Here at OMORPHO we are constantly striving to improve athletic performance with our innovative collection of athletic training gear and award-winning G-Vest Sport weighted vests. We do this by partnering with the world’s best athletes, athletic trainers and performance coaches.
Since early 2022, OMORPHO has had the pleasure of working closely with ALTIS, a globally recognized leader in sports education. They specialize in coaching excellence for speed, power, and strength training. We worked closely with ALTIS’ head coach and CEO, Stu McMillan, to outfit his entire athlete training group from head to toe in our gravity sportswear and G-Vest Sport weighted vest.
Backed by 150 years of combined coaching experience and the knowledge of working with 120+ Olympians, ALTIS is a place where coaches go when they want to learn how to make their athletes fast. ALTIS knows all things speed and they also provide an elite training environment for athletes. From Stu’s experience of using OMORPHO with his athletes, we wanted to write a blog series to give you a peek into one of the most vital and fundamental skills needed by every athlete - speed.
Speed is truly one of the most important skills an athlete can further develop. The faster athlete wins the race, while the faster team out runs their opponent. I call it a skill but it is also very much a physical capacity. Highly skilled athletes can successfully express the strength and stability needed to move in a powerful, yet agile way down a rubber track or across a turf field. This physical capacity is honed by weeks, months, and years of training.
When coaches are working with their athletes to develop sprinting speed they will monitor one of the foundational biomechanics principles of sprinting, which is termed “ground contact time.” Ground contact time is quite straight forward. It is the length of time the athlete is in contact with the ground during each step. This is an important factor to sprint running as athletes need to be able to strike the ground with lots of force to run fast - but the faster they run, the less time they are in contact with the ground to generate force. It can be quite the conundrum!
Coach Stu to explains more: “The development of speed requires improvements in both technique and the necessary physical abilities. Vertical stiffness is one of these abilities. A fast sprinter can be compared to a spring—the stiffer it is, the less it deforms upon impact, allowing for quicker ground contact and faster running. This ability is key for enhancing speed.”
This is where the OMORPHO weighted G-Vest Sport comes in. The G-Vest Sport is the perfect tool to help athletes improve their stiffness in order to develop better ground contact times and faster sprint times. I’ve asked Coach Stu again to explain how he has been using the G-Vest Sport to get ALTIS athletes, such as Hafsa Kamara, even faster. Hafsa Kamara is a nine-time Sierra Leone National Track and Field Team Member training for her second Olympics appearance. She runs the 100m dash, 200m dash, and 4x100m relay. Needless to say, this girl is fast and looking to get even faster!
"The G-Vest Sport is the perfect tool to help athletes improve their stiffness in order to develop better ground contact times and faster sprint times."
"With Hafsa, we've focused on improving her stiffness. Implementing the G-Vest Sport in her warm-up runs, along with complexing with non-weighted sprints, has significantly boosted her stiffness and speed. She is setting career bests at an age when most athletes tend to decline." – Stuart McMillan
With the OMORPHO G-Vest Sport, Hafsa is challenged to generate more force to support the weighted training gear as she moves down the track. The added weight will try to depress the ‘spring’ that is her body to a much greater extent. To fight back, Hafsa must increase her ability to stabilize her core musculature as she continues to hit her good running form. Over time, training using wearable resistance like the G-Vest Sport she will develop an improved ability to be a ‘stiffer spring’, which will translate to faster sprint times.
It is early in the season but Hafsa’s stiffer spring is already showing itself. Her ultimate goal is to make it to the Paris Olympic Games, and so far this season she has run three of her fastest times ever.
So when you watch athletes this summer sprinting across the track, soccer pitch, basketball court and even down the vault runway you are seeing the best in the world at being a stiff spring as they chase down the winning podium.
To learn more about the principles of MicroLoad™, how it works, and what it can do for you, check out the OMORPHO science page.
