Tag Archives: sarcopenia

A Nifty Little Sprint Complex

Posted by theorytopractice on

Deal with the Devil if the Devil has a constituency – and don’t complain about the heat –

C. J. Cherryh

Not complaining, just sayin’, you know; 106-degrees F at the time I performed this little sprint routine, on the way to the day’s high of 111.  No telling how friggin’ hot it was out on the artificial turf; let’s just say it was blazingly so.  But hey, like CJ says — deal with the Devil and his constituency, and roll the hell on…  🙂

Here we go –

– knee to chest jumps for max height, as little a pause as possible between jumps.  x 7 reps

– 10 second, max effort sprint for distance (drop-off technique)

– tennis ball goalpost “dunks”, x 7

– dual leg hops x 30 yds (90 feet), fast as possible and covering the distance in as few hops as possible (again, utilizing the drop-off technique, here).

– “drum major” (stiff-leg) sprint x 40 yards.

Wash, rinse, repeat for 6 rounds.  Sweat a ton, get a bit queasy, lounge like a lizard the rest of the day.

A few notes on this one:

  • I’d originally intended to push until hitting drop-offs in both the dual-leg hops and the sprints — however, I pulled the plug after hitting drop-off in the hops only; discretion being the better part of valor today, due to the heat.  I probably had another 2 or three top-end sprints in the tank.
  • I covered right at 80 yards in each 10 second sprint today; self-timed, on turf, standing start.  Not bad for an old goat.
  • I covered the 90 ft distance in 11 dual-leg hops today, with the last round requiring an additional jump.
  • about 30 seconds recovery between exercises, except for following the 10-second sprint and the dual-leg hops, in which case there was an approximate 1 minute recovery.
Where does something like this fall on the Exercise-Activity spectrum?  Well, again, one man’s “play” is another man’s workout; the dividing line between the two, for me, is predominant fast-twitch fiber involvement.  I’ll get into this a little more in future posts, but a decided lack of fast-twitch fiber involvement in an activity makes that activity of little value in enhancing/preserving muscle tissue and, therefore, in helping one battle against the scourge of sarcopenia specifically and, more broadly, diseases of affluence.
Plenty of fast-twitch activation here, so we’ll bump this one near the “exercise” end of the spectrum.
In health,
Keith