Let's hear it: Share your best weight training / plyo schedules and videos. A collegiate coach (and yours truly) needs your help

Year 10 of college coaching, been following Boo’s stuff from day 1 and have had a lot of success with it. I use his circuits (general strength/range of motion), sprint development drills (range of motion/mechanical efficiency), hurdle mobility and medball work (good CNS primer, when needed). Also, have started using ALTIS (Dan Pfaff) remedial hops with kids that have had a history of lower leg stress fractures and have actually noticed a difference in the amount of volume they can handle. Happy to share if they’re more specific questions.

For the coaching emailing Rojo: there’s a lot of stuff you can do besides what the old dudes will say (weights are dumb, run 100 miles and keep your mouth shut) and a lot of coaches (Ed Eyestone, for one) are adopting a lot of this stuff. Go ahead and look up the_runstrength_coach on Instagram. He works with the BYU men in the weight room, I’d say they’ve had some success recently!

We don’t understand the troll website you guys built… Seriously get a dose of reality please

The BYU weights coach works with Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, and Kenneth Rooks as well as the BYU XC team. In Clayton Young's youtube videos, he is seen working with them often.

Here's his website.

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Great channel from london running club.

Workout is for mid distance

I have this saved from a different thread. I can’t seem to find the thread at the moment but this is not my own post. I took this from somebody else:

Training in the weight room to support running can be just as complex as training for running, so everything I'm saying is very simplified, but meant to get you going. A good basic program you could follow would be something like this, 2–3x per week:
- Olympic life/most explosive lift. This is your most challenging movement that requires strength and explosiveness. Low reps, high quality. If the reps aren't quality, they aren't helping you. You could do something like 4-6x3 hang power clean. Slowly add weight, but make sure they stay "snappy," the moment your form gets sloppy, lower the weight. You could do hex bar jumps too. Or snatches. Or weighted squat jumps. You get it
- Your strength lift. This is where you'll typically do squats, front squats, deadlifts, RDLs, etc. Back squat is king IMO. I still do front squats. I'm not a fan of traditional deadlifts for runners. I'm not afraid to see athletes load up heavy RDLs as their primary strength movement either, just ease into it to avoid killing your hamstrings. Something like 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps. Go heavy-ish and do some work.
- Accessories. Typically higher reps. Back extensions. Weighted planks. Pullups. Overhead press. These are some movements I really like for running. Things like 3x12 on a few of those will get you strong.
Just like with running training, there's no objectively best way to train. But some general rules you can follow according to the point in the season you're at:
Off-season/summer: Heavy weights, lots of work. If you want to get stronger, this is the time to do it. You can do a few extra sets of squats and cleans. Try some slightly higher volume. Be mindful that you may gain weight. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on a few factors. Don't be so focused on strength that you lose sight of power, keep doing your jumps and olympic lifts. Strength without power is useless for running.
Early season: Once you're racing, you really can't make many strength gains in the weightroom without harming your running performance. So you enter sort of a maintenance and power mode. The idea is that you've gained a lot of strength in the offseason, but you need to learn to generate the most power and transfer that to the track. In general, you'll be doing less volume. You might be doing more weight on your Olympic lifts. You're not squatting super deep and heavy. You might even do half squats here to save your legs a bit.
End of season: Just focusing on injury prevention and staying springy. A few sets of medium weight squats just to get the blood moving. Olympic lifts with a medium weight, as fast and clean and snappy as possible. Accessory volume goes down. You're just trying to feel good at this point.
I forgot to mention, in the weightroom you typically do a warmup. There's a million ways to do it. I like to jump rope for a few minutes and then do a mashup of running, band, and mobility drills. So something like this:
- Jump rope
- Band walks, e.g. 3x10 lateral band walk, 3x10 monster walk, etc.
- Lunges, lunges with twist
- Frankenstein walks, marches, skips

I believe he is asking for content that has been "vetted". Not something somebody spent "2 seconds" glancing at. Perhaps if you tried using the program you found, you could add something useful to the conversation.

vetted: make a careful and critical examination of (something).

Yes, I'm sure the coach was hoping someone would just send the first result of a google search. They definitely didn't want to hear from experts with actual expertise in the area.

How unhelpful and unkind you are.

If you want the newest science

You should look at VBT (Velocity Based Training) .

The goal is to improve RFD (Rate of Force development), while minimizing recovery time and not gaining any muscle mass.

I dont think anybody uses it in running so far.

I know olympic speed climbers use it, for them strenght to weight ratio is super important.

so basically westside barbell's louie simmons ftw?

as a general reminder to all who think lifting is super important: carl lewis did not lift weights

personally, as a general rule i'd say the only thing every top runner ought to be doing is seated calf raises and very heavy 1/4 squats

outside of those two lifting and plyos are highly dependent on the individual

I'm an armchair exercise science junkie, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

The thing that matters most in training is intention. Meaning, you are picking your workouts and recovery with a goal or a plan.

So much of weight training in distance running is aimless. People lift because they see other people lift and watched a couple youtube videos on some elite athlete doing it. They see some cool lift and repeat.

But WHY are you lifting? What are you trying to improve? Focusing on the WHY of strength training is most important.

Is the goal to increase muscle size to help your legs absorb the eccentric shock of fast distance running better? Is the goal to decrease ground contact time? Is the goal to have more overall coordination? Is the goal to improve range of motion in the ankles? Is the goal to improve your max speed to increase your speed reserve?

A poster above mentioned that Carl Lewis never lifted. Neither did Haile G or Kenenisa B. You can be the best runner in the world without lifting.

Honestly, I think the #1 best anabolic workout in distance running is simply sprinting fast and short. I think uphill sprints are the best because fast flat sprints are very taxing. and when I say sprint I mean it.

A sprint workout session might be this: 20 mins of warm up mobility drills, 15 mins of wickets and hurdle drills, 3 x 6 second steep uphill sprint with 3 min rest between sprints, 3 x 6 second bounding uphill and 3 x 6 seconds running uphill holding 5 lb weight with both hands. Nothing engages the core like hard sprinting IMO...skip all those "core" exercises.

Some athletes might not be able to handle that load and would benefit from a strength sessio beforehand building muscle mass using more conventional lifts. again, look at where the athlete is at and the movements they can effectively execute.

Runners should also probably lift more lazily. Your hardest workouts should be running. If you are sore for more than 1 day after a lifting session it was too hard in the context of your overall training load. This means lifting progress will be much slower than you'd like. That's OK though, you are a runner first.

also: My #1 exercise is pistol squats. They don't make you fast at all. But if you can do a real pistol squat you have good mobility, a lot of strength, good coordination and enoguht muscle mass for distance running.

One of the best posts in LR in a long time. Very well-said. You know who agrees? Legendary strength-and-conditioning coach Dan John. "If all you could do was hill sprints and pull ups, you'd be OK."

1/10

If it’s a top school it should have competent Olympic sport strength coaches. If this person was hired as the head coach, focus on the running and consult with them about individualizing strength and power for his team. Then educate yourself. Altis is a resource. NSCA is a resource. David Grey is a resource. It is time consuming endeavor. How did this person become qualified to head a cross country team? By crowd sourcing as well?

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Strength and Conditioning for Endurance Running:

https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Conditioning-Endurance-Running-Blagrove/dp/1847979874

why so many downvotes this is pretty valid information weights are great but not the best use for a lot of people

Links????

General guidelines - http://www.sacspeed.com/pdf/distance.pdf

Exercise selection (General Strength, Bodybuilding circuits, Hurdle Mobility, Sprint Development) - http://sacspeed.com/pdf/SACinventory.pdf

ALTIS -

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Again, gotta build them in correctly and match themes for the day. Recovery day with recovery, etc.

If you do Instagram, a great person to follow on this is Swedish sprinter/jumper/coach Madeleine Nilsson:

https://www.instagram.com/madeleinenilssons/

My sincere advice would be to have the coach do the strength and conditioning certification through the USTFCCCA Academy at the convention in December