Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

wintertime maybe the best time to start with.
Any suggestions ? Special weightexercises, kind of plyo's, bounchings or just do many start in blocks?

i saw in an old book that Harmin Hary the German sprinter who was the fastest man in the 50', just 10" on 100m had a very quick reactiontime of 0.13 ", but now 55 years later others like Tim Montgomery and Surin Bruny could improve this time by 0.01".
Its not such a big improvement. Maybe there us a limit in reactiontimes.
Which methodes can we use to improve our reactiontime ?

You can try cheating/false starting.  That can work pretty well for a killer reaction.  I'm sure tons of people have achieved a reaction (cheating or not) under .10 but that's called a false start.

rrheyn - 01 December 2007 07:55 AM

wintertime maybe the best time to start with.
Any suggestions ? Special weightexercises, kind of plyo's, bounchings or just do many start in blocks?

How would weight exercises help something that is unrelated to pure reaction time?

Theoretically, you can register a faster reaction time if you apply pressure to the blocks faster, but you would still be reacting at the same time as you did before.

I think reaction time is one of those built in things and even if you could improve from an awful reaction time (I think this usually comes from thinking about the wrong thing or waiting to hear something rather than just having a poor nervous system or whatever) to the fastest possible legal reaction (.20 to .10), you still wouldn't be that much faster. Asafa can react in .3 and I could have 0 reaction and he would still destroy me and most others on this board.

Have someone stand behind you while you are standing. Put your hands on an imaginary ground and your head down like in the blocks. When they clap, shrug your shoulders as fast as possible. After about 6 times, try the same drill with a big arm split upon hearing the clap sound. Last, start from the same position and upon hearing the sound, immediately begin pumping the arms after the initial arm split.

It will help fire up your CNS. Do it on days when you do starts and when you race. It won't help your technique, but you might twitch/blink/move your arms/etc first. haha. After that you are on your own.

Just practicing your start and acceleration will do wonders for your sprint times as reaction time is still highly variable within subjects and the range seems to lie between .12 - .23s for reaction time and skewed towards the lower end at about .15s.  Even having the athlete think about the gun or the clap will slow reaction times, the thoughts of the athlete need to be on the first movement not the sound.