What’s the Most Accurate Way to Time Sprints in Training?

The Stopwatch Problem

Ask two coaches to time the same rep and you’ll likely get two different results. That’s stopwatch timing in a nutshell.

Even the sharpest thumb can’t start and stop with the precision athletes deserve. And when athletes are chasing hundredths of a second, that margin of error is bigger than the improvement they’re working for.

Why Accuracy Matters

In sprinting and agility drills, gains show up in tiny increments. A 0.05-second drop over 30 metres is huge — but only if your timing method is consistent enough to catch it.

• Stopwatches → human error of ±0.2–0.3 seconds. Two different timers can produce results that don’t even look like the same run.

• Laser gate systems (Brower, Dashr) → often promoted as “very accurate,” but coaches know the catch: a hand, knee, or arm can trip the beam early, stopping the clock before the athlete’s body has crossed. Numbers may look precise, but they don’t always reflect true performance or repeatability — and don’t get me started on trying to time multiple athletes at once.

• Photo-finish systems (FinishLynx, Olympic-level) → the gold standard. Millisecond accurate and fully certified. But with price tags in the tens of thousands, completely fixed setups, and dedicated staff required, they’re simply not a daily training tool.

That leaves most of us needing something else: a way to capture repeatable, comparable times that actually reflect what the athlete did on the track or field.

A Different Approach: Timing at the Center of Mass

Freelap solves this by shifting the measurement point. Instead of a thumb or a beam, it uses a chip clipped at the waist — the athlete’s center of mass.

• The chip is always in the same place, every rep.

• Portable transmitters mark start, splits, and finish.

• Each crossing is logged to ±0.02s and sent instantly to the app.

The result is simple: every rep is measured the same way. Whether it’s a group of athletes in a session or an individual working alone, the data is consistent and fair.

Why That Consistency Matters

• For coaches, it means accurate feedback across groups without losing time to setup or second-guessing the numbers.

• For athletes training alone, it means you don’t need a partner with a stopwatch or someone to manage equipment — your runs are captured automatically, the same way every time.

Different situations, same principle: consistency makes comparisons meaningful.

The Luxury vs The Rest of Us

If you’ve got the luxury of a $20,000 Olympic photo-finish system and a full staff running it at every workout — fantastic. But let’s be real: for the rest of us, that’s not reality.

Daily training doesn’t need Olympic infrastructure. What matters is a system that’s consistent, repeatable, and affordable. That’s what Freelap delivers: results athletes and coaches can depend on, session after session.

Real Applications

• Track & Field: flying 30m, 10m splits, block starts, relay exchanges.

• Football: 40-yard dash, 5-10-5 shuttle, 3-cone drill.

• Soccer: repeat sprint tests, 20m acceleration, agility drills.

• Gyms: objective speed testing and athlete monitoring.

Wherever speed and repeatability matter, the setup is the same — and the data holds up.

In The End

Stopwatches are inconsistent. Lasers have their quirks. Photo-finish is the gold standard, but not realistic for everyday use.

For coaches and athletes in Canada, Freelap offers the balance that makes sense: accurate, consistent timing that works the same way whether you’re running a team session or training alone.

Click here to see Freelap Running Packs are available in Canada.