Sprint Training For Javelin Throwers, Why Faster Athletes Throw Farther

Running is essential to being a good javelin thrower. In order

to have speed and rhythm down the runway you need to

have good speed and rhythm while doing basic running

drills, sprints, and jogging.

Barefoot jogging is essential to building up your relaxation

in your face, and your whole body during the running steps,

once you build up your relaxation you are able to establish

rhythm. You can’t force the rhythm and relaxation in your

approach with a javelin in your hand, if you’re unable to do it

in a jog while not holding onto anything.

Just like mobility, if you can’t hit external rotation in your

throwing arm while you are doing a stretch, how do you expect to hit it when you throw?

This also helps strengthen the arches of your feet, Achilles tendons, and calves, which translates to you becoming more bouncy. Once you establish that relaxation in the barefoot jogging, you can progress to pogo hops. Pogos will do the same thing for your feet but also establish more bounce and ground reactivity. Once you are solid with barefoot jogging and pogos, be sure to give bounding a try. Bounding helps you bridge the gap between running and jumping, which is a very similar feeling to what you are going for in your approach. When you are doing your approach, you’re not jumping, you’re not running sideways, and you’re not simply stepping. Some may describe the feeling as more of a bound because of how bouncy you are while moving down the runway and getting your knees and feet up off the ground.

Once you establish the relaxed, elastic bouncy feeling, you want to progress to sprinting. Sprinting is extremely helpful to work on your speed and power in the throw.

One thing that is not necessarily essential to

improving your speed, but it is essential to

improving your rhythm is the ability to do running drills like A skips, B skips, and side skips. We use these a lot during our approach work days with the javelin so being able to do them running forwards, without a javelin in your hand is

certainly a necessary step 1! Progressing to sprinting we want to be able to

do medium distance, relaxed sprints in the 100- 200m range to work on our relaxed, backend speed. A big cue I like to give with my athletes here is to stay tall and keep your face as relaxed as possible. Without straining or tensing up your muscles.

Jan Železný was known as a speed thrower and could run a sub-22 second 200m dash. That alone tells you how important relaxed, long sprinting ability is for javelin performance.

I like to think of it this way: longer sprints translate mostly to the running steps of the approach, while shorter sprints emphasize the crossovers and penultimate. Shorter sprints between 20–60 meters develop power output, which translates to maintaining speed into the crossovers and producing actual power in the throw.

At the end of the day, you need to be fast and explosive in order to throw far.

You need to train your relaxed speed AND power speed so that when you are running

down the runway during your approach you do not need to go 100% effort to be fast.

You should train to be so fast that your 80% relaxed speed is still fast enough to pack

a punch. This is so that you are not straining through the approach and still able to

keep your face and body relaxed. As we know we need the throwing side to be passive

and the blocking side to be active, in order to accomplish this we need to stay relaxed

during the approach, we cannot tense up during the approach and strain through the

crossovers, then get to the final phase of the throw and have a passive throwing side. It

is impossible to turn it off once it is on.

To watch sprinting progression my athletes use, watch this video below.

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