I wanted to share some of the information I learned from sitting down with bright coaches on EliteTrack for several reasons. First, I am noticing a lot of discussion in the message boards about strength training and endurance, and wanted to share my observations of Galen Rupp. I love that we have a stud American distance athlete and I think he is a monster talent. One of the discussion was a critical review of his strength training, and a lot was taken out of context for several reasons. This is a growing problem we have with information. We have some blogs like mine that are designed to be though provoking, but eventually you have to share what you do. For example youtube I uploaded specific videos to share training I think that may be stimulating conversation. I have also shown workouts in detail, and tried to show rationale. It still doesn’t do the trick.
In Patrick Ward’s blog post he talked about what he does, and one of my requests was to see the workouts, either on paper or video to illustrate what is going on. In fact, I think after talking to a few coaches this weekend, we must see the workouts over years to see the design and visit to see the implementation. Patrick has one of the most well written blogs on the net, but without workouts and shared benchmarks it’s more theory or idea sharing than applied coaching. I need to do a better job sharing workouts because application is key, as most know what to do but the art is far less accessible.
After reading the forum exchange of strength training for endurance, I was in the middle of the agreement with many of the members. First, defining strength is harder than I thought, but I do agree that we need to get better with the importance of contractile strength of muscle. Raw ability to contract more forcibly is important, because much of the other qualities like stability are coordination and I suspicious on how much is needed- if one is running and following a non-machine workout with ground based leg exercises. Second we don’t know where someone started to see progress. It’s easy to be critical, and I am now far more careful as we don’t know what is going behind the scenes, but we need to revisit the training after a few seasons to see what direction things are going in.
One coach who really shaped my thinking is a well known 400m coach the area and he always asks for workouts as it connects the dots. Without examples we are have no reference points and I think I will share next week workouts and let people draw the conclusions. I do know that sometimes it invites debate or discussion beyond my time I have available, but I think it’s important.
Note: Still suffering from last night’s loss (Superbowl) Excuse any unclear writing.