While I was catching my breath on a rest interval during a tempo running workout at my local park yesterday, I gazed up at the hill that surrounded the large grass field I was running on like the sides of a bowl. The hill was about 30m up at an incline of about 30 degrees. I'd probably never have anyone do serious running workouts on a hill like that because the surface was too uneven and the inc [...]

Had another interesting 'out of the box' thought that I thought might be good for this ongoing Just a Thought blog series. This one is on the idea of giving athletes some guidelines for training options that achieve a similar or nearly similar stimulus and then allowing them to have a little more autonomy and control over workouts by choosing the specific module to achieve that stimulus. In most [...]

Most coaches of speed-power athletes plan at least one day of rest in to the training protocol. This is generally regarded as a time tested method of ensuring physical readiness for the upcoming week. In my "just a thought" blog series, I've promised to throw out some of the stranger training ideas that pop in to my head. I don't necessarily think they're valid so much as I am curious about t [...]

I've kind of taken to using a concept II rower from time to time as my warmup for weight training. I've had quite a bit of exposure to the activity, first from my high school, which is a perennial rowing powerhouse; and second from having Dr. Hagerman as my professor while at OU. Doc Hagerman, is one of the founding fathers of Exercise Physiology in this country and a long time physiologist for [...]

In track training, most of our workouts are centered around distances. Run 6 x 200m, 8 x 150m, etc. This makes good sense and is easy to standardize, make comparisons, and track the progress of training. The problem though is that success in track is judged by time not distance. So I was thinking...what if you made all (or some) of your workouts time based rather than distance based. While I alrea [...]

I'm going to start an ongoing thematic series about some of the random training thoughts that pop in to my mind. Most of these I'll point out, I have never tried but they seem to be like ineresting ideas although relatively experimental. Since many are quite nontraditional and potentially thought provoking I thought they might be good conversation fodder for the forums. Here's my first one:What [...]