Why does my sprinter's arm swing look so wide?
Wide, flapping arms are usually a symptom of tension somewhere else, and it is a fault a side-on camera is not even positioned to measure.
Instead of driving straight forward and back, the elbows swing out to the sides, and from behind it looks like the athlete is trying to fly. It is a common fault, and it usually gets coached as an arm problem. Underneath it, it is rarely just an arm problem.
What wide arms are usually covering for
Arm swing that drifts sideways instead of front to back is most often tension leaking out somewhere: tight shoulders that cannot rotate cleanly, a grip clenched so hard the whole forearm locks up, or a trunk that cannot stay stable while rotating, so the arms swing wide to counterbalance it. Telling an athlete to "keep your arms tight" without touching the actual cause usually lasts about ten metres before the old pattern comes back.
What tends to fix it
- Dropping the shoulders down and back before the drive phase, so there is somewhere for the rotation to happen from.
- Piston-arm drills against a wall, which train the front-to-back path without speed to hide the flare.
- Loosening the grip: a fist clenched like a doorknob tightens the whole arm, and a lightly cupped hand often fixes the swing on its own.
- Filming from directly behind or in front, not just from the side, since that is the only angle this fault actually shows up in.
Where the Film Room can and cannot help here
The sprint setting reads elbow angle against a roughly 90 degree norm, but it reads it from a side-on clip, in the plane the camera is pointed at. Wide arm swing happens in the other plane, side to side, which a lens pointed along the direction of travel is not positioned to capture at all. The elbow-angle number can tell you if the bend itself is too open or too closed. It has no way to tell you whether that arm is swinging straight or flapping outward, because that motion happens perpendicular to the shot.
A single 2D camera measures whatever plane it is pointed at and nothing outside it. For an arm-swing fault this specific, film from behind on a treadmill or a straight run-through before trusting any side-on number to have caught the problem at all.
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Related
Why does one of your sprinter's arms swing more than the other?
An uneven arm swing usually is not an arm problem. It is a report on which side of the trunk is doing more work.
Read →Why your arms cross your body when you sprint
The arms are usually the symptom. Fixing them without fixing what they are balancing rarely holds past ten metres.
Read →Why do my sprinter's shoulders creep up around their ears?
Tight shoulders do not make anybody faster, they burn effort the legs needed and shorten the arm swing that was driving the stride.
Read →Try it: Sprint timer app: 40-yard dash and flying sprints with one phone