Hot Body Training

If it’s a nice day outside, do you ever get the feeling that you should be training in the fresh air instead of breathing the chlorinated stale air of your local gym? If you do, then maybe you should give sprint training a try.

The Cheetah: This guy does his sprint training.

It’s summer here in South Africa and this Saturday it was a beautiful day, so I ditched the gym for the outdoors and went to the beach for some sprint training. Because my gym doesn’t have a track, I only do my sprint training outdoors. For this reason, I never really have much of a plan and tend to turn it into more of a fun, ad hoc training session rather than one with set parameters. If you have a track in your gym, sprinting would be a great inclusion into your regular programming, otherwise, maybe you should consider canning the gym once in a while and head out to your nearest field or open area and do some sprints.

I recently wrote about Why You Should Train Like an Athlete and cited sprinters as one of the power athletes that I think have the greatest builds. They have great bodies because sprinting is the ultimate compound exercise, using every muscle in your body. The explosive nature of sprinting means that it can do wonders for your speed and power. Like taxing exercises such as squats and Deadlifts, sprinting stimulates the release of large amounts of muscle building growth hormone, which can pack on a decent amount of muscle in the right places too. Sprinting also places large emphasis on the posterior chain muscles, especially the hamstrings and glutes that are often overlooked by the average gym trainer.

Sprint intervals also train the metabolic system and for this reason are also one of the most potent fat burners. This is especially true if you keep the rest intervals short, but be warned, it can be extremely gruelling. Contrary to popular belief, training intervals like this is a faster route to fat loss than performing steady state cardio for hours on end.

One word of caution. Be careful of injuries, especially hamstring pulls. Most people have tight hammies anyway, so you need to doubley careful. Make sure you’re warmed up first with some light jogging. If you’re new to sprinting, you should also start your sprints from a slow run and build up to maximum speed, rather than just bolting from a cold start. Stretch the hammies afterwards to increase your range of motion for future sprint sessions.

If you want a no fuss beginners sprinting routine, check out A Simple Sprinting Routine over at the Health and Fitness Advice blog.

If you’re bored with your regular gym training then head outdoors and get in a simple yet highly effective workout that can be loads of fun too. There’s definitely something exhilarating about sprinting, so give it a try.