Should Kickers Sprint? Speed Work and Why It Matters

“You’re a kicker. Why would you run sprints?” I get some version of that question every offseason, usually from a kicker whose leg speed stopped improving two years ago and who can’t figure out why.

The honest answer: because sprinting and kicking are the same movement wearing different clothes. You don’t sprint to become a track athlete. You sprint because it’s the fastest, cheapest way to teach your hips and legs to produce force quickly — and force produced quickly is what a swing is.

The Honest Answer Up Front

Sprinting will not magically add yards to your field goals by itself. Nothing will. What it does is improve the raw material your technique runs on — hip extension, leg stiffness, ground contact quality, and the general ability of your body to go fast without falling apart. Kickers who move like athletes get more out of identical technique than kickers who move like they’ve never chased anything. That’s the whole argument, and I’d rather state it plainly than sell you a fantasy.

It’s also why we treat kickers as athletes first. Our whole philosophy is in the post about being an athlete first and a kicker second — specialists who train like athletes keep the qualities their craft runs on.

What Sprinting Builds That Kicking Uses

• Hip extension power. Full, aggressive extension at the hip drives both a sprint stride and a kick. Sprinting teaches that pattern at speeds no gym set can match.
• Leg stiffness. A sprinter’s plant leg lands and goes rigid in milliseconds. Your plant leg does the same job on every kick. The quality trains in both places.
• Fast deceleration. Sprinting teaches your leg to slow down from top speed safely. Your swing leg does this after every contact — and sprint-trained deceleration is why some kickers’ swings never look frantic.
• Coordination at speed. There’s no slow-motion version of sprinting or kicking. Both demand your body organize itself at speed, and practice at one transfers to the other.
• Durability. Progressive sprinting hardens hamstrings, groins and hips against the exact loads a season throws at them. The kickers who pull muscles in week three are usually the ones who never sprinted in July.

A Simple Weekly Track Session

One session a week in the offseason is plenty. Keep it boring and repeatable:

1. Ten minutes of progressive warm-up: skipping, leg swings, high knees, a few runs at half speed
2. Six to eight sprints of 20 to 40 yards at 90 to 95 percent effort
3. Full walk back between every sprint — when the rest is short, the sprints are junk
4. Start from a standing or falling start; block starts are for track people, not for us
5. Stop the session the moment your form gets sloppy, not when the clock says so

That’s it. No hill sprints with a parachute on week one, no testing your forty for social media. The volume is small on purpose: sprinting is high-neural, high-load training for muscles that also have to kick.

And training doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing identity — this one-minute version of that idea is worth two minutes of your time:

Where Sprinting Backfires

Two situations. First: in-season volume. Sprint sessions during the season should shrink to two or three short accelerations in warm-ups, not full workouts — your leg’s weekly budget is already spent on game reps. Second: the day before technique work. Sprinting leaves your hamstrings and hips quietly sore, and kicking on that soreness teaches your swing to protect instead of swing.

The fix is scheduling. Sprint on a lifting day or a day off from kicking, and never the day before a heavy charting session. A structured offseason handles that slotting for you, which is one more reason to follow a written plan instead of improvising week to week.

From Track to Swing Speed

The transfer isn’t a mystery — it’s leg speed, plain and simple. A faster, better-organized athlete swings faster, and swing speed is the raw input to every kick you take. Our post on how leg speed makes you a better kicker covers the specific ways that speed reaches the ball, and sprinting is the cheapest supplier of it.

One caution in the other direction: sprinting is a technique skill too. Full-speed sprints on a cold hamstring, or eight sprints when you’re used to four, are how groins and hamstrings get introduced to each other painfully. Build the volume over weeks. The sprint that gets you injured is the one that sets your kicking back months.

Who Shouldn’t Sprint

• Kickers carrying a hamstring or groin injury — cleared by someone qualified first, always
• Kickers in-season with a heavy kick count — sprinting adds load your leg can’t budget
• Anyone whose technique block is actively changing their swing — don’t add new stress while re-learning a motion

Everyone else in the offseason: yes, sprint. One session, six to eight runs, walk-back recoveries, and stop when sloppy.

The Bigger Picture

Sprinting is one block inside a season of work, not the whole offseason. If you want the framework it lives inside — audit, technique, strength and speed, operation — the offseason plan puts the track session in its place alongside everything else, with checklists for each block.

So: should kickers sprint? Yes — one session a week, in the offseason, with fresh legs. Not because it’s trendy. Because it’s the same skill your kick is made of, practiced at a speed the kicking tee can’t provide.