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If you asked people what it means to sprint, most people would describe it as running as fast as you possibly can. For a treadmill workout, this usually translates into short bursts of speed interspersed with longer periods of recovery, usually either hopping off the belt or slowing to a walking pace. I usually do my fastest sprints at the lower inclines as it is easier to run faster when you’re not also having to maintain that speed at a higher incline. Today’s kettle bell class included two sprint segments, but not the kind of sprints that most people think of or do in their normal workouts.

Our first sprint was a backwards jog at a 0 incline. Our instructor encouraged us to start at 2 mph before moving our speed up to our final pace. While I can maintain a 10 mph pace at a 0 incline running forward, I had to keep my speed closer to 2.5 while running backwards. It is definitely much more challenging to run backwards so it would be pretty unsafe to attempt to do too high of a speed. You have to make sure to keep enough space between yourself and the front end of the belt to avoid tripping yourself. This is much harder than it looks and my thighs were screaming after only 2 minutes. I’m definitely going to be adding more backwards sprints into my workouts.

The second video is an incline based sprint. We had to set the incline to a 8 and select a sped that we could maintain at that incline for a full minute. Once again, I had to choose a slower speed that my sprint pace at a low incline. My average outdoor running pace is ~4.5 mph, so I did 30 seconds at 5.5 before I felt confident enough to push my speed to 6.0 mph for the last 30 seconds. It’s much harder to sprint quickly at an incline because it takes more effort to propel up yourself upwards at an incline. So you have to figure out what speed your body can maintain the speed with the additional strain of the incline. Next time, I’ll probably start at the 6.0 mph pace and see if I can push myself a little harder. This one will also be added to my treadmill workouts.