The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [149]
The Brower system.
The Devil’s in the Details
My first step had gone nowhere. Quite literally. My leg had gone from behind the line to the start line, the zero-meter mark. Losing a step might not impact a marathon, but it’s an enormous handicap in the 40-yard dash.
My untrained start position compared to the trained start position.
THE FIRST ROUND OF POSITIONAL CORRECTIONS
1. If right-handed, put your right hand down and left leg forward. Left-handers do the opposite. This will be optimal 90% of the time.
2. To set up as a right-hander: stand with the toes of the left foot roughly one foot behind the line, then touch the toes of the right foot to the back of the left heel. Next, spread the right foot out so both feet are hip width and no wider. Support yourself on both hands, placed in front of the line (to place your weight forward), then bring the right hand to the line.
3. Put three fingers of the right hand on the line: index finger and middle finger together, plus the thumb. This caused too much pain in my thumb, so I used the index and middle knuckles with the thumb.
4. Just before you take off, the left arm, bent at a 90-degree angle, will come up so that your hand is next to your hip (see photo on previous page).
5. Drive and aim the first step with your rear leg to land three feet (one yard) from your lead toe.
The result: my first trained 10-yard attempt clocked at 1.99 from a 2.07-second original, a 0.08 second improvement.
ADDING CORRECT ARM POSITION AND MOVEMENT
I had placed most of my weight on my legs, resulting in a negative arm angle. In other words, the line from my fingertips to my shoulder pointed up and behind me. This is bad. It meant I had to pause and lift my arm before taking the first step.
To correct this, I attempted to have my shoulder slightly ahead of my fingers and replace my arms. In Joe’s words, I was to “leave the lead arm behind” and drive it backward instead of lifting it. I would naturally fall forward as I removed the third leg of the tripod, and driving the right arm back would help me drive my right leg forward.
More weight forward, however, meant less sole contact with the ground, and my rear foot slipped both times I practiced this. The solution Joe suggested was Nike Vapors, which, unlike common cleats, have small teeth at the toe of the shoe. Stuck with my standard soccer booties, I hoped the new forward pressure would compensate for less traction.
It did: the next 10-yard attempt clocked at 1.91 from a 2.07 original—a 0.16 overall improvement.
FOCUSING ON SUSTAINED RUNNING POSITION AND FEWER STEPS
Joe placed a string about three feet from my lead toe and prescribed the following:
1. From the start position, keep your head down but your eyes on the string, where you want your first step to land.
2. Ensure that your knee is ahead of your toes when you land that first step.
3. For the entire 10 yards, keep your chin tucked and your upper body ahead of your lower body.
4. Take the fewest steps possible (seven steps or fewer for my limb length), which will paradoxically feel slower due to more ground contact.
I took a breath. The checklist was getting long and the setup was taking correspondingly longer. When I passed the 10-yard mark, it felt a lot slower.
It wasn’t: this fifth attempt clocked at 1.85 from a 2.07 original—a 0.22 overall improvement.
Now it was time to retest the 40-yard dash.
“Just Run Your 10”
“To transition to the 40, people forget all they learned in the 10. Just run your 10. Run the best 10 you can. Don’t worry about the rest but finish to the 40-yard line. But … run that 10 like it’s for Olympic gold.”
That was it? Five 10-yard dash practice runs and less than 15 minutes of coaching?
I took one warm-up run at about 60% of max effort to shake out the cobwebs.
“Ready?” I asked Joe.
“Ready.”
Then I hovered in the starting stance for what seemed like an eternity, making tiny adjustments, trying to keep the dozen or so points straight.
And I was off.
For the first time in a long time, I felt fast.