How to test sprint speed
Sprint speed has two parts you can test separately: how fast you accelerate from a standstill, and how fast you can run once you're up to speed. Each needs its own test, and both need a setup you can repeat.
The tests
| Test | Measures | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| 10, 20 or 30 m sprint | Acceleration | Timed from a standing or crouched start |
| 40-yard dash | Acceleration, mostly | Timed from a three-point or standing start |
| Flying 10 | Top speed | 10 m or 10 yd zone after a 20-40 m build-up |
| Flying 30 | Top speed, steadier | 30-60 m of a 60 m sprint |
How fast athletes are
Haugen et al. (2019) profiled athletes from 23 sports. Maximum sprint speed ranged from 7.5 to 11 m/s for men and from 6 to 9.5 m/s for women. The fastest team-sport athletes reached about 10 m/s for men and 9 m/s for women, and male soccer players ran about 1.1 m/s slower than sprinters. For scale, Usain Bolt covered 70 to 80 m of his 9.58 at 12.34 m/s (Maćkała and Mero, 2013).
Elite sprinters accelerate for longer: Bolt's fastest stretch came between 50 and 80 m. Developing athletes peak sooner, often between 30 and 40 m, which is why a flying 10 for a high schooler needs a shorter build-up than one for a college sprinter.
Make the numbers comparable
Start method and setup can move a sprint time by tenths of a second. In Haugen and Buchheit's review of sprint testing, standing 1 m behind the first gate instead of 0.5 m made short sprint times 0.06-0.08 s faster. Keep these the same from one test to the next:
- Stance and start method
- Distance from the start line to the first timing point
- Surface and footwear
- Warm-up, and rest between reps
Hand timing adds 0.2 to 0.3 s of error on a 40, so use an electronic timer for anything you plan to compare. Hand vs electronic timing.
Both tests from one rep
With gates, acceleration and top speed need separate setups: gates at 0, 10 and 20 m for one, and a flying zone further down for the other. Sprintbrick measures your distance from a receiver behind the start 100 times a second, so a single 60 m rep gives you splits every 10 m, your peak speed, and your fastest 10, 20 and 30 m.
Against OVR gates, Sprintbrick's segments after the first 10 m came within 50 ms every time, so you can rely on the flying times and top speed. We're still refining the start: in our latest session, the first 10 m read 0.04 to 0.09 s slower than the gates. Full results.