How Quickness Drills Can Improve Your Response Time
Quickness drills are important to improve the reaction time and should be considered by every athlete.
Quickness and speed are often considered to be a same thing but they are different. Being quick means that you have explosive strength and have the ability to react promptly. Some athletes are found to be blessed with explosive strength but they are not very fast when talking about sprinting. One example is Steve Nash. People like Matt Jones and Mario Williams were fast but not as quick as some of the other athletes of their era. It is very important to distinguish amongst the two as for some games, sprinting speed does not count as much as the ability to react quickly. Genes have a role to play in quickness and they determine how quick you are. Quickness drills can really improve your reaction or response time. Take a group of athletes, and ask them to stand-up and tap their feet in place. Watch how many times and how fast those athletes can do this. The amount of punches you can deliver in a given time is also a good measure of quickness.
Reaction Time:
When talking about quickness, reaction time comes into play. Reaction time refers to the time taken by an individual to respond to a stimulus. For example, it relates to how fast you get off your knees and start racing upon hearing the sound of the gun. It also has to do with how quickly a batsman reacts to the speed and direction of the ball thrown by the bowler. If the batsman is not able to do that in time, then he will put himself at the risk of getting out. Reaction time is what sets a good athlete apart from an amazing one. It is easy when you can judge what is going to happen on the field. However, the problem begins when you have to anticipate and react.
Talking about reaction times, average reaction time amounts to 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. As far as sound goes, the reaction time for it is around 3 to 5 hundredth of a second faster. For the best athletes, the reaction time is around 0.1 seconds. For people with slow reflexes, the reaction time is around 0.4 seconds and this is where quickness drills come into play as these improve the reflexes. The surprising thing is that you can take people with the same speed performance characteristics but still their performance will vary widely in terms of their reaction times.
1. Stimulants:
Reaction time is largely dependent on your genetic make up and quickness drills can improve it. The possible level of improvement can only be around 10 to 20 percent. There are two things that you can do to become quick. First is the use of stimulants while the second is the over-speed training. Stimulants have nothing to do with quickness drills but they are an important factor. Stimulants such as coffee and tea improve your speed of stimulant identification and associated reaction. In order to differentiate, do some reaction time tests in the morning before you drink any stimulant. Repeat the procedure after drinking coffee or some other energy drink. These stimulants increase the production of adrenalin the body. It also explains the rush or the burst of explosiveness that you experience during a competitive game situation. It results from the increased production of adrenalin.
2. Overspeed Training:
Now coming onto to overspeed training, you can become quick by training yourself to respond to situations that are faster than what you will usually encounter during your sports. If you are a baseball player, you can practice using pitching machines that throw with a speed of around 130 to 150 miles per hour. If you become better at responding to these high speed pitches during quickness drills, you will be able to respond to expected pitchesí speed during the game, which amounts to around 90 to 100 miles per hour. If you are a car racer, you can raise your game by practicing on a stimulator that follows the speed of more than 200 miles per hour. This way you will be able to control your car – running at 130 miles per hour during the actual race. If you are a sprinter with poor reaction time, learn to respond well to the gun shot.
Voluntary Quickness:
Quickness is a voluntary component as well. In order to improve that, you need to practice being quick. If you are a boxer, you can aim to punch 5 to 10 times in a go as fast as you could. Other than that, you can also go for general quickness drills such as low line hops and hurdle hops. In order to do that, set a starting line and hop over and across it as fast as you can and keep doing it for 10 seconds.
YES! I Absolutley Want To Increase My Speed,
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