This 49-Year-Old Stopped Sprinting 20 Years Ago. Here’s What His Body Lost (And the Unexpected Way to Get It Back)

Power fades faster than strength as we age—and most of us don’t realize it until we step onto a basketball court or try to sprint for the first time in years.

Strength coach Jud Linehart recently answered listener questions about speed, power, and athleticism for people in their 40s, breaking down the science of why we slow down—and what actually works to reverse it.

His advice goes well beyond “just lift lighter weights faster.”

Instead, he focuses on three critical systems most people never train: rate of force development, compensatory acceleration, and movement sequencing.

Why Lifting Weights Isn’t Enough for Speed

A 43-year-old listener named Mark wrote in after feeling “slow” during a pickup basketball game despite lifting consistently for years.

Linehart explained that strength and power aren’t the same thing.

Strength is really just force and power is force divided by time. So, like how much work can you do in a matter of time?

Research confirms this. Studies show that power—how quickly you generate force—declines more rapidly with age than maximal strength. A 2010 review in Sports Medicine found that muscle power declines by approximately 3.5% per year after age 65, nearly double the rate of strength loss.

Most gym work focuses on slow, controlled reps with an eccentric (lowering) phase followed by a concentric (lifting) phase. That builds muscle and base strength, but it doesn’t train your nervous system to produce force quickly.

In sports like basketball, you have less than two-tenths of a second to develop force when your foot hits the ground.

If your training doesn’t match that speed requirement, the force you generate arrives too late to be useful.

The Three Systems That Determine Athletic Performance

Linehart breaks down power development into three distinct but overlapping components.

Rate of Force Development

This is how quickly your muscles can produce force after your brain sends the signal. It’s the difference between reacting fast enough to catch yourself during a stumble or landing awkwardly and getting injured.

To improve it, Linehart recommends dead-stop training: exercises where you start from a complete standstill with no stretch reflex to help you. Think pin squats, floor presses from the ground, or deadlifts without bouncing the plates.

Fast eccentrics with a quick turnaround at the bottom also help, as long as your joints can handle them safely.

Compensatory Acceleration

This is your ability to keep accelerating an object as it speeds up—like shifting gears in a car.

You can be really strong in first gear when you’re going slow, but as the object speeds up, can you shift gears in order to match the speed to keep up with that speed?

In traditional lifting, once the bar starts moving, momentum takes over. You stop applying maximum force halfway through the rep.

To fix this, use variable resistance—chains or bands attached to the bar that make the weight heavier as you lift. This forces you to keep accelerating through the entire range of motion.

The other side of the equation is ballistic training: throwing medicine balls, jumping as high as you can with a barbell and letting it drop, or pushing a light sled at maximum speed. These teach your body to accelerate an object all the way through.

Movement Pattern and Sequencing

Even if your muscles can produce force quickly, that force has to flow through your body in the right sequence.

If your brain hasn’t practiced the specific movement patterns—planting your foot at the right angle, rotating your hips before your shoulders, flexing and extending joints in the correct order—the power you’ve built won’t transfer to the court or field.

This means breaking down the movements you actually need and practicing them with higher volume: the plant step, the cut, the drive to the hoop.

What About Intent?

One of Linehart’s most important points is that how you lift matters as much as what you lift.

Your intent has as much to do with the training effect as the load and the number of reps you’re doing or the exercise you’re doing. Just trying to move the weight as fast as you can when you’re in the weight room on the way up is going to really help to improve your rate of force production and your compensatory acceleration.

Two people can do the same exercise with the same weight, but if one person grinds through slow reps to failure and the other explodes upward as fast as possible, they’re training completely different qualities.

Velocity-based training—moving submaximal loads as fast as possible—has been shown in multiple studies to improve power output and rate of force development more effectively than traditional slow-tempo lifting.

Should You Sprint in Your 40s?

A listener named Brian asked whether sprinting was something he should try to add back into his routine after 20 years off—or whether he’d just be asking for a pulled hamstring.

Linehart’s answer: yes, but not tomorrow.

I would definitely not recommend you walk out the door tomorrow and try to sprint because then you would be asking to pull a hamstring. But, you know, I would also not recommend a person that has never lifted weights to go up to a barbell and try to max out with a one rep max.

Sprinting produces ground reaction forces up to eight times your body weight with every step. Your body has to be able to tolerate that.

But there’s nothing that comes close to sprinting for staying young at a cellular level, improving telomere length, and training peak power production.

How to Progress Toward Sprinting Safely

Linehart laid out a detailed progression that takes months, not weeks:

• Build a base of force production. You need to be able to handle basic strength training first.
• Add eccentric loading at long muscle lengths. Nordic leg curls, slow eccentric squats, and similar exercises teach your muscles to handle force when they’re stretched.
• Introduce open-system exercises. Skipping, easy bounding, hopping from foot to foot, and light plyometrics that involve leaving the ground.
• Progress to loaded speed work. Sled pushes, hill sprints, and stair runs reduce ground contact time and impact forces while still training high-speed movement.
• Gradually reduce resistance and increase speed. Move from heavy sleds to lighter sleds, from steep hills to shallow inclines, from grass to track surfaces.
• Earn your speed. Only when your body can handle the demands should you attempt full-speed sprints on flat ground.

One critical piece of advice: listen to your body. If you feel a tug or tightness, stop that session immediately. Many injuries happen when people push through that first warning sign.

Do You Need to Jump?

Box jumps, broad jumps, and plyometrics dominate social media fitness content. But are they necessary?

Not for everyone, Linehart says. Jumping combines two qualities: ballistic movement (accelerating until your feet leave the ground) and plyometric stretch-shortening (the rapid loading and unloading of muscles and tendons).

If your goal requires jumping—basketball, volleyball—then yes, you need to practice it. But you can build power and athleticism without intensive plyometrics.

Extensive plyometrics like jump rope, skipping, and pogo hops are lower impact and can be done at higher volumes. They still train the stretch reflex without the joint stress of max-effort box jumps.

Alternatives include jumping up onto a box but stepping down to avoid the landing impact, stair jumps that reduce shearing forces on the knees, and even fast sled pushing, which creates a stretch-shortening cycle without the intensity of sprinting.

Can You Build Muscle and Speed at the Same Time?

One listener asked how to balance building muscle with getting faster and more explosive while training four days per week.

Linehart’s answer was blunt: you probably can’t do both simultaneously.

It’s very hard to get faster and more explosive if you’re also building muscle tissue. Because when you build muscle tissue, after a certain amount of time, you’re going to increase your moment of inertia.

Adding muscle mass can slow limb speed and reduce acceleration if you’re not careful. But you can maintain or even build strength while improving speed and power—you just need to shift your focus away from hypertrophy (muscle growth) training.

Periodization Strategy

Break your training year into phases:

• Base phase: Focus on hypertrophy with moderate weights and higher reps.
• Strength phase: Transition to heavier loads (85%+ of one-rep max) with lower reps (1–3 per set).
• Power phase: Combine low-volume strength work with ballistic and plyometric training.

Within a single workout, always train fast to slow: speed work first, then power, then strength, and only then hypertrophy if you’re including it.

Never reverse this order. Your nervous system needs to be fresh for speed and power training to be effective.

Weekly Structure

Linehart uses a system he calls “undulating neural loading,” which prioritizes nervous system recovery over muscle soreness.

Two key rules:

• Never more than two high-intensity neural days in a row. High days include max speed, max power, and heavy strength work, especially lower body.
• Always take at least two low-intensity days in a row each week. Low days can include easy cardio, mobility work, skill practice, or complete rest.

You can structure this as alternating (high-low-high-low) or front-stacked (high-high-low-high, then three low days). Both work as long as you follow those two rules.

The Neuroscience of Getting More Explosive

Power isn’t just about bigger muscles. It’s a neurally driven skill, more like learning piano than building biceps.

Two major neural adaptations occur with power training:

Myelination: Fatty deposits build up around nerve fibers, insulating them like electrical wires. This allows signals to travel faster from your brain to your muscles with less energy expenditure. You get stronger, faster contractions from the same neural input.

Rate coding: Your nervous system doesn’t send a steady stream of signals—it pulses. The faster those pulses fire, the harder and quicker your muscles contract. Power training increases the frequency of those pulses.

Together with improved motor unit recruitment (activating more muscle fibers simultaneously), these changes explain why someone can become dramatically more powerful without adding much muscle mass.

Testing Your Power

How do you know if your training is working?

Linehart recommends regular testing with exercises where skill, mobility, and injury aren’t limiting factors. Good options include:

• Vertical jump height
• Broad jump distance
• Margaria-Kalamen stair power test (sprinting up stairs and measuring time)
• Olympic lift variations like the hang clean, if you’re proficient

If you have access to technology, devices that measure wattage output or force plates that track ground reaction forces give you direct power measurements.

The key is picking a test you can perform correctly, then tracking it over time. Improvements in these metrics mean your nervous system is adapting.

Why This Matters Beyond Sports

Even if you don’t play basketball or sprint competitively, training power has real-world benefits as you age.

Rate of force development is crucial for catching yourself during a stumble, reacting quickly to avoid a fall, or handling an awkward lift without injury. Research consistently shows that power—not just strength—predicts functional independence and fall risk in older adults.

Compensatory acceleration helps with everyday tasks like lifting groceries into a car, tossing luggage into an overhead bin, or picking up a grandchild.

The ability to produce force quickly doesn’t just keep you competitive—it keeps you safe and capable.

Sources

• Sports Medicine (2010) – Review on age-related decline in muscle power: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20836595/
• Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research – Multiple studies on velocity-based training and power development
• Margaria-Kalamen stair power test – Standard assessment protocol in exercise physiology literature