About the Book
Sprinting is one of the simplest movements to observe and one of the hardest to understand. Although a stopwatch and a camera can capture how an athlete moves, these kinematic descriptions reveal only the outcome of the action, not its cause. This book begins where most analyses stop: with the forces that create the movement.
Drawing on decades of research and coaching experience, Force 2: The Biomechanics of Sprinting explains why speed is governed by force production, not by how the movement looks. The book examines the key kinetic variables that distinguish fast and slow athletes, shows how these variables change across acceleration and maximal velocity, and highlights why the fastest sprinters often use movement strategies that differ from everyone else. Throughout, it emphasises the limitations of purely visual coaching and the danger of inferring causes from appearances.
The later chapters translate these insights into clear training implications. Rather than offering prescriptive programmes, the book lays out the three routes through which performance can be improved: managing the force requirements of the task, increasing an athlete’s force-production capacity, and improving their ability to use the force they already possess. These principles are connected directly to practical considerations, including the role of strength, tendon behaviour, mass distribution, joint mechanics, and the technical patterns that enable effective expression of force at high speed.
Ultimately, the book aims to help coaches and athletes understand which variables are truly modifiable, which ones matter most for performance, and how training can influence them. By focusing on causes rather than appearances, it offers a clearer way to think about running fast.
What You'll Learn
You’ll learn why sprinting performance is determined by force, not by appearances, and why kinematic descriptions alone can be misleading. The book explains the difference between observing movement and understanding the forces that create it, helping you interpret common data sources with far more clarity.
You’ll learn which biomechanical variables genuinely influence speed, how they behave in the fastest athletes, and why those patterns often differ from slower runners. The book explores the constraints of ground contact time, the role of vertical versus horizontal forces, the mechanics of the leg spring, and the changing function of joints and muscle–tendon units at high speed.
You’ll also learn how these insights translate into training. The book outlines the three ways performance can be improved: adjusting the force requirements of the task, increasing force-production capacity, and improving the athlete’s ability to use their existing force effectively. It shows how factors such as mass distribution, stiffness, strength, tendon behaviour, and technical organisation influence an athlete’s force profile and how these considerations shape training decisions.
Most importantly, you’ll learn to distinguish between variables that are truly modifiable and those that simply describe the outcome. By focusing on causes rather than appearances, the book provides a clearer, more grounded framework for understanding why the fastest sprinters are fast and how training can meaningfully influence performance.
Who the Book Is For
This book is for coaches and practitioners who want a clearer understanding of what actually makes athletes fast. It will appeal to anyone working in strength and conditioning, track and field, or field sport environments who needs to interpret sprinting mechanics beyond appearances and apply biomechanical principles to real athletes.
It is also for students and researchers looking for a grounded, accessible introduction to the kinetic causes of sprinting performance. Readers who want to understand the evidence behind common coaching beliefs – and the limitations of kinematic analysis – will find a rigorous but practical framework.
Finally, the book is for athletes who are curious about the forces that govern high-speed running. While it is not a training manual, it explains the variables that truly influence speed and clarifies how training decisions shape force production, technique, and performance.
About Dan Cleather
Dan Cleather has spent most of his life trying to understand how people get better at the things they care about. Sometimes that has meant coaching athletes in weight rooms and on tracks; sometimes it has meant teaching critical thinking and research skills; sometimes it has meant writing books to make sense of training in a way that feels human rather than mechanical.
His work has always followed the same thread: training is a process of change, not a set of rules. Bodies learn, adapt, and reorganise themselves over time, because that is what the are designed to do. He tries to help people see that process more clearly - coaches, athletes, teachers, and anyone interested in long-term development.
Over the years he has worked across elite sport, academia, and high-performance environments, including the English Institute of Sport, St Mary’s University, and as a collaborator with national space agencies. Those experiences shaped his interest in how stress, rhythm, coordination, and load interact to produce real, durable change.
The Training Wisdom Collection brings this work together: a set of books, courses, and resources built on first principles rather than trends. The aim is not to provide a system to follow, but a set of tools to think with - a way of making sense of training that respects both physiology and practice, theory and craft.
He lives in Prague, where he writes, teaches, and continues to explore how people learn, move, and adapt.
About The Training Wisdom Collection
The Training Wisdom Collection began as an attempt to make sense of the ideas that kept returning in coaching conversations - the patterns that sit underneath good training, regardless of method or sport. Over time it grew into a set of books and courses that approach training from first principles, not fashion.
The Collection isn’t a system. It doesn’t claim to reveal the hidden truth of strength and conditioning or promise a shortcut to progress. Instead, it tries to show how training actually works: how bodies learn, how stress and rhythm shape adaptation, how coordination becomes skill, and why long-term development depends more on clarity and patience than on novelty.
Each book takes a different angle on that same problem. The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom was the starting point - a compact attempt to explain why simple principles matter, and the thread that runs through everything that followed. The Practice of Change looks at the rhythms of work and recovery that shape adaptation. The Force series examines how movement and load interact. The courses take these ideas into practice, turning them into tools a coach or athlete can use straight away.
The aim is simple. Training should feel understandable. It should have a shape that makes sense. And it should help people build capacities that last longer than the programmes they come from. The Training Wisdom Collection exists to offer that kind of clarity - not by reducing training to rules, but by giving people a language that reflects what actually happens when bodies change.
