How To Break 12s in the 100m For Beginners

Originally I was gonna give a short intro on me but who cares if you want to know more about me or get more tips you can just browse my yt channel but I have some credentials, the most important one being my PBs which I got from 12s and 24s to what they are now in one season indicating I care more about breaking 11 than I do trolling or I hope it does.

Anyway. Knowledge. Mainly focused on younger athletes(16+) but the same rules apply unless you're a master athlete in which case, still applies but the bar is just that much higher. The tips will start simple and progess. But meeting the parameters in a single one of these tips is enough for a PB becuase generally, breaking 12 is quite easy if you know what to do.

BodyFat

If you're bodyfat is higher than 12%, this is a problem you should fix. Excess muscle is a bearable problem since it at least can be useful, but excess fat is useless, it just slows you down, its important as a store of energy which is why we need it but its literally deadweight above 12%, aim for 9-11%. Remember you're a sprinter, do not hop on a treadmill for this please. I beg you. Go sprint, lift weights, do burpees. Maintaining muscle costs energy and maintaining more muscle costs more energy so your fat will go.

Diet

I'm special here, other people will tell you drop junk food completely, only eat Brussel sprouts and grilled chicken or whatever. Me idc, reason being it's not as important as people make it out to be, doesnt mean its not important at all though. A good diet for an athlete should be low on sugary foods and high in protein. Now sprinting takes a lot of energy so we need carbs too, and a lot of them. What's important here though is the quality of the carbs, chocolate being your only source is bad, rice, bread? better. For protein try and eat 1.2x your bodyweight in kg, if you can eat more, better. We also need a source of collagen for our tendons, if you're not allergic to eggs, eat them.

Gym

So sprinters chase speed and if its not God given, its earned through sheer power, that means a stringent gym routine is required. Remember we are not bodybuilders, we are sprinters, hence we will train like them. The work sprinters do in the gym is a cross between a powerlifter and an olympic weightlifer with more focus on the latter than the former because they build speed power. That means grab a barbell and start clean, jerking, and snatching your way to faster speeds with a side of squats, and bench. I personally prefer dips over bench but to each their own i guess. Just make sure you work everything when you're in the gym, i dont mean do full body which you can do, i mean every muscle. Confused? You will understand when you try and break 11.

Plyometrics

If off the track gym is your butter, than this is the bread its being spread on. There is so much to do when it comes to plyometrics but at 12s I can get away with keeping it simple. Do pogos and broad jumps 2-3 times a week with 48hrs of recovery between each session minimum. Do no more than 30 touches per session, thats the amount of time you touch the floor btw. Focus on reacting to the ground as soon as you feel it.

Ok, by now, if you followed this for a few months, you should've broken 12s by now, if not then we have to address the elephant in the room. Its a shame you didnt manage to brute force 12s anyway, its possible since 11.8 or slower is relatively easy if you followed what ive said so far. if you still havent managed then it time to address your technique. Ive found that understanding how to sprint is easier if you work backwards instead of forwards.

That's why I'm only going to focus on upright sprinting, the angle your body will spend most of its time whilst running any sprint event.

Sprinting is all about power, to produce power you need to use your hips. Simple. Your leg needs to rise not because you're pulling it with the quadriceps but because you activated the hips and the satorius which is connected to both the hip and quads is activated because of the hips causing your leg to rise. Then you want to relax and contract your glute on the same leg to get it to swipe down and back whilst activating the hip on the other leg to raise that instead.

Hard to type but I made a video where im messing around but i explain in the warm up stuff you can do to turn on your hips, turn on your glutes, and figure out how to use them whilst sprinting. Start watching at 4:25, i even threw in some drills too so yeah. https://youtu.be/zTp56CLb0k8

Beyond that, breaking 12s is all about assessing yourself, you're bad at everything(big surprise), but if you had to identify what was the thing holding you back the most, what would it be? If you can't answer that question, then you're making breaking 12s a conscienscious issue as much as it is a skill issue. If you're lucky, you have a good coach that can tell you if not, think and fix that and keep going until you run out of things to fix, if you manage that you would break 10s though which should go to show how important understanding what you're weak at and becoming good at it is. Hope this helps.

If the mods don't take this down, please don't spam my inbox, my channel probably genuinely answers your question(s), if not, the pinned posts in this subreddit do. If this doesn't get taken down, I'll do another on breaking 11.5. Happy New Year!

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