How Kenny Bednarek trains to be a world-class sprint champion

The easiest sport to explain to anyone is, perhaps, sprinting. You stand in your lane and run 100m, 200m or 400m as fast as you can. That’s all there is to it.

A sprinter hitting top speed on the track is a beautiful sight, pure poetry in motion. But running fast is far from easy. Not only do you need to be athletic to start with, you also have to put in long hours of hard work just to be able to get faster by mere nano seconds. But that sliver of an edge is what puts a sprinter on the podium. And that’s the edge American sprinter Kenny Bednarek had over Olympics 100m champion Noah Lyles, the quick lipped trending track and field star, at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics as Bednarek pipped his rival to win two back-to-back 200m silver medals. Bednarek, 27, has also won medals at the world championships, including a gold in the 100m relay at the World Athletics Championships 2025 in Tokyo.

Bednarek’s consistency is a direct outcome of the discipline and dedication he shows in his training. From spending long hours on the track and pushing through pain and sweat on the gym floor, he does everything – including exercises and drills he absolutely detests – that can help him run faster times.

“I train and compete for 10 months in a calendar year. After that I enjoy my off season for two months when I rest, recover, rejuvenate and prepare myself for the next competition cycle,” says Bednarek, who was in Kolkata last month as the event ambassador for the Tata Steel World 25K Kolkata.

Early in the training cycle, Bednarek runs a lot of 500m, 400m and 300m sprints and he mixes it up with lifting sessions. Typically, training is his job and like any other person with an office job, his working hours are 9am to 6pm, sometimes till 7pm, depending on the workouts and phase of training cycle.

“On any given day I do track work, strength training and recovery drills. So, from 9am onwards I am working [out] or recovering till 6-7pm,” he says. Brimming with talent and potential, Bednarek by nature is a soft-spoken and quiet individual — the polar opposite of his arch rival Lyles, who is never shy to shoot his shot. However, during his interaction with school kids in Kolkata, he grabs the opportunity to take a dig at his opponent saying, “I am not loud like some others, but I wanted to be different from other sprinters so I started wearing the bandana for all my races.”

A LOT OF STRENGTH TRAINING

Bednarek’s gym sessions are brutal and last for 60 to 90 minutes, stretching beyond that on rare days. As you can guess, all sprinters need to work on their legs, so his training involves a lot of squats. But no sprinter can perform with poor upper body strength.

“My strength work includes a lot of squats and leg press on a machine. I also do plenty of upper body workouts and complex movements, including several Olympic lifts. We do dead lifts, bench press, lat pull-downs, cleans… pretty much everything because you have got to work out the whole body. It’s just a lot. I also do a fair bit of single leg work and treadmill runs. The single leg work and treadmill runs really hurt. It’s just intense and a lot of work,” he says.

Strength training is one of the basic building blocks for any sprinter. In order to run as fast as champion sprinters run, the body has to be capable of generating a lot of power. “To be able to hit the times that we are hitting, you need a lot of power. Just going out and running is one thing but your body also needs to be able to withstand and stay in the zone [for the entire distance] and generate the power for it,” says Bednarek explaining the long hours he puts in on the weights and gym machines. “Mondays are for upper body workouts. Tuesdays are lower body. Thursdays upper body and Fridays lower body again. That means strength and weight training four times a week. The sessions are around an hour-and-a-half to two hours.”

RUNNING DRILLS FOR THE WIN

While treadmill runs and single leg work are tough, the one exercise that Bednarek absolutely abhors is the 100m Repeats, wherein he runs 100m at full speed followed by a short pause for recovery and then goes again at full throttle. “I hate hate hate Repeat 100s. But I still do it when the coach tells me to. The reason is simple, I want to win,” he explains. Bednarek’s hatred for the tough workout is trumped by his desire to win the gold medals that are at stake. “I want to be the best and that keeps me motivated to push through pain and the difficult workouts,” he adds.

Bednarek’s outdoor training is no walk in the park either. Other than the Repeat 100s, the coach gets the sprinter to perform drills with hurdles in order to open up the hips and also a lot of shuttle runs, what he calls wickets. “For some sessions we also use weights for the track drills. It is like weight training on the track involving knee lifts. It hurts a lot, but it helps improve my technique.”

Later this year the controversial Enhanced Games, where athletes will be allowed supervised use of performance enhancing drugs, will take place in Las Vegas. Fred Kerley, Bednarek and Lyle’s Team USA teammate and Tokyo Olympics 100m silver medallist, has already announced his participation in the first edition of those games — days after the Athletics Integrity Unit handed him a provisional suspension for whereabouts failures.

While Bednarek has kept his distance from banned substances and Enhanced Games, he is curious too. “Ooh! Wow! It’s something new. I’m actually learning a lot about Enhanced Games but I don’t know right now. It’s a spectacle… we will see what that brings to the world of sport or the track world,” he signs off.

Shrenik Avlani is a writer and editor and the co-author of The Shivfit Way, a book on functional fitness.