REF-763 · Haugen et al., 2019 · Sports Medicine - Open, Vol. · Paper · PubMed

The Training and Development of Elite Sprint Performance: an Integration of Scientific and Best Practice Literature

B+moderate evidenceMeasured on elite to world-class athletesWritten before October 2026, being re-checked

A narrative review from the Norwegian group (Haugen, Seiler, Sandbakk, Tønnessen) that sets scientific findings next to elite coaching practice for sprinting. Sprint performance depends heavily on genetic traits, and an elite sprinter's year-to-year change is smaller than the typical variation, the smallest worthwhile change and the effect of wind and timing methods.

The underlying determinants (power, technique, sprint-specific endurance) are still trainable.

The review describes how progression, specificity, variation/periodization and individualization, and sprinting, technical, strength/power and plyometric training, are used, and names a gap: studies test brief maximal sprints with short recoveries in young team-sport athletes, while elite sprinters run a broad range of distances, intensities and recoveries and pick each session's components for a stated purpose.

Participants

No participants: narrative review. The abstract does not say how many studies or best-practice sources were integrated.

Protocol

Review method: integration of scientific and best-practice literature on elite sprint training. No systematic search, risk-of-bias assessment or meta-analysis is described in the abstract.

Key Results

Genetic traits weigh heavily on sprint performance, and an athlete's year-to-year performance changes are smaller than the smallest worthwhile change, the typical variation, and the effect of external conditions (wind, monitoring methods).
Key determinants are trainable: power, technique and sprint-specific endurance.
Training principles covered: progression, specificity, variation/periodization, individualization. Methods covered: sprinting/running, technical training, strength/power, plyometric training.
Science vs practice gap: most sprint studies use young team-sport athletes, brief maximal sprints and short recoveries; elite sprinters sprint and run over a broad range of distances with varying intensity and recovery.
Best practice ties each session's components (modality, duration, intensity, recovery, session rate) to its intended purpose, whereas the scientific literature tends to a "one-size-fits-all" approach.
The authors offer the review as a position statement for state-of-the-art sprint training and a source of hypotheses to test.

Practical Application

"How should a sprinter train?" — this narrative review of elite sprint training (science plus coaching practice, no pooled data) answers: power, technique and sprint-specific endurance are trainable, but an elite sprinter's year-to-year improvement is smaller than normal performance variation and the effect of wind, and elite practice chooses each session's modality, duration, intensity, recovery and session rate for a stated purpose instead of repeating the brief-maximal-sprint, short-recovery format most studies test.
Judge a sprinter's progress over seasons and in comparable conditions: annual changes sit below the typical variation and the smallest worthwhile change, so one race or one wind-assisted time says little.
Write every sprint session with its purpose first (acceleration, maximal velocity, sprint-specific endurance, technique), then choose distance, intensity and recovery to serve that purpose.
Inference, not tested here: team-sport sprint studies (short sprints, short recoveries) are an imperfect guide for track sprint programming; the review names the population gap, it does not measure the transfer.
Not from this paper; the base's own practice: use a sprint force-velocity profile (REF-553) to pick between resisted accelerations (REF-765) and maximal-velocity sprinting, and add heavy lower-body strength work, which transfers to sprint speed (REF-764).

Limitations

Narrative review without a systematic method; best-practice content is coaching experience, not tested evidence.
The abstract contains no numbers: no training volumes, distances, intensities or effect sizes can be quoted from this entry.
Written from the abstract and record metadata only (the open-access full text was not read), so the session-level recommendations in the full review are not captured here.
Differences by sex and by sprint distance are not addressed in the abstract.
How this entry was checked and changed
Why this level

authoritative narrative review from the leading group; not systematic