I have just returned from the Speed course for Z-Health Performance Solutions. It was quite a full 4 days. Although we did work on sprinting mechanics this was not the main emphasis of the course. One of the central themes was “Perceptual Reframing”. In this course the theme was in regards to changing our habitual framing of time in hours, minutes, seconds into the frame of milliseconds. A frequent phrase was “milliseconds matter”, meaning the faster we can gather information and act upon it, the faster response we can have. This led to another phrase “sooner means faster”. The references were mainly to sports but this is true in all aspects of our lives, whether it is scoring the winning point as time runs out or avoiding being hit by a speeding car. This leads into the second theme of “Contextual Speed”. Faster does not always mean better. Sometimes being too speedy can diminish effectiveness in both sport and life. Therefore the optimal speed is dependent on the context in which we are operating and not on just who is the fastest. So rather than “How can I make you faster?” it is “How can I make you faster in a way that makes you better?” This is another truism for sport and life.
A lot of time was spent on visual skills since it is at the top of our hierarchy for information gathering. The clarity of the visual information impacts both the accuracy and speed of our decision making process. There are four main skills of vision that we focused upon: Visual Resolution, Depth Judgment, Eye Movements, and Peripheral Awareness. Each of these can be trained with vision skill drills. In a recent study done at UC Berkeley, they found in a group of subjects over 50 years of age that after doing perceptual learning (repeated practice on a demanding visual task) there was an improvement in visual acuity and contrast sensitivity without changing the optical characteristics of the eye. Good new for all of us. (Check out the Beyond Eyesight class on October 22nd to explore this).
If your interest is in just running faster, I have a lot of drills I can teach you for training that skill also.
Happy Moving!
