About this workout
Sprinting is not a fitness quality. It is a force problem. The fastest athlete on the field is the one who puts the most force into the ground in the shortest window, over and over, without slowing down. This is a 12-week, four-day strength program built around that single idea. You will squat and pull heavy, jump for distance and height, and sprint at full effort while you are fresh, not at the end of a session when you are cooked. It supports your track work. It does not replace it.
Who This Program Is For
- Track sprinters in a general prep or off-season block who need a weight room plan that matches the event.
- Field-sport athletes, football, soccer, rugby, baseball, who get judged on the first 20 yards.
- Intermediate lifters who already squat, deadlift and press with sound technique and can add load safely.
- Anyone who wants to be measurably faster and is willing to give up chasing a pump to get there.
Who this is NOT for: Anyone looking for a fat loss circuit. Every quality in here is trained fresh with long rest, and long rest is the opposite of a conditioning workout. If your goal is to sweat and burn calories, this plan will bore you and you will cut the rest periods, which ruins it. It is also not for anyone unwilling to sprint at full effort. The lifting supports the sprinting. The sprinting is what makes you fast. If you are going to jog through the sprint work at 80 percent because it feels safer, do a different program.
What You'll Need
- A barbell, plates, a squat rack and a flat and incline bench.
- Dumbbells across a usable range, light enough for carries and rear delt work, heavy enough for step-back lunges and rows.
- A pull-up bar and at least 100 yards of flat, safe running surface, a track, a field or a turf strip, which gives you 60 yards to sprint and room to slow down.
The Program
Four training days a week, run Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Day 1 and Day 3 are the speed days and each one lands on the day after a full rest day, so you always sprint with fresh legs. Day 2 is upper body and trunk, which is your easiest day to move if life gets in the way. Day 4 is a full body strength day that finishes the week. Sessions run 60 to 75 minutes, and most of that is rest. Sprints and jumps come first, always, before the bar. On Day 1 and Day 3 the columns are labeled Movement, Rounds, Work and Recovery because distance and effort matter more than a rep count on those days; Day 2 and Day 4 are ordinary sets and reps.
| Day 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprint and Max Strength | |||
| Movement | Rounds | Work | Recovery |
| Sprints | 6 | 30 yards, standing start, 100 percent effort | 3 min |
| Broad Jump | 3 | 3 jumps for max distance | 90 sec |
| Barbell Squat | 5 | 3 at 85% | 3 min |
| Romanian Deadlift | 3 | 6 | 2 min |
| Hip Thrust (Weighted Hip Extension) | 3 | 8 | 90 sec |
| Hanging Leg Raise | 3 | 10 | 60 sec |
| Day 2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper Body and Trunk | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Barbell Bench Press | 5 | 5 | 3 min |
| Pull-up | 4 | 6 | 2 min |
| Standing Dumbbell Shoulder Press | 3 | 8 | 90 sec |
| One Arm Dumbbell Row | 3 | 10 per side | 90 sec |
| Dumbbell Rear Delt Row | 3 | 12 | 60 sec |
| Side Plank | 3 | 30 sec per side | 60 sec |
| Copenhagen Plank | 2 | 20 sec per side | 60 sec |
| Day 3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Acceleration and Posterior Chain | |||
| Movement | Rounds | Work | Recovery |
| High Knees | 3 | 20 yards, tall posture, quick ground contact | 60 sec |
| Sprints | 8 | 20 yards, low push-out start, 100 percent effort | 2 min |
| Lateral Bound | 4 | 5 bounds per side, stick each landing | 2 min |
| Deadlift | 4 | 3 at 85% | 3 min |
| Barbell Good Morning | 3 | 8 | 2 min |
| Single Leg Romanian Dumbbell Deadlift | 3 | 8 per side | 90 sec |
| Day 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Full Body Strength | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Hang Clean | 5 | 3 | 3 min |
| Barbell Front Squat | 4 | 5 | 3 min |
| Dumbbell Reverse Lunge | 3 | 8 per side | 2 min |
| Incline Barbell Bench Press | 4 | 6 | 2 min |
| Bent Over Row | 3 | 8 | 2 min |
| Barbell Shrugs | 3 | 10 | 90 sec |
| Suitcase Carry | 3 | 40 yards per side | 90 sec |
How to Progress
Twelve weeks, four blocks and one deload. The tables show the Week 1 starting point; here is how each number moves.
Weeks 1 to 3. Run the tables as written. Set your 85 percent off a number you have actually hit in the last few months, not a number you hit in high school. Sprint volume stays where it is. Your only job in this block is to hit every prescribed rep with clean bar speed and to finish every sprint feeling like you had one more in you.
Weeks 4 to 6. Add 5 to 10 pounds to the Barbell Squat, Deadlift, Barbell Front Squat and Hang Clean, which should put your top sets near 87 to 88 percent. Add one round to the Day 1 Sprints, taking you to 7, and one round to the Day 3 Sprints, taking you to 9. Everything else stays the same. If bar speed on the Hang Clean gets ugly, the weight is too heavy; take it back down.
Week 7, deload. This is the deload week and you do not get to skip it. Cut every working set to two sets instead of the prescribed number and drop all barbell loads to 60 percent of what you used in Week 6. Cut sprint rounds to 4 on Day 1 and 4 on Day 3, and run them at about 85 percent effort, which is the only week in this program where you do that on purpose. Keep the carry, the planks and Hanging Leg Raise as written. You should leave every session in Week 7 feeling like you barely trained. That is the point.
Weeks 8 to 11. Come back at your Week 6 loads and add 5 pounds per week to the four main barbell lifts, which is where the real strength shows up. Cut the top Barbell Squat and Deadlift sets from 3 reps to 2 reps at 90 percent starting in Week 10 so you are getting heavier without accumulating junk volume. Sprint distances go up: Day 1 becomes 40 yards for 6 rounds, Day 3 stays at 20 yards but drops to 6 rounds with the recovery out to 3 minutes so every rep is genuinely maximal.
Week 12. Test week. Two barbell sessions only, both cut to three sets, and one dedicated sprint day where you time a 40 and a 60 from a standing start with full recovery between attempts. Compare it to the number you should have written down in Week 1. If you did not time yourself in Week 1, you learned an expensive lesson about testing.
Warm-Up and Recovery Notes
Warm up like an athlete, not like a guy waiting for the bench to open up. Five minutes of easy running to raise your temperature, then leg swings, hip openers and ankle work, then two or three build-up runs at 60, 75 and 90 percent before your first true sprint. On lifting-first sets, ramp with the empty bar and then two or three progressively heavier sets before your first working set. The warm-up is not optional on a speed day. Cold hamstrings and maximal sprinting are a bad pairing, and the warm-up is the cheapest thing you can do to make the hard part more tolerable.
Recovery is what limits this program, not effort. Sprinting at full speed is high-stress work and it takes longer to recover from than it feels like at the time. Sleep seven to nine hours, take the Wednesday and weekend rest days as actual rest, and walk on those days rather than adding conditioning. If your legs still feel heavy on a speed day, do the sprint work anyway but cut the rounds; a small number of fast, high-quality reps beats a full session of slow ones. Persistent soreness in the same hamstring or hip flexor for more than a week is a reason to back off and get it looked at, not a reason to push through.
Nutrition and Supplementation
You cannot out-train an underfed body on a program built on maximal efforts. Eat at maintenance or slightly above while you are running this, because trying to strip fat and set speed records in the same 12 weeks usually gets you neither. Set protein around 1 gram per pound of body weight, keep carbohydrates high enough to fuel the sprint days, roughly 2 to 3 grams per pound on training days, and let fat fill the rest. Eat a real meal two to three hours before you train and get carbohydrates and protein in within an hour of finishing. If you genuinely need to drop weight for a sport, do it in an off-block, not in the middle of this one.
If the food is handled first, a protein powder makes hitting your daily intake easier on days you train and practice, a daily multivitamin covers the gaps that show up when training volume climbs, and creatine is one of the few supplements with real evidence behind repeated maximal efforts, though none of the three will do as much for your 40 time as sleeping properly and sprinting hard will.
FAQ
I already have track practice. Can I run this on top of it? Not as written. If you are practicing with a coach, keep their sprint work and drop the Sprints, High Knees, Broad Jump and Lateral Bound rows from these tables, then lift on the same days you do speed work rather than on your off days. Two hard days and two easy days beats four medium days. Your coach's plan wins any conflict with mine.
Do I really need to squat heavy to sprint fast? Strength is not speed, and I will not pretend that a bigger squat automatically drops your 40 time. What a bigger squat does is raise the ceiling on how much force you can apply, and for an intermediate athlete who is not very strong yet, that ceiling is usually the thing in the way. Once you are genuinely strong, the sprinting and the jumping matter more than adding another 20 pounds to the bar.
What if I do not have a track or an open field? Then this program will not work the way it is meant to. You need at least 80 yards of flat, safe ground, 60 to sprint and the rest to decelerate. A turf field, a school track, a quiet stretch of park or an empty parking lot all work. A treadmill does not; you cannot accelerate on one, and acceleration is the whole point of Day 3. Find the space or pick a different plan.
Questions and results
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