In this RESPORT Chicago video, Coach Madeline and Dr. Sean lead a track workout that pits a retired rugby player against a former Division‑1 track athlete to showcase sprint mechanics. The session begins with a structured warm‑up they call “MMA” – Movement, Mobility, Activation – featuring light jogging, range‑of‑motion challenges for ankles, knees and hips, and sport‑specific activation drills. The core of the workout progresses through a series of sprint drills: A‑skips, B‑skips, C‑skips, high‑knee accelerations (combo drill), and combo‑to‑sprint drills. Throughout, they emphasize key technical cues such as striking the ground directly beneath the body, maintaining high knees, a tall posture, explosive bounce, rigid form, dorsiflexed toes, and a mid‑foot strike, contrasting these with the more relaxed footwork of distance running. After the sprint set, Dr. Sean reflects on his perceived fatigue, the importance of tightening form under fatigue, and the observable differences between the athletes’ rigidity and cyclical motion. He highlights how these drills build speed and power for a range of athletes – sprinters, endurance runners, triathletes, HYROX competitors, and crossover athletes. The video serves as the first installment in RESPORT Chicago’s “Endurance and Running” series, promising future content on varied distances and speed execution.
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Hi, what's up guys? It's Coach Madeline.
And I'm Dr. Sean.
From RESPORT Chicago. We're out here today doing a track workout, see if this retired rugby athlete can beat a former D1 track and field athlete.
We'll see. Looking forward to putting me through my paces. All right, first thing we're going to do today is go through our warm-up before we get into the actual sprinting portion of the workout. What we're going to do is we're going to focus on what we call MMA. Got that from one of the coaches at the UFC. So that's movement, mobility, and activation. So basically, the first thing we're going to do is just start with some just very gentle movement. We're going to kind of jog up and down the field, get the legs moving a little bit. We'll kind of assess and feel how our body feels, see if anything feels a little bit tighter or if our hamstrings are a little bit sore, quads a little bit sore, glutes, etc. And then we're going to get into our mobilization. Mobilization is going to be Challenging our range of motion in the ankles, knees, and hips, everything that we need to be active for today's workout. And then Coach Madeline's going to handle the activation portion where we're going to actually get into more of the sport-specific or the kind of exercise-specific stuff that we're doing.
Yep, get into some sprinting drills to practice proper sprinting mechanics, get all those little fast-twitch muscle fibers firing, and then we'll be ready to go.
All right, awesome. So, so that's what we'll kind of go through here today. We'll videotape all of that and so you guys can kind of see what that looks like, and then we'll go from there.
All right, next we're going to get into our sprinting drills. So we're going to start with A-skips, then we're going to move on to B-skips and C-skips, then move into high knee accelerations, or also known as a combo drill. And then get into some combo to sprint drills. So with all these, we want to focus on striking right underneath the body, keeping the knee high, keeping that core engaged and the posture tall, and trying to be really bouncy and really explosive off of the ground. All right, for these drills, we also want to focus on staying really rigid. Sprinting is different from distance running in the way that it's a lot more rigid. And you want to get more of an elastic use out of those muscle fibers. So for these sprinting drills, we want to focus on keeping those toes up, keeping them dorsiflexed up towards your nose, and then striking midfoot, as opposed to distance running where you're doing it for a longer period of time. So there's a little bit more endurance focus to it. So it's a little bit different sprinting versus distance running with what those feet are doing. All right, what's up guys? Post-sprint workout. How are you feeling, Dr. Sean?
A little bit worse for wear, but all in all, it's more the temperature than the cardio, so that's good. Could definitely— like, looking back at things, I like to kind of evaluate how workouts go and how I felt and force production, execution, etc. And like, I could definitely feel, and like, especially when she got ahead of me, I could see where she was more— a little bit more tight and rigid on both her just how cyclical she was and on how she's contacting the ground. And then I could feel where I got a little bit loose, especially as I started getting a little bit more fatigue and accumulating that fatigue. So there were times where I was like, all right, I need to tighten up a little bit here. And I could feel myself kind of speeding up a little bit more. And then obviously just fatigue hits. So all in all, not bad for a really hot day and a good morning out running. So really enjoyed that. And we're looking forward to putting a few more of these together and just kind of showing some different distances, showing some speed execution, and some other drills that you can kind of work on to build some speed and build some power, both whether your, whether your goal is athletics or endurance running or sprinting or, you know, a combination of both, maybe a triathlete or a crossover athlete or HYROX. This is kind of video 1 in our endurance and running video series, and hope you guys enjoyed it.
