Improve Your Speed By Sprinting

By Joe Pietaro
08-27-2014

How do you improve your speed, even if you are naturally slow? By doing short burst sprint intervals. It’s not rocket science and it may not make you a track star, but here’s a quick example of an exercise that will only take a few minutes.


Go to you local football field, if there’s one available. With the marked yard lines, it makes it much easier to keep track of how far you are sprinting. Now grass with marked lines available? No excuse, pal! You can even do this on a city street using the parked cars as gauges. The average car is approximately 20-feet in length, so do the math.


Now here is how you start off: go to the back line of one of the end zones. Sprint to the front line; that’s 10 yards. A five-second rest period and then sprint to the 20-yard line. 10-second rest and sprint to mid-field (the 50-yard line). Fifteen seconds of rest and sprint another 10 yards. Keep up the same progression until you run through the back of the other end zone. Here it is in a nutshell:


*10-yards, 5 seconds rest
*20 yards, 10 seconds rest
*30 yards, 15 seconds rest
*10 yards, 5 seconds rest
*20 yards, 10 seconds rest
*30 yards – finish


120 total yards (counting both end zones) should take you no longer than two minutes. Now even the busiest guy in the world has that much time to dedicate to this.

I was into running when I was in grade school. And since I didn't have the speed of my classmates, I focused on long distance running. When it comes to short marathon, no one could beat me. When I was taught how to achieve natural speed by sprinting once in a while, my stamina suffered. And although I won a short race once, I felt like my long distance run had slowed down.