Most sprinters stand up too early and blame the blocks

The drive phase fails for reasons that have nothing to do with equipment and everything to do with what the athlete was told to feel.

Watch a club race from the side and count how many athletes are fully upright by the fifth step. Most of them. In a good final, nobody is upright until the twentieth metre or so, and the difference between those two pictures is worth a large chunk of a second.

The physics is simple enough. Coming out of blocks you are trying to push a body that is barely moving up to near top speed, and to do that the force has to go backwards into the track, which means the body has to be leaning forward. Stand up early and the force starts going downwards instead. Downwards force supports you. It does not accelerate you.

So why do athletes stand up? Rarely because they lack strength, in my experience. Usually because they have been coached with a cue that makes them do it. Told to drive the knee up, they lift the thigh, which rotates the torso towards vertical. Told to run tall, they run tall from step one. Told to look at the finish line, they raise the head, and the spine follows the eyes every time.

The cues that work point down and back. Push the ground away behind you. Keep the head heavy for five steps. Let the shoulders stay in front of the hips until it feels wrong. That last one matters because the correct position feels precarious. An athlete in a proper drive phase feels like he is falling, and the instinct to catch yourself is deep and hard to override without hundreds of repetitions.

There is a real limit here and it should be said. You can only hold a lean that your legs can push out of. An athlete without the strength to extend a deeply bent hip and knee at speed will stumble if you force a long drive phase on him, and forcing it produces a nasty face-first education. The drive phase length has to grow with the strength work rather than being imposed on top of it.

Which is a slower project than fiddling with pedal spacings, and considerably less satisfying, because the thing you fix in October shows up in April as a tenth you cannot point at.

But when an athlete tells me his start is bad, the blocks are almost never the problem. The seven steps after them are.