How to become quicker?

[drop bear]

Not all mass is muscle. Bigger muscles do not generate speed. They generate power.

Yes, sprinters have big legs. And tiny everything elses.
When you find a sprinter who looks like a young Arnold, then we can talk.

So the big muscles on a sprinters legs are doing what exactly?

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

Another way to be able to be fast is to "borrow your opponent's force". For example, when you throw a back fist and your opponent blocks it. You can borrow his blocking force, reverse your back fist into a hook punch (or hay-maker).

The same strategy can also be applied in wrestling. You pull first, if your opponent

- resists, you borrow his resistance force and change you pull into push.
- yields, you borrow his yielding force and pull much harder.

 

[lansao]

I believe this is really dependent on the particular movements you're looking to speed up. That said, two ways to increase your speed are to:

a.) Decrease the distance you're traveling! This was always very surprising to me. In my art, we side step, and I would find myself burning extra calories pumping extra energy into the movement to find that I had to put the breaks on harder to stop. The lesson I learned, the hard way and with significant practice, was to simply reduce the distance. If I was moving in an elliptical fashion, I might ask why I couldn't move in a straight line/cutting the hypotenuse.

b.) Simplify/factor your movement to the absolute tightest and smallest movement "within the realm of your safety."

Of course, this is all relative to the particular movements that you are training and you may already have arrived at the "prime factorization" of your expression. This is just to serve as a reminder that we should always challenge ourselves to critically examine our movements with questions like this.

~ Alan, Wing Chun Student

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

One fun speed training is to use the same arm to throw 3 punches (such as jab, back fist, uppercut) while jumping in the air and before landing back down.

 

[punisher73]

Not all mass is muscle. Bigger muscles do not generate speed. They generate power.

Yes, sprinters have big legs. And tiny everything elses.
When you find a sprinter who looks like a young Arnold, then we can talk.

I would say that these Olympic sprinters are muscular, and in balance to the rest of their bodies. A physique like Arnold's was trained for hypertrophy as it's main goal, not speed/power or any other attribute we are discussing. Not too mention the massive amounts of steroids to enable the body to produce muscle in ways it otherwise wouldn't.