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How To Be Faster on Your Feet
Five drills that will help you regain that step you thought you'd lost forever

It happens gradually. Month by month, year by year, the change is so incremental that you'd be hard-pressed to notice. Then, one day in your 30s, you go for a loose ball on the basketball court and watch as an opponent beats you to it by what feels like a dozen steps. On the softball field, you suddenly realize that the ground you cover is smaller than your corporate parking space. Visions of early-bird specials and AARP discounts start to haunt you.

The Quick Version Should you ever have the opportunity to visit a cadaver lab and cut off a hunk of thigh, infuse it with special tissue stain, and slice it crosswise, you'd be treated to an interesting sight. Muscle, you would observe, is composed of three kinds of fibers, like thousands of tricolored fiberoptic wires. These are called slow-twitch, intermediate-twitch, and fast-twitch muscle fibers, in reference to the speed with which they contract. The slow- and intermediate-twitch fibers, which are involved in activities like jogging and weight lifting, stay healthy and strong with only moderate use well into our 60s. The fast-twitch fibers, which are responsible for explosive movement, begin atrophying, unfortunately, by 30. But by using them -- i.e., regularly forcing yourself to move fast -- you can resuscitate those that have just started to decline and dramatically extend the life of those still in decent shape. Recently, a whole industry has grown up around helping elite athletes recruit more of their fast-twitch muscle fibers. A few simple drills from this arena can go a long way toward increasing your foot speed, and easing those shuffleboard nightmares.

Lunge Before You Leap At Athletes' Performance, in Tempe, Arizona, Darryl Eto instructs most of his clientele to perform variations of split lunges. These deceptively simple-looking plyometric drills zero in on fast-twitch fibers by adding a speed factor to a standard strength exercise. Start from a deep lunge position, with your left foot forward. Jump straight up. Quickly bring your feet together and return to the same lunge position before you land. Going slowly at first, do five from the left lunge position and then five from the right. Graduate to a set of ten in which you switch the lead foot midair. Finally, bang out a set of six to ten with no rest between jumps.

Get In Motion The following cone drill will begin to prep your body to deal with the fact that most first steps in sports don't start from a dead stop. Set two ten-inch-tall cones 16 inches apart, as shown in the diagram. Stand to the left of the cones and hop laterally over each, making sure to keep your feet together. When you hit the ground after the second cone, immediately break into a ten-yard sprint. Do five reps starting to the left of the cones and five starting to the right. Next, try some falling sprints, a favorite trick of Frank Cona, of the Sports Speed Advantage training center, in Rochester Hills, Michigan: From a standing position, let your body fall forward. Just at the point where panic kicks in, break into a sprint. Do five taking off with your left leg and five with your right.

Get Going Every Twitch Way Unless your sport is the 110-meter hurdles, you're going to need speed in all directions. As shown above, use chalk or tape to mark off six four-foot spokes of a wheel at 60-degree intervals. Place different-colored beanbags at the varying distances labeled A, B, C, D, E, and F. Stand facing beanbag A; jump over it and back, keeping your feet together. Still facing A, jump over B and back, and so forth, until you've done all six. Rest 15 seconds. Turn to face B and repeat the drill. Do one circuit clockwise and another counterclockwise.

Finish the workout with resistance running: Have a partner hold you back with a bungee or harness. Do 15 to 20 short sprints, in varying directions. The resistance should be substantial, but not so much that you can't move. And make sure your holder is someone you trust. If he lets go while you're going at full throttle, that sudden leap into hyperspace may be more of a speed boost than you were looking for.

By: Steve Steinberg
Photograph by: Andy Anderson
Illustrations by: Paul Mirto
(July 2003)