Copying a champion's block settings is a good way to run slower

Pedal spacing is a personal fit determined by limb length and strength, yet it gets imitated like a haircut.

There is a version of coaching that consists of watching a final, freezing the frame at the set position, and going back to the club track to reproduce what the winner's blocks looked like. It is very common and it is a decent way to make a fast junior slower.

The pedals do one job. They put the athlete in a position where the strongest possible push can be delivered in the direction of travel, with both legs contributing, at the moment the gun goes. The position that achieves this depends on how long the shins and thighs are, how strong the athlete is in a deep bent-knee position, and how well he can hold that position for the two or three seconds between set and go. Those things vary wildly between bodies.

A tall athlete with long levers and merely good strength needs a different arrangement from a short, extremely strong one. Move the front pedal back to imitate a sprinter with different proportions and you put the athlete in a joint angle he cannot push out of. He will still leave the blocks. He will just leave them with the rear leg doing almost nothing, which turns a two-legged shove into a one-legged fall.

The tell is in the first two steps. If the athlete pops upright immediately, or if the first step lands underneath the hips instead of out in front of the body's line, the setting is fighting him. You do not need force plates for this. A phone at ground level, side on, will show it.

I am not arguing that the settings do not matter. They matter enormously, which is exactly why they should be arrived at experimentally rather than copied. Half an hour of trial across a range of spacings, timed over ten metres, will find the athlete's own answer, and that answer should then be recorded and left alone for a long time.

The other half of the problem is churn. Athletes fiddle. A bad race gets blamed on the blocks, the spacing moves, the next race is also bad because now the position is unfamiliar as well as wrong, and by August nobody remembers what the original numbers were.

Write them down. Tape them in the kit bag. Then change them for a reason, not for a mood.