Author: Steve Bennett The Most Common Training Mistake made with Sprinters – Attempting too much sprinting in a state of neural fatigue. Sprinters commonly attempt too much quality training too often, by this i mean too often in the week, too close to super heavy gym sessions, too many reps in a training session and training reps that are too long. Its also too easy to give sprinters more speed endurance and conditioning work than they need just to make them feel happier about doing something and this also sabotages the quality of their most important activities and that is sprinting at 100% maximum speed. The microcycle (which may be as short as week) needs to be planned carefully with the highest quality most important development activities planned first and then all the conditioning work and extra activities planned carefully around it. Each athlete is different and what they can do and stay balanced with highest quality work actually being enabled will vary throughout the athletes development. Beware of the chronically stale sprinter syndrome where the athlete is always in a state of neural fatigue, evidence of this is apparent if the athlete runs much faster after being sick or injured. Try to maintain and even improve all high quality activities almost constantly through each macrocycle, make every high quality element measurable so you can monitor it. That sets us up for anther topic for another time about the need to split a sprinters development up into 3 macrocycles yearly and in many cases get -2-3 years of improvement in one year and avoid injuries at the same time.