What Bobsled Training Teaches You About Acceleration

Bobsled is a sport most people have seen once in the Olympics and never thought about again. That is a mistake if you care about acceleration. Bobsled push athletes are some of the best pure accelerators in the world. The sport demands it. You have about fifty meters to push a four hundred pound sled as fast as humanly possible and then hold on. The standards are brutal and the margin between making a team and going home is measured in hundredths of a second.

What the Sport Demands

To push a bobsled at the elite level you need to be strong, powerful, and explosive in a very specific way. Not generically athletic. Specifically able to apply maximum horizontal force from a standing start and maintain that output for four to five seconds of all-out effort.

That demand strips away everything that is not essential to acceleration. You find out fast what actually matters. And what matters is hip extension strength, horizontal force production, and the ability to stay low and drive through the first twenty meters without losing position.

What It Taught Me About Training Athletes

Every coaching cue I use for field sport athletes was sharpened in the bobsled context. Hips forward is the difference between pushing with your glutes and pushing with your lower back. One moves a sled. The other gets you hurt.

Stay low through the drive phase is not about looking right. It is about maintaining the shin angle that keeps force going backward and forward instead of straight down. Vertical force does not move a sled as well as horizontal force. This is the reason why there are athlete who can just out of the gym but get out pushed on a track by athletes who can produce more force horizontally despite being less explosive from a vertical jump standpoint.

Those same mechanics apply on a football field, a soccer pitch, and a track. The physics do not change because the sport does.

The Transfer to Every Other Sport

If you can learn to accelerate well enough to push a bobsled at a competitive level, you can accelerate in any sport. The reality is that most athletes start in another sport and then transition to bobsled. The demands are more concentrated and more measurable than anything you will face in a field sport.

When I work with a high school and collegiate athletes on their first step, I am using the same principles that push athletes try to apply to their starts in their attempts to get onto national teams. Scaled down, applied differently, but the same physics, the same mechanics, the same results.

Keep Pushing.