lack of speed, what's the best way to correct?

Again, lots of talk about hills, but no mention of grade. Others have asked this question: What grade constitutes a hill when doing a hill sprint workout, or when doing longer hill work? I presume a steeper grade is used for sprint work than longer hill repeats, but what is the recommended grade?

Also, are there different effects between hill and bleacher workouts?

Aren't hill reps pretty much common sense?

Find a hill a few miles from your house, jog to it for the warm up. Run up that hill hard, jog down for recovery, do it over and over until you can't maintain form and flow; jog back home.

Sometimes you could find a long steady hill and do longer reps that aren't quite as intense, other times you could do a very short steeper hill and do those much much faster. The point is to get the resistance work in.

Bleachers are fine, but personally, I hate all those little steps, too easy to trip and fall.

CrispyChicken wrote: What grade constitutes a hill when doing a hill sprint workout, or when doing longer hill work?

Calculating the grade of the hill isnt really important since the point is to reinforce good sprinting mechanics without the absolute stress of sprinting on flat ground. While sprinting up a hill is "harder" due to the resistance it causes, it is actually more easy to recover from since youre not moving as fast out right. So if youre sprinting at a maximal level you'd use a shorter hill, grade doesnt matter (within reason) and if youre sprinting at a sub maximal level you'd use a longer hill.

Finally 2 posts that go against the flow of the thread but as sad as it sounds they are spot on.

Speed is highly genetic - it's an innate ability, with little room for improvement. You can fine-tune what you were born with, but you're not gonna be able to increase the number of your FT muscle fibers from 10% to 50% or to increase the neurological strength of your brain significantly.

Bolt untrained is not a 15s guy that got to 9.5 with training. Without ever doing any sprint specific training, just by growing and being somewhat casually active in sports like soccer, he would run sub 11. Most sub 11 FAT guys have to work pretty damn hard to get there, and they are already blessed with natural speed and plenty of FT fibers.

Same with someone like van Niekerk. Untrained, at adult age he isn't really gonna be much slower than 50s. Even the most talented middle distance runners just barely break 50, after 10+ years of training with lots of strides and speed training.

Salazar's best 400 ever (his own words) was a 57. Maybe he could have got a second or two faster in a competitive race, but fact is it didn't really make him any worse as a long-distance runner. Same with Farah who ran 12.91 in 100m dash on TV. Some elite middle/long distance runners are just mostly slow-twitch, which is not necessarily a bad thing - find your distances, the right races, and destroy the guys with better 100/400 speed by running away from them or setting a pace they can't handle.

Your best training sessions will probably be long runs, threshold/CV repeats and tempo runs, if I were you I would focus on those and become very strong aerobically.

FutureOldHead wrote:

CrispyChicken wrote: What grade constitutes a hill when doing a hill sprint workout, or when doing longer hill work?

Calculating the grade of the hill isnt really important since the point is to reinforce good sprinting mechanics without the absolute stress of sprinting on flat ground. While sprinting up a hill is "harder" due to the resistance it causes, it is actually more easy to recover from since youre not moving as fast out right. So if youre sprinting at a maximal level you'd use a shorter hill, grade doesnt matter (within reason) and if youre sprinting at a sub maximal level you'd use a longer hill.

Yeah grade of hills doesn’t really matter, but if you have access to a grass hill I would highly recommend running up that than a road/sidewalk. That goes for most sprints actually, try to keep them on turf or grass until about a month before your peak race. Most likely your form is good but not great and sprinting is very tough on your body.

It is true that sprint speed is mostly genetic, but it’s definitely possible to drop your 400 time down to 57 or so. Get in the weight room and focus on back squats and deadlifts. Lift heavy for 3x6 sets. Make sure you have good form

Dairyland wrote:

Yeah grade of hills doesn’t really matter, but if you have access to a grass hill I would highly recommend running up that than a road/sidewalk. That goes for most sprints actually, try to keep them on turf or grass until about a month before your peak race.

Yeah this is also pretty true. While I wouldn't prescribe a specific time to only do grass/turf sprints, especially as a distance guy you wanna protect your body from all that impact since youre likely doing a good amount of mileage anyways. Doing it on grass/turf is protective again for similar reasons as hills, it lowers the absolute intensity reached since a lot more force is absorbed into the softer surface, aka you go slower. I'd still advocate for specific track sessions year round but only in very moderated doses. The old adage "speed kills" is true in the more literal sense too, sprint work can really mess you up if you don't allow for proper rest between reps and sessions.

I wouldn’t worry about it quite yet. It’s kinda hard for speed to be a limiting factor until you you start getting really fast. Since it’s still early in your running career, you don’t know if you’ve plateaued, you just suspect that you have. I’d say continue developing that engine and see how the track season goes. If the track season is truly abysmal, then next year you might need to start worrying about developing speed. I for one think that your track season is going to go a lot better than you think.

Firstly, if that 400 was a time trial you can probably knock off a good 4 seconds for your actual time, and another second if it was your very first 400 ever. And secondly, I’ve had plenty of slow twitch monsters tell me how they shaved seconds off their 400 just by upping mileage and getting faster at distance in general. So don’t worry about speed development until things stop working. Right now I see no evidence that things aren’t working.

Especially when you consider that that mile time, I think, is actually better than your 5k, which completely contradicts your whole thesis. When your mile is dramatically and impossibly worse than your 5k is when you should run to the boards for help.

ienjoyracing wrote:And secondly, I’ve had plenty of slow twitch monsters tell me how they shaved seconds off their 400 just by upping mileage and getting faster at distance in general.

That's true, while the 400m for elite men is around 37% aerobic only (43s), as the times gets worse the aerobic contribution increases, so for a 60s 400 it's already over 50% aerobic. So slower people benefit a lot from aerobic training in getting their 400 time down.

Also it's better training for the endurance type. They don't have the body type, muscle fibers and neuromuscular coordination to sprint fast. You can see this when a slow-twitch guy tries to sprint, they aren't relaxed at all they just push harder and harder but still go slow with bad mechanics. But when it's about cruising at 6 min mile pace, that's their territory.

Same is true the other way round - you don't want to force Bolt to run lots of repeats at 5 min mile pace - he just looks terrible at that pace, it's way too slow for his muscle fibers. It looks like he is still trying to keep his sprint mechanics even tho it's just 5 min mile pace. He just isn't efficient at that slow pace, compared to someone like Willis for example who looks beautiful running tempos at 5 min mile pace.

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

is highly genetic - it's an innate ability, with little room for improvement. You can fine-tune what you were born with, but you're not gonna be able to increase the number of your FT muscle fibers from 10% to 50%

Your best training sessions will probably be long runs, threshold/CV repeats and tempo runs, if I were you I would focus on those and become very strong aerobically.

Exactly. Speed is important, no doubt, but for someone like OP the gains he'll see will be pretty small in comparison to what he'll get taking a more traditional distance training route. For athletes with an older training age, thats when those marginal gains become so important. I also do believe that he can probably run a low/sub 60 400 right now but just doesnt have the rhythm down. The 400 is a really foreign race for distance guys and it puts your body through a whole different set of demands so it takes a bit of time to actually run it properly. Either way, you really only need a low 60 second 400 speed to run a pretty fast mile/2 mile/5k, in some cases even slower.

Well, thinking of the concepts of Work, Kinetic Energy, and Potential Energy, grade must matter to a certain extent. So, I did my own research and found that grade does matter, although not so much expressed in terms of physics. Andrew Simmons and Brian MacKenzie both discuss training variations based on grade, with a hill grade range being between 4% and 25%, but generally between 5% and 10%, with shorter repeats (e.g. 50 meters) at 10% grade and longer repeats (e.g. 200 meters) at 5% grade.

V wrote:

XCwannabe wrote:

This looks really helpful, I like actually being able to understand what I doing or working towards. Definitely gonna steal some of what’s described.

For whatever it's worth. Most of the volumes I talked about are a lot higher than what I use today. We still Speed Dev. weekly, but 6 reps is the absolute max that I would ever do and even 4-5 is much more common for us when we're targeting top speed.

How come?

and yet salazar worked extensively on speed with rupp and Farah.

high school xc coach wrote:

and yet salazar worked extensively on speed with rupp and Farah.

You can't compare runners who already run sub 13/sub 27 to the OP. They have different needs. It's not the sprinting that made them sub 13 5k runners, but the power of their aerobic system and their insanely high threshold. At 4:40/mile pace, these guys are still cruising. For OP that already feels like an all-out sprint.

Thinking you can take the 10% of sprint training that Farah and Rupp did and become a really fast 5k/10k runner is looking at it from the wrong angle.

No one says that elite runners, who can already run sub 13/sub 27 aerobically, should not work on their top end speed to become stronger in finishing a championship race.

But for OP, a slow-twitcher who is MILES away from his true potential in the 5k/10k, there are MUCH more efficient ways to get to a faster 5k/10k time than spending a lot of time and effort on sprints right now.

Phil, you are talking about a high school junior as if he has many competitive years left in front of him and so he should develop his aerobic and ignore working on top end.

Well, there are pretty good odds that the next 15 months will be the last of his competitive running career. Speed development will be very important if he wants to be the best he can be, right now.

and you certainly don't have to throw out aerobic development while working on it.

Here's Phil again giving terrible advice.

LRP’s whole concept goes completely out the window when you realize that both Rupp and Farah have run sub 11 100m with a two step acceleration. I’ve mentioned this in many threads before and he keeps ignoring it.

high school xc coach wrote:

Phil, you are talking about a high school junior as if he has many competitive years left in front of him and so he should develop his aerobic and ignore working on top end.

Well, there are pretty good odds that the next 15 months will be the last of his competitive running career. Speed development will be very important if he wants to be the best he can be, right now.

and you certainly don't have to throw out aerobic development while working on it.

I agree with Phil. This spending a ton of time doing sprinting work vs using that time to become stronger aerobically is a better use of his training time.

You guys are going way off into the weed talking about Rupp and Farah, arguably two of the best distance runners in the past decade. Not really relevant nor comparable to the training some rando HS jr.

TrackHistorian wrote:

Watch your cadence on easy and maintenance runs. Try to keep close to 180 per minute. It will help with turnover as you run faster. I have no science behind this, but it got me a lot faster at the 400 and 800 when I was younger (over 20 years ago).

If your a low spm overstrider then more emphasis is placed on the wrong muscles. Specifically ones used for absorption rather than propulsion. But i'd only increase by 5spm over your current spm as a big increase could change biomechanics enough to cause issues in underdeveloped areas.

high school xc coach wrote:

Phil, you are talking about a high school junior as if he has many competitive years left in front of him and so he should develop his aerobic and ignore working on top end.

You should never ignore any aspect of training but I don't really see a point in worrying about specifically improve top end speed when he's no where even close to his aerobic ceiling nor will he see that much improvement his top speed anyway. Sprint training is important, and a necessary part of every good program, but for a distance runner who has such a young training age its just icing. The important part is the aerobic work. This kid isn't going to hop in a 3200 and be limited by the fact that he cant run a fast enough 400, but he will be limited if his aerobic strength is under developed. If he was trying to run like 2:08 it'd be a different story but he hasn't made any indication that he'll move down to mid.