How to Train Like an Olympic Athlete

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Olympic athletes train for hours every day to build muscle and improve their skills. Olympic training is more than a hobby and more than just health. Even so, their training may be more intense than ours, but we can still adapt their training to something that we mere mortals can do.

Sprint like a professional athletics

What Olympic Sprinters Really Do: Short-distance running requires explosive strength. This means that sprinters focus on making their muscles as big and strong as possible – as opposed to marathon runners who need to balance strength with light weights.

Sprinters work out a lot in the gym , building their leg muscles with squats and lunges, and building whole-body strength with core and arm work. They train by running on a treadmill for various short distances. And they do a lot of explosive jumps to develop the strength they need to push back hard with every step.

What you can do: This workout from Usain Bolt (yes, the fastest man alive ) has taken you over. The three types of jumps work different muscles to their full potential. You can do them on your own or at the end of an easy run.

  • Bunny Jumping (5 sets of 20): Start in a squatting position with your hands behind your back, then jump forward with both legs, swinging your arms up. Your goal is to cover as much territory as possible.
  • Box Jumps (4 sets of 8): Jump onto a sturdy box or bench, again from a squatting position. Jump back down and repeat.
  • Limit (3 sets of 10): This is an exaggerated run. Jump from one foot to the other, covering as much distance as possible.

Daphne Schippers , the 2015 world sprinter and heptathlon world champion from the Netherlands, has developed sprint and core strength training for the free Nike Training Club app ( iOS and Android ). You will need to download the app to get the complete program, but the basic workout looks like this.

  • Run 300 meters (¾ standard track) six times.
  • Run 200 meters (half run) six times.
  • Run 150 meters six times

Rest one minute between repetitions. If you are familiar with how fast you run at different distances, do 300 meters at the same pace as a 5K run, and repeat 150 meters at the same pace you would use for a 1 mile run.

Be flexible and improve your cardio like an Olympic gymnast

What gymnasts really do: By the time gymnasts get to the Olympics, they are able to combine insanely complex movements into flawless exercises. They are judged by their routines, so they are a key part of the practice. Simone Biles , three-time world gymnastics champion, explained to women’s health that a typical training day is a morning of basic skills and a half day of routine.

Gymnasts also do mental preparation exercises when all eyes are on you and the stakes are high. For example, everyone on a team might have to sit and watch everyone do their routine, and if someone is wrong, everyone should do the same again.

You also don’t want to be too tired to go about your business. In this video of a day at the gym with the US team , women alternate between running and running. How close to perfect can you move when you’re out of breath?

What you can do: You may not be able to do sky-high flips, but you can combine skill work with traditional cardio and strength movements. Forward rolls and cartwheels are some of the available exercises that most people can try. This adorable young gymnast will explain what it is:

Most of us can do at least one of these moves. If you want to guide the Olympians and work on perfecting gymnastics techniques, trythis 11-minute workout aimed at improving your cart wheel .

For a cardio workout, head to the grassy field trail in the infield. Take a few minutes to figure out which beginner moves are right for you. Then start your workout: run a circle on the track, then return to your base on the grass to practice your acrobatics for one minute. The ten rounds should take 30 to 40 minutes.

Boost your muscle endurance like an Olympic swimmer

What Swimmers Really Do : Swimmers, like sprinters, do a lot of fast reps over short distances. They work on endurance, as well as work out various parts of the stroke (for example, just kicks or just pulls with your hands). A typical workout program includes hours in the pool as well as many onshore workouts in the gym or bodyweight workouts .

What you can do: Michael Phelps’s trainer gave a mini version of Phelps’s endurance workout to the author of a men’s magazine that you can follow. The goal of this workout is to spend time at the lactate cusp, a kind of “sweet spot” where it would be impossible to stay at a heavier level for more than a few minutes. It is slower than an all-out sprint, but faster than an easy effort. Here’s what the workout looked like:

  • Warm up with 50-meter exercises. We don’t know exactly what kind of warm-up the coach used, but it may have been similar to this one : start the first 50 meters at about half your maximum speed, and by the end of the lap, accelerate to about 80%. Do three more such accelerations, each faster than the last, so that by the end you will try your best.
  • Swim 50 meters, then 100, then 150, then 200, resting 30 seconds between efforts.
  • In reverse order : 200, then 150, then 100, then 50, faster each time.

During training in the gym, swimmers should devote a lot of time to work on the shoulders, back and core. Swimming may look like it’s coming from the arms and legs, but you need a strong core to put it all together.

The video above shows some of the exercises on land that target the muscles that swimmers need most. These include:

These movements challenge your coordination in addition to strengthening and stretching your muscles, which is very important for your body to function as a unit when you are in the pool.

Training for Olympic athletes is insanely difficult, and it takes hours of every athlete’s day. Combined with a busy training schedule, practice, and a highly specialized diet, they make up the pinnacle of the human body. But with these smaller, more doable versions, you can still add a new challenge to your training schedule and take your workouts to the next – and inspiring – level.

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