If I had one hour a week for exercise and the goal was to preserve the most valuable physical capacities as I age, I would probably spend it sprinting.Not leg training, not running, not HIT. Pure sprinting, on hills and uneven terrain. Sprinting here means short, near-maximal efforts over 10 to 15 seconds with full recovery between reps. Not necessarily as an exercise, but as goal.
The reason sprinting has the edge, to me, is that it preserves capacities most likely to disappear first and matter later: explosive force, high-threshold muscle recruitment, hard skeletal loading, and the ability to generate power on demand. All of that, in a violent movement that is the most likely one you're going to do under an emergency. Let's start with the need
Functional fitness
It's been a buzzword in online fitness circles for close to 2 decades now. And it goes from focusing on 3 movements that supposedly carryover everywhere (lol) to animal movements (lol). Functional means FUNCTIONAL, so it's definitely dependent on the application. For a swimmer, a functional training is very different than from a ballet dancer. You don't need calves in swimming now do you? Now imagine dancing without them.
Functional means that there's a function to be done. So use your brain, evaluate your life and see what functional training means to you! If you don't find yourself squating fridges on your back, then what the hell do you try to get to 400lbs squats in the name of functional training? Anyway, back to the point.
Then what's the point about sprinting?
Sprinting is the thing you do when shit hits the fan. When you kid chokes on an apple, when your dog runs out of the house into the road, when you miss a bus, when a car comes at you, when you run away from something, when your building gets on fire... You don't leisurely jog anywhere under stress. You don't animal walk, you fucking run as fast as you can. And if you can't, you or someone dies.
So, as a goal, you're not functional in any sense unless you can sprint. That's the base of your life. You need, at any time in your day, to be able to take of and be able to sprint. You can add things to what you consider functional, but you need a baseline that's common to most of us. And I think sprinting is.
Ok, good goal. But is it a good exercise?
Start with hormonal signaling. High-intensity anaerobic work produces a different acute hormonal response than steady-state cardio, and sprinting is one of the clearest everyday ways to get that signal.Sprinting makes you release growth hormone, testosterone... It's great. You can honestly feel it, just try, you will feel great and understand what I mean.
Then the fast-twitch issue. Type II fibers are recruited when force and speed have to show up now, not eventually. They are the fibers you use when you catch yourself from falling, accelerate, jump, climb, or move with violence on demand. They also decline faster with age when you stop asking for them. A person who never sprints may stay moderately active for years while still letting those capacities erode. That is why the usual recommendation set, walking, mild cardio, moderate-tempo lifting, mobility work, can keep someone generally busy while still missing something important.
Bone density is the third mechanism, and it matters more than most people act like it does. Sprinting loads the system at high velocity and high impact. Those forces are meaningfully larger than what you get from walking and usually larger than what you get from easy jogging. If you are trying to hold onto structural resilience as you age, that matters. Mainstream recommendations routinely favor what is easy to prescribe and broadly safe to scale. They do not always favor what preserves the most under tight constraints.
Lastly, the fact that sprinting put everything together. It makes you face that your hips are stiff, your feet are weak, your core is weak, you left leg is weaker, your neck is not stable... It makes you see the weak link, not just encourage you to do the same exercise over and over again with more weight. You legs are only as good as your feet allow. It makes you realize that your neck hasn't been exercised in 10 years the first time you sprint. That happened to me, expected sore legs the next day and it turned out that the neck was the muscle I should have been worried about all along.
So why doesn't every coach recommend sprinting?
Risk of injury and space. Look, sprinting is hard. Risky, injury prone and hard. You don't read a motivation article (like this one) and you go straight into doing it. You don't read a 10 step guide and you do it. You earn it. You build your legs, you sprint a bit, you see what's weak and you exercise and practice that. And it takes months. But during those months, sprinting keeps surfacing your weak spots and you work towards fixing and putting them together. It eventually makes you see that you don't need to squat even more, 300lbs is good enough. You see that 400lbs deadlift is enough. In fact, you regret the effort getting to it since you realize soon that it's an overkill. You never need to do those movements in day to day, so why practice them so much to get such high numbers? Why not do Bulgarian split squats and ensure both legs are strong and stable unilaterally, since that is how you use legs most of the time anyway? What's the point of deadlifting if, when carrying stuff it's always your grip or your arms that give up first? Sprinting makes you reflect on what's really important in terms of fitness. What are your legs good for being so strong if your hips are tight enough that you can't even run without pain?
Yes, I still lift weights and do it often and with a strong drive. But I introduced variety and focused, now, on the smaller muscles. On a balanced body. And all of that is thanks to sprinting surfacing my weak spots.
So, go ahead, sprint, get injured and learn a thing or two about your body.
- Me