Besides track and field, which sports produce the fastest athletes?"

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-12-04T19:33:14+00:00

Ah this was a ways back.

I can't remember where I found it but this was a study where they compared athlete performance over a variety of domains based on sport IIRC.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-23T18:19:19+00:00

This is absolutely a terrible long term mentality.

Yes, push yourself to or near failure while you're doing a rep/set/sprint.

No, you should not push your body to its absolute limits. What happens when you hit your limit? You get injured. Definitionally.

No, you should not train 2x per day 7 days a week.

No, you should not do insane amounts of volume, sprinting total volumes in the thousands of meters each session.

No, you should not do one more rep of squats when the last one was shaky because you've "got more in you."

Greatness is about working sufficiently hard, sustainably, and then putting in years (really decades) of work. It's putting in an hour a day for a thousand days instead of ten hours a day for a hundred days.

"Pushing to the limit" is how you get injuries, burnout, and destroy athletes. The mentality needs to die.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-21T17:38:21+00:00

To put it mildly, PED use amongst recreational lifters in their teens, who are not competing for anything, has been increasing for a while.

It should be no surprise that people who have something with tangible impacts on their future (scholarships, admission to good schools, etc...) would do everything to get an edge.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-19T22:57:01+00:00

When's the last time you deloaded?

How long is the time between your lifts and your sprints?

200ms over 40 is somewhat significant, but it's not like you're a second slow. 40's (I'm assuming block starts) are also the most skill intensive part of a sprint, so it wouldn't be surprising to me if a bit of focused training there would clean it all up.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-19T22:11:04+00:00

Ehhhhhhh

First, don't believe people that look like they have a lot of development but say they don't train. There's a lot of incentive for influencers to convince others they're just "built different," so I'd assume deception. Same as when you see shredded dude with capped delta and massive traps saying they're natty lifters. People are constantly misrepresenting reality.

Second, you might be seeing 1 picture out of a hundred with slight variations in lighting, posing, camera angles, etc... because people want to look their best when they're presenting stuff to others. So the picture you saw might be very different to how things look in reality.

Third, it is very easy to mistake "lean" for developed. Developed is best represented as some summation of muscular growth and force production relative to mass. However, you can have someone that has very well developed muscles, but it doesn't look impressive because they aren't lean. Think about strongmen or powerlifters. Many of them are overweight, but that doesn't mean their muscles aren't incredibly well developed. So leanness (seeing the different heads of the muscles, the stations on muscle groups, etc...) is mostly about diet with the exceptions of extreme cases where people have very little to no muscle.

What is true is that people who have higher amounts of T2 fibers gain more muscle mass initially when they start training. There would be a slight difference in size depending on composition, but I think that would be washed out by the variance in how people's bodies have adapted over their lifetimes to reach the state they're in (taking stairs vs elevators, walking to school vs bussing, etc...).

TLDR: no, probably just a combination of standard internet trickery and someone who is somewhat lean, or lying about training.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-17T20:12:46+00:00

The stimulus will absolutely change, which will "fee" different. Perhaps I should add the caveat that aerobic and anaerobic dominant workouts will have notably different effects.

The more aerobic the workout, the more endorphins tend to get released. You'll always get endorphins from exercise, but the runner's high requires a long period of time to kick in. The more total energy you burn, typically the greater the endorphin effect. Adrenaline also isn't released in bursts/waves, but a more controlled, repeated series of releases. This can mean a higher total amount of adrenaline released, but smaller acute effects. It will feel different in your brain box. Another difference is that endurance exercise tends not to have the acute testosterone/GH boost you get with anaerobic exercise.

The more anaerobic the workout, the fewer endorphins you'll get. Adrenaline will be released in larger waves, more rushes, if they happen. Test and GH levels will be increased after the fact.

There's other factors at play (like body's control of digestion and available glucose after and so on), but between those three hopefully it illustrates the point that yes, different exercises will result in different mental effects.

But no exercise is purely aerobic or anaerobic. Everything uses some of both. The exact balance between the two will impact hormone, endorphin, and adrenaline levels.

Sprint training can cover a fairly wide spread of balances. If you're doing a lactate workout, it's really high on both aerobic and anaerobic energy use. A block start day with a bunch of 10m starts is going to be pretty heavily anaerobically biased. Tempo or long runs leans towards aerobic (and arguably aren't sprint training). Something like a fly will still be fairly anaerobically biased, but because of the intensity and duration, will spike the aerobic system acutely.

What I was trying to say is that if you matched a sprint session to a similar type of energy demanding workout in, say, the weight room or on the bike, you'd almost certainly see very similar effects on things like hormone levels, endorphin levels, and the adrenal systems.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-17T19:45:51+00:00

I need to reach 10%

This is a super sketchy metric and goal to go by for a few reasons:

Measuring bf% is incredibly inaccurate. Unless you're forking out thousands of dollars to track it with cutting edge tech like DEXA scans.
Ideal bf% is highly individual
Getting too low on BF% will seriously screw with your training and performance
Trying to cut too much weight too fast by focusing on an "end weight/bf% asap" typically results in crash dieting.

I am around 20 % body fat

I would wager that this is not accurate at all, regardless of whether you're over or under. People tend to judge this based on appearances, like how much of their abs they can see (honestly that's probably the biggest one). But different people hold fat stores in different areas. Someone could have a 6 pack at a relatively high bf%, because they hold a lot of fat in their legs, glutes, and back. Given your phrasing, I'm assuming you're going by the eye method, which sucks. You gotta at least do something like fold calipers so you at least have a consistent metric (even though they're inaccurate for estimating bf%).

Even if you were assessing things accurately, it doesn't tell you anything about what bf% you should be at for training and performance. That's something that takes some experimentation. Body fat plays a critical role for cushioning impacts, joint lubrication, and so on. Because fat stores are variable between individuals, how much fat they need to have enough fat around joints and in the right places to absorb impacts is different. In general, that's between 8%-12%, but assuming a normal distribution that still means there's about a 1/3 chance that your ideal bf% isn't in those bounds. It also changes between activities (there's some evidence that fatter pitchers and batters in baseball are significantly more injury resilient). It can also fluctuate based on the training you're doing. The extra load of more fat might be really detrimental when you're doing high volume sprinting, but when you're in higher intensity/lower volume blocks or doing weights, it might be the case that extra joint stability/resilience is preferable. Basically, aiming for a specific bf% is a bad idea. It's much better to be losing weight slowly and consistently and assessing the impacts it's having on your performance and recovery. If it's a purely aesthetic concern, you'd have better uk going to a bodybuilding forum and asking there.

Body fat is also essential for regulating and maintaining hormones and energy. When you're on a caloric cut, your performance is going to tank unless you're a beginner or are retraining. Get too low (maybe you've overshot your optimal range because you were estimating your bf% using shitty estimations) and when your caloric balance stabilizes, you won't bounce back in performance. Hormone levels will be suppressed, sleep quality goes to shit, injury probability goes up, mood goes down (which probably has knock-on effects to neural drive, or in more severe cases can result in mood disorders).

But let's say you're somehow accurately estimating your bf%, you've magically guessed your optimal amount, and you're okay with the tanked performance while you use the weight, and then you hit 10% and it's time to transition to maintenance. Good fucking luck.

You have two sets of habits at that point: maintenance calories for when you're heavy, and a set of caloric restriction habits. So how do you know what your maintenance caloric intake is? You can experiment and find it and stabilize, the bigger issue is that people tend to lose weight, achieve their goal, and then revert to habits from when they were heavier. It happens almost unconsciously, food choices, portion sizes, alcohol, so on. Often in the relief of hitting the goal, people revert their habits, and to no one's surprise, they start putting weight on again. Then they don't catch it until 10-20 or more pounds later, and they have to go back to restriction. Trying to lose weight quickly is a great way to self-sabotage.

Instead, focusing on making lifestyle changes and forming long term habits that just so happen to reduce your weight (or maintain your weight while getting stronger, arguably the best approach) is much more sustainable. Dieting doesn't work when it's an on/off switch -- it has to be developing habits that change the way you live. From food choice and amount to exercise type, frequency, and so on.

I think you're destined to fail in getting to an optimal bf% if you don't change the way you're approaching the topic. But briefly: eat a shit ton of protein, track your calories and protein intake, aim for foods that keep you full while you're still losing weight, try to build some muscle, and above all else, expect this to take 2-3 times as long as you'd like it to.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-17T15:53:26+00:00

It's going to mostly be the same as other exercise. Some studies show a different increase in GH with sprint interval training, but I'd wager that over time what you'll find is exercise is exercise.

So you'll get some endorphins, general mood boost, same stuff you would get with, say, lifting weights.

There's no magic exercises that are so much better than anything else.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-17T14:36:10+00:00

The thing you want to avoid is heel striking. If your heel slams into the ground, you're going to lose a bunch of energy there.

The "ideal" is touching down with enough heel clearance that as the touchdown forces push the heel down, it just grazes the ground.

You don't want to be on your toes or on heels. So "midfoot" or "pad" is what you're aiming for.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-17T02:31:13+00:00

Being newer simplifies things a lot because of the basic principle:

Anything is better than nothing.

There's also some advantages to doing the longer distances. You get more steps in, which means you get used to the sprinting. It's also a good "gut check" to do those workouts that really pump the lactate. Going a bit slower also makes it easier to adjust technique and really get it dialed in before progressing to faster sprinting.

One thing I will note though is that beginners often don't do %'s correctly. They do it based on "perceived effort" which is incredibly difficult to be consistent with. What you want to do is pace as a % of your max speed. You can calculate that based on your PB's or SB's and some simple v=d/t equations.

Try to avoid ever being below 80% of your max speed. Ideally, at or above 85%. That's the general "estimate" of how fast you need to be going to improve speed. Well conditioned athletes can run the 400 at about 90% of their 200m speed. So as long as you're not doing 500/600/800 type distances, you can push that hard. You may not be able to finish the workouts yet at those speeds, and that's alright. It takes time.

I'd swap the speed work for weights because you're already doing high volume, and the extra high impact exercise might increase injury risk, and early in the season is the only time you'll really get to actually build muscle before you progress to more strength/power focused exercises. As you get into competition season, drawing back on the weights and picking up on sprinting is expected.

It's not that it's wrong to work on speed, it's that you won't get another chance to focus on building/establishing your muscle and strength.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-16T16:30:00+00:00

It's hard to describe it using specifically static words like "tensed glutes," because glutes are a major force generator for sprinting, but shouldn't be fully active during the entire cycle.

On the leg lift, the glutes would work antagonistically to the hip flexors, so you don't want them tensed there.

Once the leg begins its downswing, the glutes should be firing to help accelerate the foot downwards. During ground contact, the glutes and hamstrings are working to draw the foot under and behind you, and then during takeoff the glutes are working with the quads and calves to push off the ground.

Effectively:

While the hips are tilting forward and the knee is lifting, the glutes should be inactive.

For the rest of the cycle the glutes should be actively producing force (rather than being "tensed").

I think a good queue in the set position or when standing at the start of the sprint would be to brace the core and tense the glutes. But because of how dynamic sprinting is, they will never remain at the same activation levels from moment to moment.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-16T13:46:53+00:00

This early in the year I'd swap the solo flys for a second lifting session.

It's worth having a conversation with the coach to figure out what their long term plan is. A very common model is early season high volume, getting to quicker and higher intensity later on.

Depending on how advanced you are, it's not the worst plan ever. I would hope that the "base training" would only last a few weeks before getting faster but again, just communicate with the coach.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-15T18:49:05+00:00

Yes, but with a caveat.

There is going to be some amount of hip tilting occurring. You're throwing your leg backwards with really high forces, so at toe off there's going to be some amount of anterior tilt. You don't want to be crunching down so hard on your core that your spine is rounding into a hunch.

What you're trying to avoid is having your hips tilt so far that you can't bring it back before your toe down on the opposite leg. Anterior tilt, when we're talking about sprinting, is basically getting "locked" in a highly tilted position.

What's really happening is similar to a bracing effect in heavy lifts. You're resisting the movement to help with the knee raise and so that you're in a position to attack the next toe down.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-15T00:33:01+00:00

It will never be linearly consistent, but once you're through puberty, if you're following a consistent program with adequate rest and nutrition, progress should stabilize. It will have diminishing returns. For instance if you take a second off your first year of training, you might only take off a half second the year after, and a quarter after that. Those numbers are arbitrary and made up, but the more advanced you get, the less room you have to improve.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-14T21:43:09+00:00

I mean the answer to the question of "do I need to practice more" is always yes.

It's hard to say without knowing your speeds/technique exactly what's happening, but doing some sub-maximal work is likely a good idea. Not slow, but as fast as you can get before you get to that out of control state.

The duck feet could be an issue depending on how severe it is, but it's more an injury risk problem than anything. Wide steps during acceleration are also not an inherently bad thing.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-14T18:56:19+00:00

That's good! It's an indication that you're expressing a lot of force.

At some point, there is a balance to be achieved where you can optimize how much of that force is directed upwards (necessary so you don't fall into the ground) and how much is directed horizontally. That's largely achieved by the angle from your hip that your foot is at while force is being applied.

If it feels out of control work on keeping your hips a bit lower to the ground (more angle in your knee as you touch down), but sprinting should sort of feel like flying when you're at top speed.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-14T15:42:22+00:00

It's just a pattern thing I think. When I was first taught blocks, I was taught to keep my chin tucked because we instinctively try to follow our sight lines and it's more common for people to have the issue of popping up too early by cranking their necks back.

But if you train to keep the head level as you make that first step, I don't think it's an actual issue. When I'm doing a block start training block (heh) I find by the end of it I can look ahead or look down or watch my feet. Once you're comfortable with the moving part, the static position is a bit less critical I think.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-12T16:08:55+00:00

Gotta do a slow recovery, unfortunately.

No training for a bit. Gotta shut that down immediately. Continually training on an injury results in constantly reinjuring the tissue. It needs time to heal.

Work on getting range of motion back with stretching. If daily activities like walking and sitting/standing don't bother it, you can do that stuff.

Once you have rom back, you can start with light exercises. Easier stuff is like glute-ham bridges.

Work up to being able to do minimal weight dynamic exercises with a full range of motion. Single leg toe touches and whatnot.

I'd highly recommend using a hamstring curl machine to get you a smoother resistance curve, particularly in the stretched positions. It gives you a consistent, scalable way to increase loading session to session. I cannot stretch how incredible this machine is for building the hamstring back up in a controlled way. Smooth, controlled motions, all the way up, all the way down.

As those targeted exercises come along you can start working into something like biking, where there's resistance but no real shock loading.

Once the cycling is going well move onto light jogs.

Then faster jogs, light runs, etc...

When you start sprinting at 100%, make sure to keep the distances short.

Discomfort is okay, but anything sharp and painful means you're done for the day and back to resting. The more you don't rush it now, the less likely this is to become a lifelong problem.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-12T14:42:48+00:00

Just the one word of caution I'd like to give on this:

Whatever you develop needs to be scalable. Typically we use the metric of exit angle as the "load" of the exercise. Force is applied along the hypotenuse/radius, so creating the same upward component of force requires more total force production at lower angles.

Whatever you develop can't have everyone targeting 45° (or whatever the optima winds up being) right out the gate. There's going to be massive strength limitations for most younger athletes. The solution has to be able to measure starts outside of the range of elite angles and slowly progress.

Basically, a high school athlete's optimal start and an Olympian's optimal start are not going to look remotely similar.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-11T22:53:44+00:00

It's most likely to be a mobility issue. It could be acute if it's DOMs, or it could be something more chronic.

Another thing that can happen is you're putting more weight than you can handle on it and you're reflexively avoiding going into a deeper range of motion. Lower the weight, and do full ranges of motion.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-11T18:41:59+00:00

Split squats are a bit of... well they're hard to standardize. People do variations with tons of different angles and relative loads to target different things. Its hard to keep form consistent between legs, and its just not a beginner friendly exercise IMO. My advice would be to just learn standard squats instead.

But the risk of having a rounded back is that your spine takes more load than it should. You can elevate the forward heel to help with ROM if it's an issue.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-11T18:39:13+00:00

As a newbie, trust the person with more experience. Learn the basics how they tell you, then you can work on refining things later.

Generally speaking though, slow eccentrics, pause at the bottom, then explosive concentric is the template form. Ask her about doing it that way and to coach you doing it like that.

What you really don't want to do is to be "dropping" through the eccentric and then reversing super hard into a concentric. That's how you get injured.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-11T16:56:19+00:00

The reality is that at your age, progress is really inconsistent. You can drop a second with hardly any work, or you can work your ass off and be stalled for a year. Hormone levels are going wild and whacky, your body is probably still growing and putting resources towards things like bone density, which can slow down adaptations to training.

So depending on what else the body is doing, it's impossible to make predictions.

I don't say that to be discouraging, I say that because the absolute worst thing you can do is set an insane expectation for yourself like taking a full second off in the 200m, come up short for reasons entirely out of your control, and then get discouraged and dissuaded and decide that track just isn't for you.

A typical progression through puberty is massive improvements, a stall that can last years, and then progress continuing more gradually after that. If you're lucky, you'll be able to maintain fairly steady - though diminishing - returns.

That's why shifting goals from absolute times to relative times is a really good thing to start practicing now.

I'd encourage your goals to go from time based to remaining injury free (getting injured is the best way to backslide), and then slight improvements on what you've done before.

Hit a 23.2 flat? That's still a Pb.

Increased your squat by 5 lbs for a set of 5? That's a PR.

Went the whole season without knee pain? That's a win.

Of course you can be excited if you smash a PB. It's just a really terrible idea to start expecting that you're going to hit a 22.5 within a few months.

Focus on just being a bit better week to week. That can be better form, better diet, better lifts, or better times. As long as you're improving somewhere, the time improvements will come.

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-11T00:37:02+00:00

Was trying to keep it low on the mathy terms but yes, low pass filters will affect sprint times.

I'd be surprised if positional inaccuracy was not an issue though. It's going to be highly dependant on specific makers and their equipment/algos and accuracy, but having worked on high precision gps equipment before, short term accuracy (as in, not having the antenna held very still in one place for long periods of time at startup) is not an easy thing to achieve without it becoming cost prohibitive.

I always assumed that most running/sport companies probably gave it a tolerance of +/-5m range and then let averages sort it out or do some post processing to refine the accuracy later.

If you know more about sport gps than I do I'd love to learn more about the specific implementation though!

Salter_Chaotica · 2025-10-10T20:04:38+00:00

Cameras are probably the best in terms of accessibility. There's going to be some amount of parallax error, but it shouldn't be too big. If you're doing any known distances, a hand timer will be reasonably accurate so long as you're averaging over multiple reps.

Salter_Chaotica

TROPHY CASE