5x60m w/ full recovery

I have but pretty rarely. Usually speed dev (an acceleration dev) are so foreign to distance runners in HS that I don't need to use these until they are juniors or seniors if its needed at all. I reserve this stuff for my more powerful athletes who aren't going to feel like the sled is throwing them around or who I think need an extra stimulus to get them another step forward in training.

The common doctrine is to never exceed 10% of your body weight (some also use the rule that the weight shouldn't slow down an athlete more than 10%; this is incredibly hard to measure accurately in practice). But some research disagrees with this showing that in heavier groups you can see bigger differences in acceleration when pulling a heavier sled (30% speed reduction) than lighter sleds (10% speed reduction).

Another paper came up with a clever equation drawn from a regression analysis to basically determine how much of a speed reduction you want to see based on % Body weight. [% body mass = (−0.8674 × % velocity) + 87.99) ]. To make that more clear if you want to see a 10% reduction in speed then you'll plug in 90 as the "% velocity" which equates to a sled weight of 9.924% of your body weight. a 30% reduction would be 27.272% of your body weight. Those numbers look about right to me and I really like the way they derived it. As much as we love our rules of training I am always a fan of seeing the science and math back up what we're doing.

It should be noted that distance runners will probably notice weight being added more than traditional speed and power athletes. We just aren't used to is so I would err on the side of slightly lower weight at least until they're used to it. That doesn't mean you can't aim for the 30% velocity reduction but if that's the goal I'd shift it down to 25%. Just make sure that you have a goal in mind. If you reduce the speed too much then their mechanics can change pretty drastically and the lack of specificity will lead to adapting to something that isn't usable once the sled comes off.

I think someone will ask about this so I'll add it here, "why do we care about acceleration?" Its a good question, its not as though acceleration is a big component of any of our races right? This is a great example of training to train. No, acceleration isn't important in our races, but if an athlete has poor acceleration then they will not get the most out of their speed development sessions. The ability to accelerate more efficiently will let you utilize your top speed more easily so that when you go back to speed dev then you should see another step of improvement.

We always use a tailwind when possible for speed development. I've never tried wicket drills personally, I have some plyometric work that looks vaguely similar, nothing wrong with them though. And I'll combine the first and last part here, we progress 'past' 80m usually using in-out sprints. 50m sprint, 20m float, 20m sprint is something I've used a bit with some variations. I'm putting 'past' in quotes because to me its something that we use to change it up but 80m sprints are the top end of what we will do for speed development... unless you count downhill sprints. On an VERY mild downhill (around 1%) we occasionally do some downhill work that's usually about 60m that I think you could argue is more intense than flat 80m but due to the specificity of an 80m rep I still think of it as the final goal for my experienced athletes.

The goal of in-outs, to get back to the last question, is to try to fit 2 sections of top speed within a single sprint. To be honest I don't think I agree with the rationale of them in the sense that the last sprint in a 50m-20m-20m (sprint-float-sprint) is actually true top speed. I think a single 70m rep is more efficient in that goal, but changing gears has some value to it that is worth doing in its own right but lets you change things up. Week after week of 60m sprints gets old for them so I don't mind seeing it in there on occasion. Sprint coaches seem to love this workout, but in general I use it far less.

I do know some that do 400m reps with 50m alternating in-out reps (typically 3 reps or sometimes done with more laps together). I would definitely not consider this speed development but might call it anaerobic power. You'll get in some decent volume at a hard pace and the short recovery breaks it up enough to feel like you can get after it. I haven't tried these but I've had several coaches recommend them to me. the closest I've done is 150m reps doing 50-50-50 trying to again work on hard gear shifts which I think is a great training tool for 800m runners in particular.

[quote]V wrote:

But some research disagrees with this showing that in heavier groups you can see bigger differences in acceleration when pulling a heavier sled (30% speed reduction) than lighter sleds (10% speed reduction).

http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/2014/10000/Effects_of_Weighted_Sled_Towing_With_Heavy_Versus.6.aspx

quote]

I read through my previous post again and wanted to make sure I'm clear here in case someone doesn't read through the abstract, since I'm sure this paper isn't public. When I wrote "30% speed reduction" or "10% speed reduction" I'm referring to the effects of the sled while sprinting, not the change in performance between pre and post training.

Taken directly from the abstract:

The heavy group significantly improved both the 5- and 10-m sprint time by 5.7 ± 5.7 and 5.0 ± 3.5%, respectively (P < 0.05), whereas only 10-m sprint time was improved significantly by 3.0 ± 3.5% (P < 0.05) in the light group. No significant differences were found between the groups in the changes in 5-m and 10-m sprint time from pre- to posttraining.

V:

Just wondering why you are spending so much time posting so prolifically?

jus wonderin wrote:

V:

Just wondering why you are spending so much time posting so prolifically?

It's mostly because I enjoy it. I love talking track and especially being between seasons I have the time to give decent answers (hopefully). It helps that I only follow 1-2 threads at a time so it doesn't take that much time. This thread makes it seem like I do a lot, but I'm less prolific than many contributors here.

The other reason I guess is that I think that you can only say that you understand something when you can easily explain it to others. This thread, which is pretty specific, lets me look at an area of track and field that I value but is widely disregarded or ignored in middle and long distance running. Threads like these force me to look into every facet of a topic so that I come out of it knowing more than I walked in with so I become a better coach as well. Most threads on this site leave something to be desired, but LetsRun is still one of the biggest disseminators of information for our sport (for better or for worse). If I can help someone out then I've helped this sport grow and that means a lot to me.

Our sport revolves around antiquated information that just gets passed down from coach to coach. Not to get into a touchy subject but its a little like religion, a coach tends to use the same plans that they did as an athlete or that their head coach does while they were an assistant. It gets to the point that many don't know why the do something, just that its "how it works" or "what we do." Even when you've been given good workouts if you don't know how or why they work I don't think you'll be able to assemble those workouts the way that an athlete needs. People inevitably lose information from generation to generation unless they take it upon themselves to learn more from another source.

This is my way of talking out loud to better understand and articulate my own training while getting to hear other people's thoughts which lets me expand my horizons. If someone else finds value in it then all the better

jus wonderin wrote:

V:

Just wondering why you are spending so much time posting so prolifically?

You don´t have to read it if it exceeds your brain capacity.

Yes- pure leg speed. Uphill, flat, downhill, they all work.

V wrote:

With an older group whose 100m times are longer than athletes I have you have to factor in a loss of coordination and CrP fatigue earlier since they are running the reps for a longer period of time. Our bodies have no idea what a meter is, our energy systems only care about how many seconds it can do something. The magic number for these sprints is between 7-8 seconds. If anyone in your group is running longer than that at a hard effort then its no longer alactic and means they will be slowing down to some degree.

I had our 79-year-old do 5x40yds with a rolling start on our indoor football field. He ran them in 7-low, so that distance seems to be right for him.

Two questions/observations.

Can this workout be followed by a hard workout the next day? If so, our routine would look like this. If not, when should it occur?

Hard day: Intervals

Cross training day: Weights, core, drills, walk or a few easy minutes on the elliptical.

Easy day: Warm up of 15 minutes running, drills, and 5x40 yards.

Hard day: Long run (60-75 minutes)

Cross training day: Repeat above

Easy day: Slow trail run of 30-45 minutes

Repeat this 6 day cycle. Progressing intervals and speed reps as fitness progresses.

Everyone in our group suffers from recurring hamstring issues, except me. I'm not sure how to address that. I started a very intensive weight workout 3 days per week about a year ago. Although it interferes with my running workouts, it has eliminated my recurring leg injuries.

My 0.02

I would start the sprints with an easy day before and after them for about a month at which point you should be adjusted to be able to do them the day before a workout.

I'm a big believer in the key to injury prevention having three aspects.

1. Being the best athlete you can be. Our warm-ups always include moving in multiple planes of motion. In the weight room we jump and throw medicine balls in multiple planes. Athletes learning how to move effectively is huge in my mind for injury prevention.

2. Use your sport to prepare for the demands of your sport.

I think a lot of hamstring and calf pulls come from not doing a lot of speed work and then 6 weeks out from the big race doing 10x200 hard (or whatever). Progressing to doing a sprint workout or two every week year round won't negatively affect endurance development during base and also gets your tendons, ligaments & muscles ready for running fast when you need to in important workouts and races.

3. Warmup up well. My warmup for a sprint workout is

15 min jog

Leg swings

Hurdle drills

2x30m for following exercises

skipping

side shuffle

High skips

Carioca

A march

B march

A skip

B skip

4-6x50m progressive

Coach V, as a prior 400/800 guy who still loves running shorter distances, I immensely appreciate your posts thus far.

I was wondering the following: when doing the ATP/CP speed workouts up to 7 seconds, what is the most appropriate start - falling, 3 point, etc - I should do to get the most out of these speed workouts. I sense that this detail is overlooked in some programs that simply will advise something like 30m fly with 20m acceleration zone. Is there a preferred start to extract the most out of the speed workout?

Sounds great, V. Thanks for sharing your valuable insights and experience. Good luck on your upcoming seasons.

fisky wrote:

[quote]

Can this workout be followed by a hard workout the next day? If so, our routine would look like this. If not, when should it occur?

Hard day: Intervals

Cross training day: Weights, core, drills, walk or a few easy minutes on the elliptical.

Easy day: Warm up of 15 minutes running, drills, and 5x40 yards.

Hard day: Long run (60-75 minutes)

Cross training day: Repeat above

Easy day: Slow trail run of 30-45 minutes

Repeat this 6 day cycle. Progressing intervals and speed reps as fitness progresses.

Everyone in our group suffers from recurring hamstring issues, except me. I'm not sure how to address that. I started a very intensive weight workout 3 days per week about a year ago. Although it interferes with my running workouts, it has eliminated my recurring leg injuries.

Fisky,

You got a great response from HS Coach Ordinary, I wouldn't change a word. Once my athletes are used to speed dev (we do this all during our prep phases so its not a problem for them) then it's best placed the day before a hard effort, particularly if the hard effort is on the other side of the energy system spectrum (Threshold, VO2max, Long Run, Long Run+, etc.). We do that mostly to avoid having too many neuromuscularly intensive days in a row, its easier to hit chronic fatigue that way.

As far as hamstring issues go, these workouts do carry more risk so be very patient with the progression. Weight training usually helps out as you've noticed already, try to make the lifts sport specific when possible (eccentric muscle contractions) to help with injuries.

This isn't a textbook answer but when you get athletes who haven't done any lifts and get really sore from them, limiting the workout the following day, then you can switch the order of the days and make the speed dev/weight session lighter, or simply put the lift on the second day even if it doesn't fall on the speed/power day. I don't like doing that but we sometimes have to work with the hand we've been dealt. Long base phases help to reduce the need for this.

But read HS Coach Ordinary's 3rd point, I believe that that's the main reason speed has a bad rep for injuries. I've never had an athlete pull something while sprinting in these workouts so for now I'm going to maintain that this kind of training, when well designed and very patient, carries minimal risk.

To decrease risk of pulling something, you can just spend the first 2-3 sessions running the hill reps at 80%, fast but not sprinting. This might be more important for sprinters who mainly train on flats than for distance runners who often encounter steep hills.

Sprinting Question wrote:

Coach V, as a prior 400/800 guy who still loves running shorter distances, I immensely appreciate your posts thus far.

I was wondering the following: when doing the ATP/CP speed workouts up to 7 seconds, what is the most appropriate start - falling, 3 point, etc - I should do to get the most out of these speed workouts. I sense that this detail is overlooked in some programs that simply will advise something like 30m fly with 20m acceleration zone. Is there a preferred start to extract the most out of the speed workout?

Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words.

If you're a 400/800 guy then lean toward 4-point (assuming you're good at it), it allows the fastest start for guys and girls that are sufficiently powerful. I had an old sprint coach who really didn't like that so many HS girls (sprinters) did 4-point because most lacked the power to unfold their hips and get into triple extension well enough to justify it.

But I would mix it up. A coach I knew from Army used to always say how much he wanted his athletes to be good muscle problem solvers. So with his multi's in particular they'd be doing tons of drills that were just teaching coordination and how to do things with minor changes to make their athletes develop better kinesthetic awareness, course correction, and coordination. So they might throw bowling pins instead of a Jav or a disc just to make them adapt. Sprinting can be much the same. You need to make small changes between standing, rollover, 3-point, 4-point, and jogging starts that might nor seem very different but they keep you adjusting and adapting without added strain. Plus it gives you another variable to progress things.

That being said most athletes without the proper sprint background either wont have the power to do some of those starts, won't have the technique to benefit from them (could hurt the effort), or don't need to spend the time in those deep acceleration mechanics. Rolling starts eliminate all of those issues and get to the heart of speed dev more easily.

So look at proper sprint starts and their derivatives as a tool that you have that most distance runners don't. If anything is at a dead start, I'd go 3 or 4 point in your case except at the start of the season.

Great thread with lots of useful information for any coach.

With my group (1:44/1:45/1:47 guys), we do a pure speed session every Monday night year round (they would have done their 60min long run on the Sunday morning and nothing else between).

A typical session would look like this:

- 2 laps jog (800m)

- Faisal stretching (10 min)

- 30min of Pfaff Drills (20-30m up and back each drill) you can find these drills on youtube (Wup Set A Dwain is a good example)

- Dynamic stretching (5 min)

Then move in to the sprinting (we do each sprint individually so the athlete is only focusing on there cues). There is no set recovery between reps, but it's typically 3-4min, after each athlete runs and recieves feed back)

- 3x30m

- 4x60m

10 min rest then a long rep

- 1x200m or 1x250 or 1x300 for example. The 1:44/45 guys would hit 21.7 with a standing start when if peak shape.

- 10 min cool down jog

My athletes aren't blessed with a lot nature speed (46/47 point), so it's something that they have to work on if they want to be world class over 2 laps.

So to answer the original questions - if you are doing 5x60m hill sprints once a week, it would be more beneficial than detrimental to you 1500m (Matt Centro is not closing in 50 point off long runs alone).

JR

Great post.

V uses longer work the day after the sprint speed day, like Threshold, VO2max and Long Run. You do your long run on Sunday. What type of work does Tuesday consist of?

Thanks for taking the time to post this. I'll relay this to our group.

One of the things I've noticed is that aging athletes lose range of motion before cadence, especially if they don't routinely do something fast, so the workouts discussed here caught my eye.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed response. Your insights on this and other training topics are truly a breath of fresh air!

Great info, as well as the posts of "V". You must built your short sprinting speed to be fast at 200m, etc. Once you have the anaerobic capacity, it´s a great base for the coming anaerobic power work. Seb Coe was able to run the 200m in about 21.8 in training if I remember, as well as Andre Bucher, and both ran a 14:06 5k when young. In 2001, the day before a session of 4x200m in 21.x with 8 min rest, Bucher ran a 30:15 10km @ 1800m altitude. Of course not everyone can create a combination like this, but the 800 is a combination of speed and endurance. If your "speed workouts" consist only 800m speed endurance workouts (and maybe some alactic sprints), with some strides and weights throughout the base, you miss the real speed and anaerobic capacity development.

This is one of the better threads I've read on here in a long time and conveniently the exact topic I have been trying to read up on recently as I write winter break workouts for the college distance (and Mid-distance) runners I coach. Thank you to everyone for sharing. I have always valued keeping speed work incorporated during all phases of training to some degree, but this has helped me better understand the phases of developing speed and how to start with acceleration.

My question right now (which may have been covered somewhat already, but I'm still a little unclear on this) is how often should I incorporate acceleration work for 3k runners and 5k-10k runners during the short general prep phase we have between xc and indoor track? Should I be incorporating alactic top speed work at all during this phase of training or should I just stick with acceleration. Generally our long distance runners during this phase have been doing something like this:

Mon: Finnish circuits- fartlek type workout with a longer hill and some short sprints with easy running in between on the way back to the bottom of the hill

Tue: easy run + 4x60 m strides with a 40 fly in the middle, 90 sec rec, lift

Wed: steady state run

Thur: easy run + 4x80 m strides w/ walk back rec, lift

Fri: Shorter tempo run at anaerobic threshold

I recently read some stuff to try to better understand acceleration and training progressions and realized that the 60-80 m. post-run strides might not be the best place to start right now, although they are somewhat used to those from xc season. I decided to change the workout progression a bit so instead of doing the 80 m strides on Thursday after their run, they instead warmed-up and did drills etc. and then did 2 sets of 10, 20, 30, 40 m w/ 90 sec b/w reps and 8 min b/w sets and then after this they would just do their easy run mileage for the day. Is this an appropriate workout week during general prep for long distance runners and should I have the accels on Tue as they are or is that a bad idea to be working top end speed this early in the season?(although it probably won't really be top end when done after an easy run.) Given that we don't have as many different areas to work during this general prep phase which makes our microcycles shorter than during other phases where I used the 12 day cycles, should we be doing something like this once a week during general prep for 5k-10k guys or is once every 2 wks sufficient? Would it be appropriate to alternate the finnish circuits every other wk with a longer hill repeats (300-400 m hills) every other week or does that better fit into the specific prep phase? It's also worth noting that most of my athletes live in the north east and do not have access to indoor facilities at home over christmas break, so I am also wondering if it would be more appropriate to either have them do acceleration work uphill or on the snow or shorten recovery to reduce injury risk or is it fine to do it on flats if they warm up good and dress warm since it is such short distance? While distance running is inherently a little simpler to write workouts for due to having less mixed zone contributions than middle distance, I tend to have a harder time nailing down exactly what my focus should be each macrocycle for long distance compared to middle distance since I was a middle distance athlete in college more so than a cross country runner.