The squat number is the most over-read figure in sprinting

Maximum strength buys a sprinter something real, and the return on it disappears far earlier than gym culture wants to accept.

There is a strength threshold in sprinting and there is a strength obsession, and the gap between them has swallowed a lot of Februaries.

The threshold is real. An athlete who cannot produce respectable force against a barbell will also struggle to produce it against a track, particularly in the first few strides where contact is long and the demand looks most like a slow push. Getting a young sprinter from very weak to reasonably strong reliably improves acceleration. Nobody serious disputes that.

The obsession is what happens next. Once an athlete is reasonably strong, further increases in maximum strength stop transferring, because the limiting factor is no longer how much force is available but how much of it can be expressed in about a tenth of a second. A squat takes a second or more to complete. Top-speed contact does not. Beyond a certain point you are improving performance in a task with a completely different time constraint and then hoping.

What tends to happen instead is that the athlete gets heavier, gets sore, and spends the useful part of the week recovering from Wednesday.

I will state the position plainly. For most sprinters past their second year of serious lifting, adding twenty kilos to a back squat is worth less than adding two centimetres to a standing long jump, and considerably less than an improvement in acceleration posture, and yet the squat is the number that gets celebrated because it is the easiest to record and the most satisfying to chase.

The counterargument is durability, and it is a fair one. Stronger tissue tolerates more, and a sprinter who has spent time under load handles a hard racing programme better. I accept that. It is an argument for a floor, not a ceiling.

The practical version is boring. Establish enough strength to be credible, maintain it with far less volume than most programmes use, and spend the recovered training capacity on things that happen fast: jumps, throws, sprinting itself, all of which are also the things the athlete is actually being tested on.

The awkward part of that conversation is social. Weight room numbers are visible, satisfying and easy to post. Ground contact times are none of those things.

Which is exactly why the squat keeps winning arguments it should have lost years ago.