Why are sprinters’ upper bodies so muscled?

Apparently your idea of ripped is different than mine if you think that 14 year old Jamaican is ripped, trust me my man that is not ripped.

theyre densely muscled because theyre on several steroids at once,plus human growth hormones and probably insulin as well.oh,and they spend several hours in the gym every day,or every second day.

Dis true. Yohan Blake would have run 17.52 in the 200 if he had pipe cleaner arms. Ego got the better of him.

Why aren't long/triple jumper's arms as built as sprinters then?

Explosiveness seems to be just as important in the horizontal jumps?

And that is what draws in the average viewer. In the words of Fred Kerley, "At the end of the day, nobody really comes to watch anything besides 'The Fastest Man in the World,'".

But maybe if everyone on this forum just keeps whining about "dopers" people will quit watching the 100m and start watching the 10K.

Now I understand why hippos are so fast. Upper body.

So, what type of upper body work are these guys doing in terms of specific exercises? I know nothing about weight training for sprinting.

Short sprint training includes a lot of weightlifting. Combine that with a body type that responds well to lifting (mostly West African decent) and you have a muscled upper body. If you look around at any college meet, you'll these body types disproportionally present in the short sprints.

Now, to your question... it is necessary? Not absolutely so, but it's optimal. When I dropped down to the 200m at USATF Masters National Championships a few years back, I was shocked at how chiseled the sprinters were compared to the greyhound body types I had been racing against for years in the 800m. I think that to compete at the top level, you need fast twitch genetics and a muscular, but not bulky, upper body.

Yes, but let's word it correctly - "... not as a prerequisite to running fast, but as a byproduct of doing the weight work required to develop the other muscles that are important for sprinting fast."

There, fixed it for you. Otherwise, you completely nailed it and of course that is what you communicated, you just should have worded it more explicitly.

Harry Aikines-Aryeetey competes both as a bodybuilder and a sprinter, but will never get on a podium with his 10.08 100m PB. But he looks impressive.

A combination of:

Olympic lift variations- cleans, snatch jerks, hangs

Static lifts- squats, lunges, deadlifts,

Med ball throws

The USTFCCCA convention symposiums touch on this. The material is accessible to anyone.

My guess is the wider the sprinters body, the higher the optimum amount of arm muscle.

Reason is the arm motion is transferred into forward power through the torc along the long axis: it rotates your body and, unless your foot strike is directly under your center of mass, serves to move the striking foot backwards; adding to propulsion.

Since rotating while in the air is not good, I imagine your body adjusts things such that the torc from pushing off with the foot (where it strikes vs. the center of mass) is exactly compensated by the torc from the arm swing.

At some point, though, there is probably too much torc from the arms to easily use and any additional arm muscle is wasted. Hence the original guess that wide bodied sprinters can make better use of buff arms.

In distance running, the power you get from your arms is going to be inefficient. Much better to use your legs a bit more. So you get things like distance runners who don't even really use their arms and twist their torsos instead.

Yes, you probably need the torc to absorb all the ground reaction forc, otherwise your torso might just divorc.

you cant pick and choose body types for different parts of your body. A sprinter genetically has a mix of strenght and power. So their entire body will reflect their genetic makeup. Even if they did zero upper body work they would still have a bigger upper body than a distance runner who did nothing but bench press all day.

Don't forget about the glutes, dmb

Hmmmm?

The main explanation for this is that sprints obviously require a very powerful lower body.

But when you train your lower body, you end up putting muscle on your entire body. It is a complete misconception that you only put on muscle in a particular area by training that body part.

You could do nothing but squats and your arms would get bigger.

Huge upper bodies on sprinters are mostly the incidental result of building a strong lower body.

The claims above are utterly false. Muscle strength and hypertrophy are well understood to be targetable in isolation. Perhaps you are thinking of spot fat reduction.

Do you lift? Have you ever trained anybody that lifts?

Can, should, and are....are very different words.

Squats and Cleans still work the upper body to some extent and also REQUIRE upper body strength to some extent.

Alan

Also, most sprinters have HUGE shoulders in comparison to their chest. There is a reason for this.

Alan