Sprinting

We are all natural-born sprinters. How many times did you sprint as a child—after a friend, a dog, a baseball, a Frisbee, a dream, a phantom? Forgot, didn’t you? It had to have been thousands of times. Study after study has shown how effective and efficient sprinting is for fitness. We won’t bore you with all the technical details behind sprinting, except to mention a few eye-opening studies, then we’ll move straight to some cool sprinting techniques and protocols.

One of the most impressive aspects of sprinting, or interval training, is that studies show it tends to slow the aging process in terms of the cardiovascular system and the specific leg muscles involved with sprinting, such as the Type II “fast twitch” fibers in your quadriceps or thigh muscles. Your skeletal muscles include Type I slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are less powerful but take longer to fatigue, and the faster-fatiguing “fast-twitch” fibers—Type IIa (slightly longer to fatigue) and Type IIx.