Does the toe drag make you faster and should you use it to improve your speed? In this post you’ll learn:

• What the toe drag is and why most sprinters get it wrong.
• Why and when it’s used by olympic sprinters.
• Some tips that will help you decide if you should implement the toe drag technique into your sprint training.

The toe drag is all about low heel recovery. You may have seen athletes like Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell performing a toe drag in their warm up. What’s good for them is good for the rest of us mere mortal sprinters, right? As with most things in track and field, it’s not that simple. In this post we break down from the perspective of Olympic sprint coach Ken Harnden why the toe drag isn’t as straightforward as many people make it out to be, and provide some pointers on how to properly implement this technique into your starts.

If your foot’s back out of the blocks and you want to get it up forward, the fastest way from point A to point B is a straight line. So if you allow the foot to come up underneath your butt and through forward to get to that position, that takes a long time and obviously that’s air time. That’s not ground time. So we want to be able to pull that foot as fast as we can and as low as we can in order to get it through to that position of power.

If you go back in time and watch Usain Bolt warming up in Olympic Games, you’ll hear him drag the toe. But generally what you’ll hear is he drags the toe doing his walk-in and 2-point starts. What he’s doing is he’s trying to fire that muscle memory and allow everything to stay nice and low, and pull through that position.

There are very few athletes that actually toe drag out of the blocks that are not incredibly strong. Asafa Powell is one of those athletes. Superstrong in the weight room. Strength-to-weight ratio is really important. Christian Coleman, world record holding 60 meters, drags the toe but his strength-to-weight ratio is extremely high.

One of the things you need to focus on is as you drags the toe, there’s a drag and then a continual movement. Understand that if you drag the toe too far, there’s nowhere for it to go. So if you drag the toe all the way through and you get to forward, two things happen:

• You have nowhere to push and you have no strength behind the push.
• That foot’s now landing in front of the hip.

So ultimately the toe drags back and then it continues through and lifts off the ground in order to create a position where it can push back into the track.

Notice that the sound you hear is quick and fast. It’s not a long toe drag. You´re not doing this all the way down the track. It’s a quick toe drag. So again, as a coach use your ears and pay attention to what the athlete’s doing. As you watch in slow motion that drill the athlete just did, you’ll notice that the foot stays nice and low, and then it pulls up in order to create power and movement.

Bibliographic references:

• Outperform. (2022). Can The Toe Drag Make You Faster? [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/pml7B5zEmU4?si=-YKlp4yun_TpBImP