Sprinting, with Dan Pfaff

Dan Pfaff discusses how coaches analyze sprinting technique and make programming decisions based on movement patterns.

Last night, Dan Pfaff spent two hours working through how coaches read sprinting. Coaches joined a Coaching Eye Live Immersion Session from the UK, Sweden, the US, Canada, and Japan to study real footage and unpack how decisions are made in practice. The session moved from team-sport acceleration into upright sprinting, with one clear objective: build better judgment and the ability to interpret what we see. What we learned: • Training history shapes movement patterns long before coaching cues do • Symmetry and stance dynamics often matter more than surface mechanics • Arm action usually reflects ground-side problems • Force applied late in stance signals grinding, not speed • Effective movement can succeed short-term while quietly raising injury risk • Upright sprinting holds together when hip and shoulder axes stay coordinated • Heel drop, joint yield, and amortization support speed rather than slow it • Intervention decisions hinge on availability and output, not aesthetics Dan also spent a significant part of the session clarifying this: Movement patterns can produce results and still carry a time-bomb that costs careers... An athlete can be 'effective' with asymmetry, late force application, excessive push, or poor coordination between segments. They can run fast, win races, or be the fastest on their team. But that 'effectivenes's often hides inefficiencies that accumulate over time. Those inefficiencies tend to show up later as: • Stalled performance despite increased work • Rising injury frequency or reduced availability • Compensation patterns shifting load to one side • Tissues failing where tolerance has been exceeded over time or in an acute episode The coaching challenge we worked on was learning to recognize which patterns fall within an athlete’s bandwidth and which ones signal a future problem. That judgment determines whether a coach intervenes, supports the existing solution, or leaves the athlete alone. This distinction between effective now and sustainable over time was one of the central learning threads of the session. --------- Membership into Dan Pfaff's Coaching Eye cohort is next available from May - June 2026, and registration is now OPEN... 👀 Want to be part of this group? 👉 Head here loom.ly/qtcqnio