Are your A-skips speed work?

Here's what's in this week's edition.

If A-skips and B-skips are part of your warm-up, this one's for you.

Stu McMillan isn't a fan. On Andrew Coates's podcast this week, he said they're "hip flexion drills more than they are real hip extension drills", and that we do far too much of the first and far too little of the second.

In plain terms, they train lifting the knee up in front of you. What moves you forward, as he puts it, is getting the knee back behind the hip.

They do have their defenders. The A and B drills go back to the coach Gerard Mach, and plenty of coaches still use them, often as part of the warm-up rather than as speed work in their own right.

My take is somewhere in between. If you like them in your warm-up, I wouldn't bin them. Just don't count them as the part of your session that makes you faster.

What I'd add is the kind of skipping McMillan does recommend. Skip forwards, push the knee back behind the hip on every contact, and don't worry about how high the front thigh comes up.

Start with small, low skips. Once they feel easy, skip for distance. Pick a spot about 50 metres away and see how few skips it takes you to get there.

He's also clear that you shouldn't go all out with this on day one. Learn to skip first. Here's a short ALTIS clip of skips for height and distance so you can see what it looks like.

Les Spellman sorts athletes into five profiles from a short battery of tests, mainly jumps, a hamstring test, a mobility screen and a trap bar pull.

You get springy "bouncers", strong "drivers" who spend longer on the ground and push it away, "spinners" who are average across the board and make up for it with quick steps, complete athletes who are good at everything, and athletes who don't have a profile yet.

He uses the profiles to spot what each athlete is at risk of. A springy athlete, for example, might not cope when you start piling on load and volume.

Lance Brooks called the elastic versus force-dominant split "a false dichotomy" on a podcast this month. "You have to be both," he said, and he won't give one athlete a different set of drills because of their type.

I think they're both right, about different things. Every fast sprinter has to be springy and strong, so I wouldn't train only one quality because of a label. Where the type helps is deciding how much of something an athlete can handle.

Dan Pfaff has a useful way of thinking about this. In every part of the race, each athlete has a ceiling, the most reps they can do before quality drops, and a basement, the least they need to do to get the effect they're after.

His elastic and muscular sprinters trained the same things. Their ceilings and basements were just in different places.

That's how I'd use a profile. If I had a springy athlete, I wouldn't stop them lifting or doing block starts.

I'd just expect them to hit their limit sooner, so I'd cut those sessions shorter and build the volume up more slowly. I'd do the same in reverse for a stronger athlete on the longer reps.

Last week I told you to make some of your sprints genuinely flat out. This week it's a slightly different idea, and I think the two go together.

On the Garage Strength podcast, JB Morin said that for regular high-speed running he'd rather players ran at 90% of their max. As he put it, "about 90% of your max without being at your max".

His suggested dose is around 100 to 150 metres a week at that speed.

The session is simple. Build up over 20 metres, cruise at 90% for 20 metres, then take 20 metres to slow down. Do three of those, twice a week. Only the cruising part counts, so that's 120 metres.

He's honest that he doesn't have science behind that number. He also said that when his team tested around 50 young footballers and asked them to run at 90%, most went well over it.

That's the bit I'd take away. Holding back is harder than it sounds. If you can't tell 90% from flat out, shorten the build-up. A shorter run-up limits how fast you can be going when you hit the cruise, so you're not relying on feel alone.

Morin even suggests the second session can go at the end of team training, with the training itself as most of your warm-up.

This doesn't replace last week's flat-out sprints with full rest. I'd see the 90% runs as the regular top-up in between, especially in-season when you're playing every weekend.

Before this year, Bednarek had four global silver medals in the 200m, two at the Olympics and two at the World Championships.

Talking to Reuters this month, he named the problem himself. "My Achilles heel has always been my reaction time and sometimes maybe just not getting out of the blocks the way I wanted to."

At the Ultimate Championship in Budapest last month he won the 100m in 9.85 and the 200m in a personal best of 19.52.

The result sheets show what changed. In the 100m final at the 2025 World Championships, his reaction time was 0.211 seconds, the slowest in the field. In Budapest it was 0.147.

That's a big improvement, but it was still only the sixth-quickest of the eight. World Athletics' race report says Oblique Seville got the better start, and Bednarek won it in the second half.

So he didn't turn his weakness into a strength. He stopped it costing him, and let the rest of his race do the work.

That's the lesson I'd take for any athlete. Fix a weak point until it stops losing you races, not until it's your best quality. There's a point of diminishing returns.