⚡️SSL #009 How To Train Like Noah Lyles

In one of the clips of Noah Lyles warming up, I noticed that when he performs his B skips he does them very differently than most people.

B skips are a fairly popular drill in sprinting, however, there’s a problem with them that most people don’t talk about.

I’ve had to speak with several athletes about this.

The intention of the drill is to train your foot to strike back into the ground.

Normally, the foot extends on its own while sprinting but in this drill, an athlete has to kick out in order to mimic the same motion.

This trains your foot strike but it can also worsen it if you kick out too much.

If you do, you’ll be training your foot to over-stride, which is a sprinting SIN and can also place additional stress on the hamstrings.

Not only will this slow you down but also put you at risk for injury.

For this reason, I’ve never been a fan of this drill honestly.

Tom Tellez, the coach of 9x gold medalist Carl Lewis, says he hates this drill.

I have my own set of drills that I use instead to train the slice with my athletes.

So I found it really interesting that when Noah Lyles does the B skips he’s actually really intentional about keeping the foot close and not overreaching.

Seeing this further supports my theory that overreaching in this drill can actually make your technique worse and you should be very careful of you perform this.

I tell my athletes to keep their foot close and don’t start throwing karate front kicks unless they want a hamstring injury.

Look at Usain Bolt here, the foot reaches out as its striking but not as much as you see athletes do during their b skip drills.

The lesson here is if you do B skip or honestly any drills for that matter be careful in how you perform them to make sure you’re improving your mechanics rather than making it worse.

Instead of B skips personally, I prefer to teach my athletes dribbles in order to learn the proper foot strike.

It’s a much more natural movement.

2. You Don’t Need A lot Of Volume

The same reps and distances Noah Lyles uses can be used for other athletes with some changes.

For example, if you want to train your 100, add 50m to work on speed endurance, then remove 20m to work on sprint technique.

If you play football, rugby or another team sport that requires a lot of running, you can use the same track workout that Noah Lyles uses of 250’s and 120’s to work on your repeated sprint ability.

What I mean by that is to improve your ability to sprint over and over at high speeds throughout a match.

I talk about this further inside Sprint Cheat Codes but essentially you would have shorter rest times between sprints with 3-5 reps, and a slightly more extended rest period between sets.

For example:

250s x 3-5 reps with a 90-sec rest between reps.

Repeat for 2-3 sets with 3 minutes rest between sets.

TL;DR

1. Be careful with how you perform drills, otherwise it can ruin your mechanics
2. Dribbles are an alternative to B Skips for learning the foot strike
3. Focus on high-quality sprints and not just volume
4. Noah sometimes does as little as 5 sprints in a single session
5. 250’s for speed endurance, 120’s for technique