HBHS 220y wrote:
I'm not sure about lifting, but if he did lift, it was light with lots of reps. What he did do, under the direction of George Gandy at Loughborough was box drills, high knees, and lots of other strength-building exercises. If you're really interested in Coe's training, see if you can find interviews from that period where he talks about being coached by his father and working with Gandy in the winter.
I do not have them available to me at the moment, but I remember that Peter Coe's book and a documentary film about Seb Coe painted a very different story. I saw him doing hamstring machine ... I recall Coe was a light guy (perhaps high 130s?) and he was doing a LOT of weight on that machine - reps w/ something like 150 pounds - significantly more than his body weight and more absolute weight than I, as a pretty strong guy at ~170 pounds, would have done (it was equivalent of my doing that machine with ~200 pounds!). Frank Shorter used to do *very* light weights, but I would describe Seb Coe as doing the *opposite* of "light with lots of reps"! I was pretty stunned by how heavy he was lifting relative to his body weight!