The Sprint Vaccine: Why Running at >95% Speed is Non-Negotiable
Footballers keep getting hamstring injuries.
During Brazil’s opening group game against Haiti, Raphinha — arguably the most dangerous wide forward at this World Cup — went off injured in the first half. The diagnosis: hamstring. He joins a long list of players whose tournaments have been disrupted or ended before they got started. Militão didn’t make it to the US at all. Estêvão, the 19-year-old Chelsea forward everyone was watching, suffered a severe hamstring strain back in April.
Three of Brazil’s key attacking players. The same injury. Different careers, different bodies — but the same underlying problem.
Brazil aren't alone. In the same tournament, Reece James — England's first-choice right-back — went off with a hamstring injury; his replacement Jarell Quansah then picked up an ankle injury covering for him, and England go into tomorrow's knockout game having burned through both right-backs before the group stage ended.
Hamstring strain injuries account for 24% of all injuries in men’s professional football, and the rate has been climbing by 4% every year. If that trajectory holds, expect more of the same at every tournament. So why hasn’t the sport fixed this?
Part of the answer is that most prevention programmes don’t address the actual mechanism of injury.
My son on the ball. He runs at top speed every week at our athletics sessions.
Why the weight room isn’t enough
When a player reaches maximum speed, the long head of the biceps femoris — the most commonly injured hamstring muscle — is activated in a way that no gym exercise can replicate. Research shows that as a player moves from 80% to 100% of their maximal sprinting speed, biceps femoris activity increases by 67%. That’s not a marginal difference. And that specific stimulus — high load, high speed, specific timing — cannot be replicated with a Nordic curl or a Romanian deadlift.
Those exercises matter. We need high-quality hinge work to strengthen the hamstrings across both the knee and hip joints. You can see my full hip hinge progression — from unloaded wall hinges to single-leg loading — in Three ways to reduce hamstring injuries. But the gym work is the foundation, not the vaccine itself.
The vaccine is sprinting.
Getting the dose right
Like any vaccine, the dose matters. The relationship between sprint volume and injury risk is U-shaped: too little exposure leaves the muscle unprepared; too much creates fatigue that increases risk. The research points to what we might call the 85/95 Rule across a weekly microcycle:
• 35–40% of your weekly sprint volume should exceed 85% of maximal sprinting speed
• 15–20% must exceed 95%
That second number is the one most training programmes miss. Games rarely provide sufficient exposure at >95% speed — match play is interrupted, tempo varies, and players self-regulate. If you’re leaving it to the game to provide the stimulus, your players aren’t getting the vaccine.
In Tenets of Speed Development, I’ve written about the technical requirements for this work — specifically how pelvic position determines whether the hamstrings can do their job properly. Sound technique matters here as much as volume.
What it looks like in practice
Below is a clip of Dan Hayfield, a footballer I worked with, doing exactly this kind of max velocity work, after doing hinge variations in the gym. This is what the sprint vaccine looks like in a real training session.
Three things to do this week
Stop relying on match play. Games don’t reliably deliver >95% sprint exposure. You have to programme it deliberately — it won’t happen by accident.
Use 40m+ distances. To reach true max velocity, you need a build-up. A 15m acceleration phase followed by 25m at full throttle is a practical starting point. Shorter distances won’t get you there.
Use the MD-2 window. In tactical periodisation, Match Day Minus 2 is the optimal point in the week for high-intensity speed work — providing enough recovery time before the game while still delivering enough stimulus to count.
The consistency problem
New research is clear on this: the protective effect of any injury prevention programme is concentrated in high-adherence implementations. Doing your sprint work every week at a moderate volume beats doing a large block once a month. The players who avoid hamstring injuries aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated gym programmes — they’re the ones who sprint fast, regularly, and systematically.
Some of our young athletes working on 40 metre sprints from the fire hydrant start.
Raphinha will probably return before this tournament ends. The medical teams at the World Cup level are excellent, and the recovery protocols are first-rate. But the injury didn’t have to happen. For the players you work with, that’s the conversation worth having now — not after someone pulls up in a game.
Before putting this into practice, make sure you have the foundational 98% in place. If your players aren’t hydrated and in energy balance, the nervous system isn’t ready for max velocity work.
Read Mastering the 98%: Essential Performance Basics for Pre-Season Heat first if that’s a gap.
Next up: What you can learn from top footballers about sleep.
Note to coaches: using spinning bikes / rowing machines to get your players 'fit' completely ignores the role the hamstrings play in top-speed running. It may even hamper their ability to work properly when fatigued, increasing the likelihood of injury.