Quick feet cues are making your sprinters slower

Telling a sprinter to turn the legs over faster usually buys frequency by stealing the stride that produced the speed.

A coach shouts quicker, quicker at a fourteen year old on the back straight, and the fourteen year old obliges. The feet do move faster. The athlete also drops the knee, shortens the swing, lands closer under the hip with less force into the track, and runs a slower time while feeling busier than they have ever felt. Everyone goes home satisfied. Nothing improved.

Speed is frequency multiplied by length, which is arithmetic, not coaching. The trouble starts when a coach decides to attack one term directly. Frequency is an outcome of how quickly the leg can be repositioned in the air and how briefly it needs to stay on the ground to produce the force it produces, and both of those are limited by things the athlete cannot consciously hurry.

Ground contact in a good senior sprinter at top speed is somewhere near a tenth of a second. You cannot think your way through a tenth of a second. What actually happens when someone tries is that they reduce the amount of force they are willing to put down, because a lower force is easier to produce quickly. Less force means a shorter flight. A shorter flight means less time to reposition. The cadence goes up because the whole cycle got smaller.

The useful lever sits somewhere else. Hip flexor and hamstring recovery speed sets how fast the swing leg can be folded and driven back through, and that responds to specific work over months, not to shouting. So does the stiffness of the ankle at contact, which decides how much of the landing energy comes back instead of being absorbed by a collapsing arch.

I will go further than most club coaches would like. If you find yourself cueing frequency at all, you have probably diagnosed the wrong problem. Athletes who look slow between strides are usually not lacking turnover. They are lacking the ability to put down enough force to earn a flight phase worth having, and the honest fix is a strength and posture problem that takes a winter.

The one place the cue earns its keep is a hurdler cramped between barriers, where geometry rather than physics is dictating the answer, and shortening deliberately is the only way through.

Everywhere else it is noise dressed as instruction, and it is the easiest thing in the world to say from the infield.