I read an article about sprinting by Kelly Bagget. He mentions “good feet” and “bad feet” which describes how efficient an athletes foot position is when they are sprinting (I’m assuming on the balls of their feet). I was thinking that skipping while alternating the patterns used would be a great way to improve foot position. It could be used to warm up for a workout without having to add in any specific training. Any thoughts?
P.S. Shouldn’t good foot position be important to all athletic movement.
[quote]Ryan Michael wrote:
I read an article about sprinting by Kelly Bagget. He mentions “good feet” and “bad feet” which describes how efficient an athletes foot position is when they are sprinting (I’m assuming on the balls of their feet). I was thinking that skipping while alternating the patterns used would be a great way to improve foot position. It could be used to warm up for a workout without having to add in any specific training. Any thoughts?
P.S. Shouldn’t good foot position be important to all athletic movement.[/quote]
Good feet is a result of good hip flexibility and force absorption and reactive strength.
Take a look at a program like Thib’s Renaissance Body Development (or something similar to that). It has a really simple warmup that would also do the trick. I’m sure there are better/more detailed examples, but that’s the first one that came into my head.
I find that doing the skipping very quickly (let’s say… 180rpm) works really well. At these speeds, your foot contact times are gonna have to be very short, otherwise the rope will catch your feet.
You can feel a transition as you speed up from slowly bouncing up for each revolution to “striking” the floor with your feet.
Actually good feet in the sense of his question is about plantar flexor stiffness (calf stiffness) anf the muscles ability to lock up and release the contraction rapidly.
Yes skipping is a wonderful exercise to develope good feet, same with ladder drills, dot drlls, and line hops
Also stiff leg altitude drops (from a very low height)