I'm here at beautiful Malibu High School and I'm with the one and only Stu McMillan who is a sprints coach and is considered one of the premier sprints coaches in the world. He's highly revered, he's highly sought after because he's the man with the knowledge about how to sprint better and faster and he has a lot of knowledge about running in general and today I want to learn how to actually sprint properly.

Perfect, let's do it. All right, first of all, we're not going to go for a jog. Sprinters are not joggers. It's a very, very different gait pattern. We don't jog at all. The way in which we warm up typically is we skip and stride. So we sprint, but really, really slowly and skipping is a gait pattern that is very, very similar to sprinting.

So if you think about what happens when you skip, there's stiffness at the ankle, at the knee and the hip, and there's a systemic stiffness and they coordinate together to keep you tall and bouncy. When you jog, you kind of roll through your ankle, you roll through your knee, and you just kind of push your way around the track or push your way around the grass.

So we're going to skip instead. It'll just look like this. So the legs stay straight, allow the arms just to bounce back and forth. So a couple of differences between kind of jogging and running fast or striding or sprinting. You said you want to kind of learn how to stride.

So that's the right terminology because really we're not going to sprint. Sprinting is something that very, very few people can actually do. We can get into the science behind that, but you can stride. And the difference is really striding kind of happens in front of the center mass. Everything's out here.

We're jogging and running kind of happened back here behind the center. So when we do this, we're going to do a stride right now. Really slow, like jogging speed, but think about it happening in front of the center mass. So all you're going to be thinking about is pulling your thighs forward and jogging in front.

Okay. Don't reach out or anything. It just, it'll kind of look like this if I do it in front of you. Just that, just bringing your thigh in front and not leaving the foot behind you. So do I want to think about a little bit like instead of a high knee, it's a low knee.

It's a low knee. The only cue is pull the thigh forward and be flat on the ground. And I'll tell you why flat on the ground in a minute. Okay. Just like this. Yeah. You got it now. Yeah. It took you a few steps. So you're there. You're there now.

I had to get my arms into it for it to start happening. Yeah. So one of the other big differences between running and sprinting is the postural considerations. Posture and jogging and running is kind of closed. Everything's down here. It's very, very efficient. Sprinting is really expressive. It's very tall where you're using your entire body.

Jogging is kind of a lower body activity. Sprinting is a total body activity. So think about boxing. So if you were to hit a heavy bag as hard as you can, you're going to squeeze your wrist and hold your wrist as stiff as you can and squeeze your fist as tight as you can.

Because if you hit it, there's a lot of forces there. In fact, the peak forces when you hit a heavy bag is upwards of five times body weight. It's actually the same is what they are when you're sprinting. You wouldn't hit a heavy bag like this. So you shouldn't really sprint with a really, really relaxed ankle as well.

So the way I try to teach them how to impact the ground is to be as stiff as you can, as if you're hitting a heavy bag over and over and over again. So when we're doing the skip now, I want you to be really stiff through the ankle, really tall and really expressive through the entire body.

So just there, stiff, stiff. So you can feel if you, you might be able to hear the pop of my feet. Relax your arms. There you go. Right. As soon as I get my arms into it, it's okay to kind of catch some air. Yes. Perfect. I'll just walk on back.

Think about landing flat footed. Flat foot. So you hear that little pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. So remember, jogging is back here. Sprinting is in front. Okay. Easy. Just nice and easy. Pull the thighs forward, pull them forward, pull them forward, pull them forward. Great. So let's skip again.

So we're going to skip down to the chair. Okay. Find a little bit more height and a little bit more pop. And again, really expressive posture. Okay. Just think about expressing yourself. You're up here, allow your shoulders to bounce and to rock and to roll a little bit. Come here, your feet.

Hop. There you go. There you go. Great. Good. We'll walk on back. So we'll typically do that eight times for about 15, 20 minutes rather than jogging. So do you recommend not jogging before a sprint workout, actually? 100%. Interesting. I recommend, if anything, and this is the last one we're going to do here is just, you know, this in front of you.

That's difficult for many people. That's a different and a difficult coordination pattern. Everybody can skip. Mm-hmm. So I recommend skipping. What I would do rather than, you know, rather than jogging prior to a sprint practice is skip, walk, skip, walk, skip, walk, until you're at a point where you think, okay, I can run a bit faster now.

Do a couple faster runs and then get into it. That's how I would do it. Stiff ankle, pulling a thigh in front, relax the arms, good posture, very expressive, okay? Pull in front, pull in front, pull in front, and the knee can start coming up a little bit higher now as well.

A little taller, taller. Now, when we actually start sprinting, it'll just be that, but it'll be a bigger range of motion. Like, what that is called now is called a dribble. So it's really a truncated range of motion sprint. So if you take the full sprint and you just put it in half, that's kind of what we just did there.

It's called a dribble. Sprinting, as I said, is a whole body activity. The spine probably being, if not the most important part of that, one of the most important part of it. So we have to get some movement of the spine. So if you think about sprinting, the hips oscillate and they undulate.

They come forward and back and they go up and down. And the shoulders counter-oscillate and counter-undulate. So it ends up looking like this. And then you have this spine that rotates, laterally flexes, and extends and flexes to basically counteract all these forces that are going on in the shoulder and the hips.

So it has to move. All right, so the ability for the shoulder blade to glide up and down the ribcage. Really important, right? So remember where the shoulders are doing this and the shoulder blades are going and the ribcage is also moving as well. If you see people who don't do this well, what you see is the torso just stacked and square, and the arms are sort of doing this, and the shoulder blades not moving.

The shoulder blades have to move. Like the ones who really look efficient and athletic, it looks like this, right? You can tell. So the next one is that. We'll do an elbow push-up. So we're on our elbows here. We take our shoulders down to our fists. So we sink all the way in, protract the scapula.

We push up into a dolphin position. There. I'm going to sink in, come forward, drop all the way down, almost to the ground. Like, don't rest on the ground. So your scapula is right there. Squeeze, push up, and then push your scapulas away from the ribcage on the way up.

Like so. Sink all the way in. Perfect. That's great. Great. We'll do the same thing. We'll do three where you go super slow, and then three where you just flow through it pretty quickly. Trying to create the same shapes that you're doing when you're doing them slow. Love that.

Really good job. Slight variation of that. This is pretty similar. We're going to be in a side plank position here. Front foot is on top of the back foot. You're going to take the free arm, rotate under as we rotate, and drop that shoulder down to that fist to here, and then rotate all the way back up.

So this is an exercise just for this shoulder, really. Rotate all the way under, all the way back up, and then reach up. Three where you go really slow. Three where you flow pretty fast. Nice work. Rotate the feet. There you go. Good. Yeah. Really good. So we're going to go in a tall kneeling position.

So this tall kneeling position is here. We're going to take one leg. We're going to put it out to the side. Try to get your entire foot on the ground, and it's not open. It's not here. So the whole foot goes down there. You push actively into the floor hard.

Okay. Arms are going to go above your head. You're going to squeeze over to this side. Hold for three seconds, actively pushing. So one, two, three. Come back over. We come this way. Don't lose the tension on the leg that's pushing into the ground. One, two, three. Come this way.

Great. Now you do five or six on each leg. All right. So we're going to go into a half kneeling position. So 90 degrees on the front, 90 degrees on the back. From this position here, we're going to posteriorly rotate the pelvis. So just tuck the pelvis. Let's start off with both hands go up.

We rotate to that side and then rotate back towards that back foot. So you're here, side bend, rotate back, hold for three seconds, and then come back out of it. Maintain that posterior pelvic tilt. So now we're combining some of the patterns of the spine. See if you remember the spine flexes, extends, lateral reflexes, and rotates.

And we're kind of doing all of the things here except for the flexion. That feels good. There, side bend. Yeah, exactly. So this is kind of what it looks like when you're sprinting. You've got hip extension. You've got posterior rotation of the pelvis. You have lateral flexion and extension of the spine all at the same time.

And that feels good. Yeah, it's good, right? So we try to coordinate and even combine some of these rotational stuff, what's called the spinal engine patterns, with this hip extension pattern. So that's kind of what we'll do now. So we're going to take it off the ground and go into a split squat position.

We're actually going to hold this for 30 seconds. Go with that? Cool, we're trying it. A little bit of internal rotation with the front foot. The back foot is going to be, if you're hip width there, just go straight back and then out just by a few inches. Internally rotate there.

Drop into a lunge, where the front foot is directly on top of the laces of the front foot. So we're in this position. The front. And then push that back knee down. And then from this position now, we're going to pull the front heel towards the back foot. So actively, you should feel now your hamstring engaging.

Pulling the front foot forward so hard. You might be able to start, you might feel yourself starting to shake a little bit. Yeah. From this position now, we're going to rotate. Yeah. And then you side bend. Yep. Side bend. Rotate some more. Side bend some more. Actively pull that front heel back.

Feel the hamstring. How much more rotation can you get? Can you suck your pelvis back underneath you a little bit more? There, Andrew. Yep. A little bit more posterior rotation. Great. A little bit higher, a little taller. Keep the front knee forward. Just keep pulling back with the left foot.

And then we slowly come back up. Great. So again, we're kind of just combining the important kind of secondary moving patterns in sprinting. The ability to extend the hip and the ability to move the spine. So let's do the other leg. And start pulling and just sink yourself into it.

Pull yourself into the ground. Try to breathe as naturally as you can. Keep pulling, keep pulling, keep pulling. This is what we call the dynamic mobility portion of the warm-up now. So we're going to skip. And every third step, we're going to drop into a lunge. All right, so it'll look like this.

So skip, skip, drop, up, reach, skip, skip, drop, up, reach. Again, we're working on that hip extension pattern. Everything we do from the warm-up is really trying to get better access or gain better access to hip extension. Skip, skip, skip, drop, good. Reach both hands up. Push the rear knee back up as well.

Straighten the back leg. That's awesome. Great. In this portion of the warm-up, we try to move the body in three planes, three velocities, and three types of range of motion. So we've gone forward. Now we're going to go sideways. Really, I mean, we've got a lot of sort of lateral forces, rotational forces when we sprint.

So it's important that we just don't go straight, and we don't just go forward. We do all things. So we're going to do a side shuffle. It's the same as before, though. Everything that we do, think about being flat-footed on the ground. So you're impacting the ground like you're punching it.

We're never here up on our toes and never down here on the heels. It's flat foot. So even on the shuffle, think about pulling the laces up towards the knees. But if you remember, the difference between sprinting and jogging is the expressiveness of it and the posture of it.

So we're not going to shuffle down here. It's up here with big arms, opening up, and we'll come down to around where the pole is, and then the same thing going back. Yeah, exactly. Great, great, great. Great. Good, and now we'll backwards walk. So backwards walk. The heel's going to come to the butt, and then reach back behind you.

Keep the torso fairly upright as we do that. Keeping the foot fully dorsiflexed all the time. That is, toes up towards the knees. Cool, and then we'll just walk on back. All right, so we're going to skip. This time, rather than just being here, it's going to be big arms.

We're just throwing about. No real rules about what you're doing with it. Just throw them about. We can go this way. We can go across. Anything you want to do with them. Don't worry about bringing your knees up. Keep your legs fairly straight. Not bad. Okay, that's good. And those little kind of dribble steps we did earlier.

Pop, pop, pop, pop. We'll do five of those. And then we'll go fairly wide with the feet. Kind of one bounce in the middle. One to the left. One to the right. One back in the middle. Pop back up. Pop, pop, pop, pop. So it'll be pop, pop, pop, pop.

Come here. One, two, three, four. Bounce back up. Pop, pop, pop, pop. There. One, two, three, four. Bounce back up. So try to cover those five steps in like three meters. There. Three meters is about 3.6 yards. So here's the issue with most people who are doing karaoke. They just try and move their feet as fast as they can.

We're trying to get full extension on the foot that's coming back. So external rotation here, internal rotation here, counter rotation of the spine. So the movement is in the twisting. That's the exercise. Good, Andrew. Yeah, nice work. Great. Thanks. First backwards one we did was just backwards walking. Now we're going to skip.

Now heel to the butt. Heel to the butt. Heel to the butt. Push back. Yeah, you got it. There you go. There you go. Keep it there. You don't have to go faster. You don't have to be bigger. Heel to the butt. Push back. Push the sole of your heel back.

Get the knee behind the butt. Knee behind the butt. Knee behind the butt. There you go. All right. Good. Oh, man. I don't think you'll see a sprinter on the planet who doesn't do a linear and a lateral leg swing. So you grab a hold of something. You come up onto the toe of the outer foot.

But we're just going to start off just swinging the other leg. Trying to keep your pelvis kind of in place, but not locked. Like allow it to move a little bit. But you also don't want it just to do this. So start off pretty small. And as you get comfortable, just allow it to swing.

And like I said, allow the pelvis to move just a little bit, but just not excessively. Keep the torso fairly upright. Once we've done the other leg or done both legs, we're going to be up on one foot. And we're going to go laterally through across the body now.

So we externally rotate when we come into adduction. And we internally rotate when we come into adduction. So we come across. So the toe is basically pointing towards the outside of our body on each direction. And there'll be a little bit of rotation on the stance foot. And again, we start off just really small.

And with a lot of swing, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger. And then it's a nice big swing. So again, no magic number. I'd say somewhere between six and 12 is about good of the full swings. Remember the difference between jogging and sprinting. The primary one is posture.

Posture and sprinting is very, very expressive. And I'll say expressive a lot. Express yourself maximally. Jogging is not that. Everything jogging is down here, right? That's not a bad thing. I'm just saying that's the task, right? So we come here. We come all the way to the outside. We come to the front.

All the way to the outside. Come to the front. And we'll do about five or six forward. And then five or six backwards. So the knee comes all the way up. So for me, that's all the way up right there. It stays up there as it comes back. And then it comes down and it rotates.

That's really good, actually. Yeah, really good. Great. Two more exercises that every sprinter on the planet does. One's called an eagle and one's called a scorpion. So we're going to do eagles first. You're on your back. Your arms are out to your side. So we're here and just let it swing.

Just let it swing. He's making this look real easy. All right. And then we're going to do the other side. We're going to roll over. And then it's just that side. Nice. And then again, no real magic number here. It's between six, eight, 10, 12. Flip over onto your other side when you feel like you've done enough.

Great. Yeah, really good job. And if you want to hang out there in that extended position for a second or two, just do what your body's asking you to do. Mm-hmm. That feels good. All right. So we would typically now do a couple of strides. So I want you to start off doing kind of the skips that we were doing before, which is low amplitude.

The knees are just down here. And we're just thinking about the impact of the ground. It's a pop, pop, pop. So really stiff impact on the ground, really being kind of big and open. And with each step, we're just going to get a little bit bigger, a little bit more expressive, drive the thigh up a little bit higher.

So by the end, the thigh is going to be up here. So it's just going to start down here. It's up. It's up. It's up. It's up. It's up higher and higher and higher. We start pulling the other thigh up and getting a bit more height. Start swinging the arms.

That feels good. Yeah, nice work. Great. I don't really typically use percentages, but if you want a percentage of your, if you were to go out and maximally run right now, this is like 50%. So that's your pace. And we'll go down to about where that garbage can is.

You know, when you, when you, when you cut this. Yeah. If they edit it from here. Yeah. Just down. Yeah. Money. You got that? Don't do that. I want, I'm, I'm a big believer in beginner's mind. Tim Ferriss has talked about this for years and he borrowed it from other people and I'm borrowing it from him and I don't want to appear like I know what I'm doing.

Mistakes and all, warts and all. Otherwise there's nothing to learn. No, no errors. No plasticity. Lower body looks great. Okay. Thank you. Upper body. I don't think you move from this motion, this position. All right. I'll open up the upper body. So just allow that to swing. Remember. So the hips oscillate and the undulate and the shoulders are the same.

You should feel the shoulders sort of bouncing, rocking and rolling a little bit. So it's okay if they move. Oh, no, it's, it's more than okay if they move a little bit, a hundred percent. Just rock and roll. There you go. A little bit higher. Pull the, pull the thigh forward.

Yeah. Great. This requires a little bit of balance. We normally do this barefoot. It's cold today. Let's not, let's not bother. The connection between how you're applying force into the ground and what you're doing as you project your center mass into space is everything in sprinting. Can you connect your foot with the hip?

So we'll start off. We'll just kind of just go into a drinking bird position, which is kind of a half RDL where it's, it's this thigh is back and the torso, there should be a straight line here between the shoulder and the knee. You can bend that back leg if you want to, but it doesn't, you don't need to straight line between the knee and the shoulder.

It's about a half range of motion. Full range of motion will be all the way down there. So half is here. You're going to hold that for three seconds. You're going to swing it up and you'll be in this position. You hold that for three seconds. Now this position up here, this is basically the top position of a sprint.

So you'll see Andrew here that the foot should direct be directly underneath the knee or the lace is directly underneath the knee and the knee, the height of that should be about where the belly button is depending upon how mobile you are. Well, some people are going to be down here.

Some are going to be way up here. Some sprinters are super mobile on the way up there. Rob's actually doing a pretty good job right there. Hold that for three seconds. Come back down into the half RDL position. One, two, three. Come back up. One, two, three. Right there.

Great. Yeah. Not gripping with the planted foot with the toes. Makes it, takes the shaking mostly away. Exactly. And we'll do about five per leg. And when you come to the top, sorry, I should have looked. When I come to the top, my standing tall, open it up. Right here.

And now we're putting all that together. I'm going to finish up onto the toe of the stance leg. So one, two, three. Up. And step forward. All right. Not bad. Not bad. Let's do two easy strides. If the last ones are 50%, these ones are 60%. Okay. So when we're just thinking about pulling forward and stepping over the opposite knee.

So pulling the thigh forward and stepping over the opposite knee. And Andrew, you're also thinking about keeping that upper body loose. Yes. Pick your thighs up. Pick your feet up a little higher. Up here. Up here. Up here. There you go. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Great.

Good. The other thing with jogging, jogging is a lot of horizontal force. Like everything's sort of back here. And that's what you want to do. Where sprinting is almost 100% vertical force. It's straight down, straight up. Straight down, straight up. We have this conversation every day when I'm coaching athletes.

Just be expressive. Be more expressive. I want you to express yourself fully. We talk about that a lot. Like, what does that mean? Like, express yourself. Be big and open and free, you know? Where, you know, so many of the other things, as you said, we're just not doing that.

All right. One more stride. All right. Okay. Same as what we just did. I like that. But you're just going to be a little bit more vertical. Just think about up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Once you've got some forward momentum, just think vertical.

Up, up, up, up, up, up. Just doing high knees. That is a lot better than what I was thinking it might be. Okay. Like coming into today, I said, all right. If I had that picture in my mind of what you're going to be able to do, I'd be really happy.

I hope people will try some of these things because it's a distinctly different sensation than jogging or what I think of as sprinting, which we haven't really done today, right? We strided. We strided. I feel much more alert, I think, posturally. I feel open. I was on a plane this morning and, you know, all that, I think the things that kind of open up your lungs, but it's not the kind of like grinding effort, but I can tell it's cumulative.

After this, I could see like, yeah, it's a workout, even though it might just seem like we're going a short distance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's the most rhythmical, the most fluid, the most coordinated that are the best athletes, regardless of the sport. It's not the most powerful.

It's not the biggest. It's not the strongest. It's the ones who have the most rhythm, most coordination. And sprinting is the ultimate test of that. Try it. Do it. Don't try it. Just do it. It's so much fun. And you notice, I hope my editing team will keep in some of the wobbles and errors in my mechanical ones and my less mechanical ones, if they were there.

It's really good to, I think, to see that unless you're a natural, I suppose, no one gets any form of exercise exactly right the first time and just to keep doing it. All right. Thank you so much, Stu. Yeah, no worries. Looking forward to our conversation tomorrow. You too.