The Impact of Hand Positions on Acceleration and Top Speed

Today’s episode features John Garrish, director of athletic development & performance at North Broward Preparatory School in Coconut Creek, Florida, and the school’s head track and field coach.  John has previously served as the Director of Athletic Performance with the Florida Rugby Union’s High-Performance Program 7’s team, and has been involved in numerous other strength and sport coaching roles. He also serves as the National High School Strength Coaches Association Regional Board Member for the Southeast. John is a passionate, creative and detail oriented coach, who distributes his methods freely through his social media outlets.  At North Broward prep, John has the challenges of teaching speed and athletic movement to large groups of athletes at a time.  In doing so, he has implemented a variety of unique mini-hurdle variations with arm position, as well as hand and finger positioning, these each having unique impacts on the athletes.  John is a tremendous compiler of data and sprint images, and it was a joy to pick his brain on his speed training implementation and discoveries. On the show today, John covers his management of the weight room at North Broward and how he manages large groups of athletes with a small support staff.  He describes his use of gallops and various skips as an important part of his warm-up process, and then gets into all of the mini-hurdle speed constraints in his program, which is a true highlight.   This was a fantastic episode on speed training for not just the high school athlete, but any athlete seeking improved speed and explosive ability. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Key Points John’s management of the weight room at North Broward Prep John’s assessment process having a large number of athletes John’s use of gallops and skips in training his athletes Progressions as young athletes pass through John’s program Various constraints John utilizes in his flying sprint training How John has experimented with various hand positions during sprinting “Usually what I look for (in assistant high school coaches) there is I find the teachers on campus that the students love, because there’s something different about them and they bring out passion in the students” “The kids know there is going to be some sort of assessment on a daily basis” “My first 3-4 years I avoided the 40 yard dash like the plague, but I was timing 30m dashes, and kids were asking what it would be in their 40 yard dash” “I think the more we get back to skips, and gallops and hops and jumps, the better for the long term development of our kids” “Once we started (skips) going for speed, seeing some positions the athletes found themselves in was pretty cool to see” “From a standpoint of those fly’s and sprints we’re testing, there are 3 big challenges we are going to look at for our students: There is an overhead.  Rotation is big.  And then also drills that help us focus on better front-side action (but realizing what’s happening within context with the ground.” “One of the things I was seeing (running fly sprints with a stick overhead) is I was seeing an over-correction and an excessive arch in the spine, and it might look good in a kinogram, but it wasn’t what our students need was” “If we use constraints, (we) still use rotation, they’ve never over-corrected with too much rotation” “I started toying with different hand positions with pulsers or weights (during fly sprints), I don’t think that’s a thing we looked at much during the first three years” “Normal grip with the pulsers, or anything in the hands, with acceleration that was really forceful, but when we got to upright running, it wasn’t how I wanted it to be” “What you saw the hand starting to do,