what situation you're in or what sport you play, we teach athletes that a triple extension, whether we're doing pleads where we're squatting and dead lifting, from plyos and bounding exercises, medicine ball throws, you teach triple extension through a variety of means in order to develop overall athleticism and the ability to move out of multiple different positions. So I don't care if you're a track sprinter or a soccer player or a football player, the ability to apply force to the ground. And so when you run, that ability to be running, recover the heel underneath the butt and step over and drive that foot down to the ground and get extension through the hips, that is the key to running fast. That is what you must teach your athletes. So whether you're talking about doing hurdle mobility exercise and dynamic warm ups in order to increase the flexibility required to get through that range of motion, speed drills, weight room, plyos, this is why if you want to be a good athlete regardless of sport. You must take a well-rounded, multi-lateral approach to training that's going to make you a better overall athlete and not just focus on sport-specific skills or one type of movement pattern. Overall athletic development is going to put your athletes in the most mechanical and efficient position to get the most out of their bodies. That is what step over, drive down is, the ability to recover the heel underneath the butt, step over the opposite knee with the active leg heel, a little bit of that cyclical action, recover, step over the knee and drive the foot down to the ground landing on the ball of the foot with the foot landing under the hips. Get your athletes to do that, they will get faster. Doesn't matter what you're doing for program design. Doesn't matter what sport you're playing. Doesn't matter what's going on in the world. Get your athletes to step over, drive down, they're going to get faster. End of conversation. So this is Latif Thomas. Thanks for watching today's mail bag. That covers the question that most people ask. Feel free to post any questions you have or success stories you've had doing this down below. I'll be back again next week with my next mail bag on another topic of questions we've been getting.
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