Week 1 of practice is in the books and it went great. I will say that the beginning of the week was rough…(especially since I hadn’t been doing anything all summer) but it seemed to lessen down and become less grueling as the week progressed. It was a week of 500, 400, 300, circuits, hills, 200′s, general strength, hurdle mobility drills, medicine ball throws, plyometrics, and much more. We put in a lot of work this week and I can finally say it is nice now to have a training partner, another sprinter, to help push and to be pushed for all the same reasons of becoming Canada’s best and one of the best in the world.
This first week was mostly spent on retraining the body and mind back to sprinting correctly and efficiently. For me, it doesn’t take very long to retrain the muscles, and with the right cues of course, the muscles remember what the movement should feel like. Muscle memory basically becomes accustomed to the certain types of movements. It becomes second nature, an unconscious process. For example, walking. We do it everyday and as a baby we grew our neural pathways gradually to give the muscles a sense of muscle memory. That’s why when first learning something new, it’s stressed to learn the correct way to do it. Your muscles will play around with you if the movement was learned incorrectly making it that much harder to change in the future. The bad habits need to be broken first, which of course is now apart of their muscle memory, and as new movements are learned, new neural pathways are formed making you a better athlete.
So, during base training is when you should work on all the proper mechanics of sprinting or your movement. You have more time to focus on the way your feet should land, the correct body position, the motion your arms should be swinging…remember it all starts by training from the ground up. Muscle memory is best developed when that movement is done over and over and over again. That’s why we practice (obviously). And as that movement is practiced corrections of that form NEED to made then and there, so in the long run, there’s no need to think…it’s already memorized.
