DEEP DIVE
The strength that makes a sprinter faster isn't the same strength that puts more on the bar. It's force the body can produce quickly, inside the time the track gives you.
Ground contacts at maximum velocity are over in around a tenth of a second. The lift you grind out under a heavy bar takes well over a second to peak.
The two windows don't overlap, and that's why a stronger one-rep max past a certain threshold stops carrying over to the times.
Dan Pfaff put it directly in his plyometric guidelines. We have, in his words, athletes who are tremendously strong who seemingly do not convert that strength into efficient movement.
Pfaff wasn't arguing against gym work. He was arguing that gym work, on its own, doesn't finish the job. Force you can't apply fast is force you can't use on the track.
There's a base case before any of this is true. Below a strength threshold, the issue isn't transfer. It's that the athlete isn't strong enough to produce the forces a sprint actually asks for.
In the Sprint Manual I list the minimums I expect to see before I stop emphasising max strength. For male 100/200 athletes, that's around 1.8 to 2.0 times bodyweight on the back squat, 1.2 to 1.4 times on the power clean, and 2.0 to 2.2 times on the trap bar deadlift.
The female equivalents come in at roughly 1.5 to 1.75, 1.0 to 1.2, and 1.75 to 2.0 on those same lifts.
Below those, the gym work is genuinely the limiting factor and more max strength will help. Above them, more of the same load lifted slowly stops being the lever.
Komi's work, summarised in Hiserman's report on strength and power for sprint training, explains why heavy work still has a place once the base is set. The highest-threshold fast-twitch fibres, the ones the sprint actually needs, don't get recruited until force exceeds about 90% of max.
That's the case for keeping heavy work in the programme year-round. It's also the case for not letting heavy work become the goal in itself.
The job of the heavy lift is to put those fibres on the team. The job of the explosive work that follows is to teach them to fire fast.
Once the base is there, four things move the needle. They look different to the work that built the base.
The first is intent on the bar. Same load, same reps, but driven up fast.
Evely and Crick, in their UKA strength series, put the principle plainly. In athletics, we need athletes to produce high forces relative to their bodyweight in very short amounts of time.
The lift that trains that isn't the one moved slowly under heavy load. It's the one moved fast.
A speed squat at 50 to 60% of 1RM, a clean from the thigh moved with full intent, a snatch jump at 30%. The load is moderate. The bar speed isn't.
The second is contrast pairing inside a session. The mechanism is well established.
A near-maximal lift performed three to five minutes before a depth jump leads to a higher depth jump than the athlete could produce cold.
The heavy work primes the nervous system. The ballistic work expresses what was primed.
Evely and Crick describe this as complex training, and it sits at the heart of the SPP block I lay out in the Sprint Manual for athletes who are over the strength threshold. Heavy work first, ballistic work second, and the order matters as much as the work itself.
The third is how plyometric work is prescribed. Pfaff is specific on this.
The progression goes multi-jumps first, then endurance bounding, then depth jumps. Volumes matter, and so does fatigue.
The variable that tells you whether the work is reactive or whether it has degraded into jumping practice is the foot. A box jump with a long ground contact is jumping. A depth jump with a short, snappy contact is reactive.
The reactive stimulus that transfers comes from short contacts. Depth jumps, pogos, low hurdle hops, A-skip emphasis. Coach the foot off the ground, not the height of the jump.
The fourth is the marker that tells you whether any of it is showing up where it matters. Track gym numbers and sprint times together across a block. When both are climbing, the work is transferring.
When the gym number rises and the sprint time stalls, the kind of force you're training isn't the kind the track is asking for. The answer at that point is rarely more volume in the gym.
It's a change in the type of strength work. A shift towards intent, towards complex pairings, towards reactive volumes that are short, sharp, and limited in number.
Pfaff also flags something that's easy to miss as the season approaches. Plyometric volumes should peak six to eight weeks before the competitive phase, not running into it.
The best work is short, the foot is off the ground fast, and the volume is conservative. Twenty to fifty depth-jump contacts in a preparation week, dropped to ten to twenty during the competition phase.
Under-train rather than over-train. Reactive work pays off only when the athlete is fresh enough to produce it cleanly.
Across all four levers, one distinction holds. Maximum strength is the basement of the building.
Without it, the upper floors collapse. Once it's there, more of the same doesn't get you higher.
Above the threshold, the gains live in how quickly that force can be expressed, and the lifts and jumps that train that quality look different from the ones that built the base.
Hiserman's framing of this is the cleanest I've seen. Athletes with high levels of maximum strength benefit from a greater emphasis on explosive strength. Once max strength is at the level it needs to be, it can be maintained with minimal work, and the emphasis shifts.
That's the difference between a gym programme that supports a sprinter and a gym programme that quietly turns into the sprinter's training. The second one stops working after the threshold is met.
The first keeps working because it changes shape across the year. Weighted towards max strength early, towards explosive output through SPP, towards short reactive contacts as competition approaches, with a marker on the track that tells you whether what you're building is what the race is actually asking for.
If you want the full programming framework that sits behind this, with sample weeks and the periodisation logic for each phase, it's laid out in The Sprint Manual Bundle.