Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

From Tank…...“new high school coach, where do i start?“

i guess i should give a little background on myself first. i graduated from university high school (HI) last year and am taking a year off before going back to college. this year i will be coaching my alma mater’s sprint team. i have nothing to go on. my high school sprint coach is gone, and the current head coach is a distance runner. i have use of UH’s mondo track on Monday and Wednesday,
and a neighboring high school’s dirt track Tue, Wed, Thur. here’s the problems:

-there are 90-100 kids that i will be dealing with.

-do i train the group as 400m sprinters, and pull the 100-200m potentials and give them a seperate workout?

-what order do i do my workouts in? (speed endurance, tempo endurance, power speed, endurance, strength endurance, speed)

thanks for your time.
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From me…..

Hi and welcome to the list-
I’d say that you would definitely want to split the short sprinters and long sprinters. The demands of each event are quite different.

If you could, I’d definitely try to take advantage of your two days on the mondo track. You didn’t mention it in your post but I’m assuming you train Friday also. Taking these points into consideration, I’d probably set up a high school short sprinter’s week like this:

Mon: Acceleration work (i.e.-10-30m repeats)
Tues: Tempo work or something relatively easy like a low intensity plyo circuit or an extended warmup
Wed: Max Velocity (i.e.-running repeats where the athlete is running 30-60m @ 95+% for each repeat).
Thurs: Same as Tuesday
Fri: Speed Endurance (i.e.- 90-250m repeats @ 85%)

For a long sprinter I might takeout the acceleration day and maybe do two days of max velocity work or two days of speed endurance depending on where you are in the year. Something like this:

Mon: Max Velocity (i.e.-running repeats where the athlete is running 30-60m @ 95+% for each repeat).
Tues: Tempo work or something relatively easy like an aerobic circuit
Wed: Speed Endurance (i.e.-90-250m repeats @ 85%)
Thurs: same as Tuesday
Fri: Max Velocity (i.e.-running repeats where the athlete is running 30-60m @ 95+% for each repeat).

For the long sprinters, I might even consider switching the Wednesday and Friday workouts since it would be much better to do Max velocity work on mondo as opposed to dirt. The drawback to this would be that the athletes may not be able to recover fully if you really pound them hard.

If you want to read more about sprint training theory, here are some links to related articles on ELITETRACK:

http://www.elitetrack.com/periodization.htm

http://www.elitetrack.com/plan.pdf

http://www.elitetrack.com/strength.pdf

http://www.elitetrack.com/sprinttheories.htm
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From JJ…..

Good luck with the team!

Just one very minor discussion point for Mike:

For the long sprinters, it might be beneficial to start with 1 day of acceleration development so that they can learn the proper acceleration pattern and mechanics. I also think that it allows for a more controlled environment to teach technique as compared to a fly 30 or fly 50 type situation. After 4-6 weeks, though, I agree that MaxV work could be done 2x/week.

Like I said, minor point, but just another view.

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From JJ-

Good point. If the time is limited, maybe only 1-2 weeks of basic acceleration technique would be appropriate.
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From Tank

thanks everyone. i like the advice mike! it will definetly be put into consideration. jj, today i will talk with my head coach and see where your ideas could be implemented. i talked with my personal coach, dacre bowen. he’s a former canadian national teamer who ran for the ducks in college and was
part of canada’s 76 olympic mile relay. i’ll start with everyone in the long sprints, because my better short sprinters will be running the mile relay, and they’ll need to be able to compete in multiple events, and i have the philosophy, you are a long sprinter untill you have proved otherwise. throughout the season i’ll recap my progress so you guys can critique it and give other HS coaches some ideas.

the first four weeks or so we’ll be doing drills daily. lots of a’s and bounding. the kids’ form is terrible. i attended some preseason training sessions and almost died.

monday’s and wednesdays will be their hard running days. tuesday, thursday and friday will be heavy drills and tempo on the infield grass. i don’t want them running on the dirt track because it will screw up their form. doing tempo on the grass will be good for the quartermilers because it will make them readust and reaccelerate every 100m, which will help them reassert themselves in the turns and out of the turns.

mondays our workouts will be speed based, doing MaxV workouts and acceleration work. i’ll have them do acceleration work their first monday. after that, they’ll be doing MaxV on mondays, with the exception of the short sprinters, who will be sepatated from the long sprint group within the first two to three weeks.

wednesdays, we will be doing speed endurance workouts.

fridays will be MaxV work, untill the short sprinters are separated from the long sprinters.

i’ll keep you posted, and thanks again!
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From me….

Tank-
Great idea about the ‘progress reports.‘ I think it will be interesting to follow the progress and get feedback. Thanks
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From Todd…

acceleration and v max

JJ and Mike-

How about this-
Can acceleration and vmax both be hit on in the same day?? Maybe volumes for both are down just a tad.
Example:
For 30 meter fly you need 15-20 meters to accelerate, why not work it through a ladder or pushing emphasis mechanics and then hit the fly? maybe groupings of other work (i.e. multi jumps) isn’t quite a thematic, but still pretty close.
thoughts?

(side note)
i know some aren’t big fans of ladders and tape marks, i’ve found great teaching use for acceleration with ladder using troch. length and % for athletes.

todd

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From JJ…...

Hey Todd,

Sure, MaxV and Accel Dev. could be trained in one session if time/faciliites are an issue. The only reason I tend to separate them is b/c early on, I tend to isolate the components I’m trying to train. If I’m trying to teach the athlete the proper acceleration mechanics, I only want them to have to focus on that skill during the session. Once they have acquired that skill, we can start doing MaxV work with an acceleration zone run-in.

As a rule, I don’t do a lot of MaxV work with my short sprinters until I see that they can consistently accelerate properly over 30-40m. Only then do I begin to do MaxV work. I find that with young sprinters, learning how to accelerate yields greater performance improvements. So many young sprinters have no concept of race distribution and how the acceleration phase sets up everything. As they mature, MaxV gradually becomes more a focus. Both qualities are being worked on, but I think that the emphasis changes slightly as the athlete improves.

Just a personal teaching preference, I guess.

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From Todd…...

JJ-

I totally agree, we follow what you do with acceleration and vmax the exact same way.

My point was probably more pointed towards facility and time usage with above scenario as you mentioned.

I think an interesting dicussion would be how we all work with the different scenario we’re given.
I’ll post that question in a separate link.

Todd
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From me.
.....

I think you can definitely work acceleration development and MaxV work together. In fact, I think it would be inconvenient and impractical to always separate the two. Like you said, if you’re running a workout like 4 x 60m @ 95%, then you are working on both acceleration development and MaxV. It’s easy to separate acceleration from MaxV but a little more difficult to completely isolate MaxV from acceleration development unless you are doing smooth and easy fly run-ins.

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hey guys,
lots has been happening lately.  the intermediate season is over, so i am a lot more free to coach, and not do so much crowd control.  the last few days i have been working extensively on the sprint start.  only thing is i work with one kid at a time, and i have 30 kids to work with. i do tape drills and put letters on the ground and tell them to tell me what they are so they stay down and power.  a lot of kids are overstriding in an effort to reach the maintenance phase earlier.  somehow they think doing this will help them, but they don’t accelerate properly, and almost never reach maxV (and this is in a 200m race!).  is there an easier way to do this?

Have them focus on keeping the feet behind them (horizontal pushing mechanics) as long as possible. Also, it might help to make sure that even though the amplitude of their starting mechanics (swinging segments) should be very large, they should not try to ‘high knee’ right out of the start. Instead, the feet should remain relatively low to the track and the knees should not come all the way up to the chest. This will help to ensure a natural (rather than forced or intentional) body lean, feet BEHIND the center of mass, and a primarily horizontal force application.

It is important to note that body angles should come from the ground up and not vice-versa. That is, the placement of the foot contacts relative to the center of mass should establish the body lean. As such the body lean should get progressively less and less as the runner approaches MaxV and a more upright posture.

well, that’s the end of the season for me.  i learned one thing: kids are weird.  it was like they wanted to lose.  they came to practice, went through the motions, and went home.  i have three kids who hate to lose and have that fire, and they are all sophmores (edit:two sophs and a freshman).  next year they’ll be all right.  the head coach is leaving next year, and he is going to tell the AD to clean house for the new coach.  i’m leaving for school next year (miami baybee!) so… that’s the end of my term. 

truthfully, i am sick and tired of coaching.  if i were to come back next year, i would shrink the sprint corps to about 30 kids, max.  most of the time i argued with kids who thought they knew what workouts they should be doing.  other kids showed up twice a week.  i tried to get the head coach to kick them off, because they hurt the morale of kids who came to practice.  i can’t believe the attitudes of the kids. last year, i NEVER showed the amount of disrespect the kids did to me.

so what now?  i would love to coach again, and i think i got a lot out of this year.  i swear to God, nothing like this will ever happen again under my watch.