how can i be better at the finishing kick

Puberty is one thing, I know you’re pretty young

Other than that work on the mental side of “this hurts so much but I HAVE TO BEAT THEM”

Simple. Improve your sprinting speed. Do fast strides after a workout or even after an easy run. Practice some all out and accelerations where you reach max speed at the end. Do these strides 3x a week. Lifting weights will help with speed as well. Plyometrics are an option too if you want to get more advanced. Also do glute exercises/drills. If you do all these i guarantee you will be a decent kicker, even if you have little speed right now. Good luck.

Figure out what your best kick is. For me in HS, I had to start winding it up from 600 out.

A winning kick isn't just about natural speed, though. What's more important is how much you have left with 400 to go. It's largely about your endurance at race pace.

But the best thing you can do to improve your kick is to practice kicking in races. Pick a point in each race where you will pick up the pace, no matter what. Try it and see how it goes. Try doing it the next week. See how much you have to have left in the tank to kick. See how fast you can go from 100 meters out. Try a sustained surge from 800 out. Mix it up. See what works.

Of course you have natural speed.......everyone has , but in your case it seem to be limited.

You have to improve your endurance , anaerobic / aerobic capacity so you can fully use your natural speed

in the end of a race . Then you can sometimes add to your training real sprinting and e.g 3-5 flying 10-30 m all out sprints with long full rest between of 5-10 min . Then you can also add fast strides 3-5 x 100m after your easy runs sometimes to improve finishing speed. Good luck! :)

Coach NR 1 wrote:

Of course you have natural speed.......everyone has , but in your case it seem to be limited.

You have to improve your endurance , anaerobic / aerobic capacity so you can fully use your natural speed

in the end of a race . Then you can sometimes add to your training real sprinting and e.g 3-5 flying 10-30 m all out sprints with long full rest between of 5-10 min . Then you can also add fast strides 3-5 x 100m after your easy runs sometimes to improve finishing speed. Good luck! :)

Two questions, JS:

1. What is the point of "sprinting" 10 metres? You don't gain anything from that, unless you are a sprinter practising starts.

2. Why do you call yourself Coach NR 1 when so many of your runners have poor results? (please spare us the lies about the 2:07)

colder and wiser wrote:

Figure out what your best kick is. For me in HS, I had to start winding it up from 600 out.

A winning kick isn't just about natural speed, though. What's more important is how much you have left with 400 to go. It's largely about your endurance at race pace.

But the best thing you can do to improve your kick is to practice kicking in races. Pick a point in each race where you will pick up the pace, no matter what. Try it and see how it goes. Try doing it the next week. See how much you have to have left in the tank to kick. See how fast you can go from 100 meters out. Try a sustained surge from 800 out. Mix it up. See what works.

☝That.

One thing that our coach has us do is towards the end of the season, we mix in a lot of 2-mile and some 1-mile pace shorter reps into specific 5k race-pace workouts. That really seems to help our strength endurance for a 5k, and makes sure that we are more comfortable at the (comparatively slower) race pace. It also seems to help us keep something of a speed reserve for the end of a race.

Apart from that, we don't do a whole ton of speed work for cross; it doesn't seem that we need to if we stay very aerobically strong.

I just wanna say I remember El G fan being like 13-14, when I was that age I ran 28-27 in the 200 but I developed to like 24. Speed grows with you.

There are so many threads like this, but there is no specific training for improving a kick or the ability to cover a surge in the pace.

If the OP's PR is 4:30, improving his fitness to 4:25 will, all other things being equal, improve his kick.

Kicking is about endurance, not raw speed. Do tempo runs followed by a hard mile every now and then. Beyond that, I'd have to analyze your training.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

There are so many threads like this, but there is no specific training for improving a kick or the ability to cover a surge in the pace.

If the OP's PR is 4:30, improving his fitness to 4:25 will, all other things being equal, improve his kick.

This is essentially the answer

A kick or a lack thereof is a combination of your speed and your endurance just like the rest of the race. If you can run a mile in 4:20, but the race sits at 4:40 pace for the first 3 laps, you are going to have a good final lap. If there are 2 4:20 milers in that race then it becomes more of a matter of 400/800 ability for that final lap. Hope that makes sense.

A lot of coaches prescribe an all-out 400 at the end of workouts to try and simulate a kick finish. The Michigan is an example. A pro I follow on Strava finishes every workout with either an all-out 200 or 400

ElGuerroujFan wrote:

I have learned that I get drastically slower in the last 400 meters compared to a lot of the kids in my race. I was sitting right behind 2nd place the other day (in a 5k) with 600m to go, and he started to kick. I had nothing left and settled for 3rd.

I just have no natural speed. pretty much anyone on the team can beat me in an open 400 regardless of their PRs. i was just wondering how i can be better in the last part of the race, when it matters most. should I do exercises to improve turnover? lots of hills for strength?

Even if this doesn't help for cross country, it might help for track.

I agree with a lot of the responses, so far. Don't confuse "pure speed" with having energy reserve at the end of a race, due to better endurance training. You may be neck and neck with a guy at the end of the race. His pure 400m speed may be 3 or 4 seconds slower than yours. But if he's run more miles, more tempo runs, more intervals and has done more long runs with strides at the end, guess who's going to close that last 400m faster?

He will. The "slower 400m guy" will close faster, because he's got more left in the tank, because he's made more deposits to his endurance bank account. You won't, because even though you have "better speed," it's no good to you in a long distance race without enough endurance in the bank to cash those speed checks when you need to.

There's no shortcut. Not even "raw speed." More miles, more tempo work, more VO2 max workouts, and more long runs where you hammer 100m strides when you're most exhausted.