What’s wrong with kids these days? Part V: Rhythm and harmony As we accelerate we should experience decreasing ground contact times and increasing flight times. While I am not measuring these variables directly, there is certainly not much rhythm or harmony to the majority of sprints performed by the youth athletes I work with. Namely, many athletes seem to have an aversion to flight time. Although this makes sense in the context of most games/competition, I come back to the mantra we often spoke about at ALTIS - athletes should ‘know the rules before they break the rules’. Over-pushing through the latter stages of excessively long ground contact times is rampant in youth athletes. This is often accompanied by a swing leg foot that falls to the ground (instead of striking the ground) well in front of the center of mass (instead of more underneath). So what should we do? Exposing athletes to a variety of sprint distances at a variety of intensities with a variety of objectives affords them the opportunity to feel various rhythms of a sprint. For example, instructing an athlete to cover 10 yards as quickly as possible will be a different task than instructing them to cover 10 yards in as few strides as possible. Similarly, constraints such as acceleration ladders and wicket runs can play a critical role in this regard.