A little help training my team, please!

Paragraphs please

Hey everyone-

I just want to make sure I'm on the right track. I'm from a small town where the coaches are asked to coach a little of everything. I was never a track guy but started trying to learn to help my daughter when she was younger. She had some success so I was asked to help with the 100-400 meter sprinters on our track team and I want to do the best I can for them. We began practice on Feb 13 and the state championships are the first weekend in May, so that gives us a 12-week season.

We began the season running about 300 meters of acceleration twice a week (Mon & Thurs) with two days of extensive tempo (Tues & Fri, beginning with 1000 meters at 65% which increased weekly). We did general runs on Wednesdays. As the weeks have gone on, on speed days we've moved from acceleration to 300-400 meters of VMax and now 300-600 meters of Speed Endurance. Our tempo days have gradually gone up in both volume (to about 2000-2500 meters and intensity (to 75%). Wednesday's are still general runs or light days.

Last week we began intensive tempo (1000-1200 meters) on our second tempo day. I plan to do intensive tempo once a week for 3-4 weeks max then move that second tempo day back to extensive tempo because quite frankly intensive tempo scares me on recovery days but I want to incorporate it to help them deal with lactic acid build-up.

Meets are beginning and as far as our two sprint days now go I want to use one day for VMax or speed endurance or possibly even special endurance a few weeks down the road while using the meets as our second speed day. From a tempo standpoint, once we reach about 3000 meters, I'm going to start reducing the volume each week until we begin peaking about 3 weeks out from the state championships. Wednesdays will remain general run days or pool workout days for the next several weeks.

I want to help our athletes be as successful as possible, but with little track coaching experience I am a little nervous that my plan is off base. Can I please get some feedback as to how my plan looks. Thank you!

Thanks...every forum needs an English teacher! Now if only you knew anything about sprinting.

I am a hs distance runner ... but that looks like more of a distance workout ... lower those intervals to less distance ... 60 m and 100m sprints are good practice ... speed endurance for a sprinter should be 200-300m have ur 400 ppl do a small 2 mile run once a week ... lots of weight room ... all that mileage is unnecessary for 100-400 ppl.... they need more fast twitch and less slow twitch ... also look into polyometrics ... and make sure to have an ab circuit

I don't think you're too far off the tracks here (and I think Mike misinterpreted your volumes to mean rep distance instead of total workout distance).

With the caveat that I've still only got a few years of HS sprint coaching experience.....

I think you probably advanced too quickly from acceleration to absolute speed to speed endurance. If this is just a 12 week season, and the kids don't have much off-season training background, I think it's probably beneficial to keep focusing on the groundwork more.

Personally, I'd work acceleration exclusively for a couple of weeks, before adding the technical teaching of absolute speed with drill work and wickets, but hold off on the big absolute speed sessions for a little while longer. Maybe starting the fourth week I'd go to one speed and one acceleration workout per week. In the case of our HS, I only did one true speed session before our meets started, and then for a couple weeks kept our neural work to acceleration, and used the meets for a combination of speed/speed endurance.

I do think it's important to start teaching the skills of max velocity running pretty early, as a lot of these kids start out pretty ugly and unskilled, and put themselves in to dangerous positions, but I think their acceleration skills are just as lacking, and they'll have a hard time achieving great top speed if they can't accelerate well.

I don't really get around to speed endurance type workouts until after at least 8 weeks of training. 400m runners get some special endurance in there, but I tend to wait for true speed endurance (outside of meets) until they've done a lot of good work on absolute speed.

I'd also be a little worried about your Wednesdays. Over all you've got quite a bit of running volume for relatively untrained HS kids. I'd move Wednesday to primarily non-running activities in order to hedge away from over-use injuries such as the dreaded shin-splints. A general run isn't really going to do anything beneficial for a sprinter that the extensive tempos are already covering. I'd probably use those days for event skills development, medballs and other general strength and circuit type work. I don't have experience with or access to a pool, but that's probably a nifty thing for those Wednesdays for some of the athletes. It might be somewhat unnecessary for true short-sprinters though.

Regarding the intensive tempo.... I have found them useful, but I know others who don't like them so much. I'd just try and keep an eye on how the kids are feeling, and move it back to a lighter extensive tempo type workout if they're on the run-down side. Once you're deep in meets, it probably makes sense to limit the intensive tempos, particularly if you've got another special endurance day in there.

You don't talk about your within rest structure, but I'm assuming you're keeping the rests hefty. A lot of kids without track experience, and kids/coaches with any distance background tend to want to rush the rests. I've found that early in the season I really have to hold the newer kids back from rushing on to their next rep.

Also be sure to keep an eye on mechanics and skills. They're probably more important than the work for many of your kids. If you shade your reps to the shorter side and focus on the skills early on, I think they tend to get more out of it.

Good luck.

Thank you so much for the reply...this makes me feel a lot better and I will incorporate much of your advice.