How long can you actually hold max velocity?

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DEEP DIVE

How Long Can You Actually Hold Maximum Velocity?

Here's something coaches and athletes get wrong about max velocity training.

We program 60-meter sprints. Maybe 80 meters. The athlete accelerates hard, hits top speed somewhere around 40-50 meters, and keeps pushing through the finish line.

Feels like max velocity work, right?

Except there's a problem. Research shows that all athletes, regardless of ability level, can only sustain true maximum velocity for about 3 seconds before deceleration begins.

Not 5 seconds. Not 10 seconds. Three seconds.

And this deceleration isn't about getting tired. It's not a conditioning issue. It's a coordination breakdown that happens to everyone from Olympic sprinters to high school athletes.

Think about what this means for training. If you're running 60 meters, and you don't hit max velocity until around 50 meters in, you might get 1-2 seconds of actual maximum velocity before you start slowing down. The rest of that run? You're training something else entirely.

Most programs treat max velocity like it's a steady state you can maintain for extended periods. But the research suggests it's more like a brief window you can access, experience, and then lose whether you want to or not.

This isn't about effort. Athletes who cross that 3-second threshold are still trying hard. They're still running fast. But they're no longer at their maximum velocity. The nervous system can't sustain that level of coordination beyond those few seconds.

So when you program longer sprints thinking you're maximizing time spent at top speed, you might actually be teaching athletes what deceleration feels like. They're experiencing the loss of coordination, the breakdown in mechanics, the inability to maintain optimal positioning.

That's not inherently bad, but it's not max velocity training anymore.

Effective max velocity work needs to account for this window. You want athletes to accelerate to max velocity, experience it while the coordination is still sharp, and end the sprint before things start breaking down.

This probably means shorter distances than most programs use. Or it means using fly-ins where athletes are already at velocity when they enter the timing zone, so more of the sprint happens within that 3-second window.

The practical application seems straightforward but requires rethinking common approaches. If max velocity only lasts 3 seconds, your training needs to be structured around that reality rather than ignoring it.

You can't fight the constraint. You can only design around it.

Which raises an interesting question about all those longer "speed" runs in training programs. What are they actually developing if athletes lose max velocity coordination after 3 seconds? Speed endurance, maybe. Deceleration management, possibly.

But maximum velocity development? That requires respecting the window.

Most coaches know that quality matters more than quantity in speed work. This 3-second principle makes that even more critical. You're not trying to accumulate volume at max velocity because you can't. You're trying to create repeated exposures to that brief window where true maximum velocity exists.

Get in, experience it, get out before coordination breaks down.

Then recover properly and do it again.

The athletes who excel at max velocity aren't the ones who can sustain it longest. They're the ones who can repeatedly access that window with sharp mechanics and leave before things deteriorate.

Training should reflect that reality.