Thank you for all that your contribute to the boards.
Would you be able to share how you’ve balanced sprint work with high mileage runners? You talk about it a bit in the 6x50m thread but you also mention that how you do things has changed. What is the max amount you would have somebody run before doing something like short hill sprints? I know Renato often schedules them after a 40 min PM run when the athlete has done a 60 min run in the morning this seems like it would be too much slower running prior to a sprint session. Would something like 4-6 miles, drills and hill sprints in the AM + 4-6 miles in the PM be okay?
I'm glad you've found it helpful.
For higher mileage runners we are basically swapping out where most coaches put strides in for short hill sprints or speed development. I don't personally like strides all that much. For younger athletes I think they are better, but once you've been around track and field for a handful of years strides aren't really enough to drive adaptation. I think speed development or hill work gives the same benefit and actually has a chance to make athletes faster -- If the injury factor wasn't so overblown by old school coaches who are afraid to sprint I think more coaches would switch strides with speed development.
That said, we'd get up to 10 miles and still do hills after for a high mileage runner. They might still have a double later in the day if they are north of 85 miles a week. Otherwise I prefer to keep it at 8 miles or less. If someone needs a double digit day I would first opt for double over going to a 10 mile run if we want to run fast after. 5 and 5 or 7 and 5 for instance are easier to still get in speed than a straight 10 mile day
Thanks for your responses! I have a couple more questions for now:
1: How does your maximum all out speed factor in to how fast you can run for an 800/1600. It is not raising your anaerobic capacity cause it’s to short to do that. Yet developing your maximum velocity is obviously very important. Basically, what does development of your all out speed actually do for you scientifically for mid distance events. Like scientifically, how is it making you run faster times?
2: What is your opinion on LEGAL supplements in running for nutrition and/or making you run faster? What ones do you recommend?
1. Usually we think of it in terms of speed reserve. If my best 100m time is 14s then breaking 60 is going to be a hell of a task because I'm operating at such a high percentage of my top speed. I'd have to run within 1 second of my PR 4 times without stopping.
The other part to is is similar to what we would mention with the weight room. How can a slow lift that takes 3 seconds possibly help my mile time? When we lift and when we sprint we're trying to learn how to generate more power. Imagine you're running a mile. During that mile you take 1,000 steps (just a number to work off of). If we can learn how to put more force into the ground to increase our stride length by 2cm without changing our cadence we would cover 20m more in the same time frame. That's about 3-4 seconds for a HS athlete.
2. We basically just have protein shakes after workouts and sometimes have our athletes get blood tests to check on the basics; usually Iron and Ferritin. I think Creatine can be a good one for recovery but I've never used it, and caffeine before running is a pretty basic one. I don't go out of my way to recommend anything to my athletes beyond, get something with carbs and protein in your system after we workout and take some iron if we know there's been any kind of issue in the past.
1. You'll be more comfortable at a slower pace. If you can run only run a 59 400, you can't run a 2:00 8, let alone a 4:00 mile. However, if you can run 50 (or so), it'll be much easier
2. Beta alanine and caffeine pre-race are good legal supplements. Boosting testosterone, HGH, etc are gray area things that work. EPO and other forms of blood doping work quite well, but are always illegal
Thank you for all that your contribute to the boards.
Would you be able to share how you’ve balanced sprint work with high mileage runners? You talk about it a bit in the 6x50m thread but you also mention that how you do things has changed. What is the max amount you would have somebody run before doing something like short hill sprints? I know Renato often schedules them after a 40 min PM run when the athlete has done a 60 min run in the morning this seems like it would be too much slower running prior to a sprint session. Would something like 4-6 miles, drills and hill sprints in the AM + 4-6 miles in the PM be okay?
I'm glad you've found it helpful.
For higher mileage runners we are basically swapping out where most coaches put strides in for short hill sprints or speed development. I don't personally like strides all that much. For younger athletes I think they are better, but once you've been around track and field for a handful of years strides aren't really enough to drive adaptation. I think speed development or hill work gives the same benefit and actually has a chance to make athletes faster -- If the injury factor wasn't so overblown by old school coaches who are afraid to sprint I think more coaches would switch strides with speed development.
That said, we'd get up to 10 miles and still do hills after for a high mileage runner. They might still have a double later in the day if they are north of 85 miles a week. Otherwise I prefer to keep it at 8 miles or less. If someone needs a double digit day I would first opt for double over going to a 10 mile run if we want to run fast after. 5 and 5 or 7 and 5 for instance are easier to still get in speed than a straight 10 mile day
I bolded a part of your post, V, that I would love to hear you talk more about because I totally agree. I only do strides now as part of a warm-up before workouts, hill sprints or wickets.
An additional yes to that request. We've had some good discussions on the boards about strides and/vs speed development, but it would be good, and probably helpful to a lot of coaches, to take it further. I also found that paragraph intriguing. More of V's thoughts and approach would be appreciated. And any other experienced coaches (HS or college) who'd like to contribute to the discussion.
For higher mileage runners we are basically swapping out where most coaches put strides in for short hill sprints or speed development. I don't personally like strides all that much. For younger athletes I think they are better, but once you've been around track and field for a handful of years strides aren't really enough to drive adaptation. I think speed development or hill work gives the same benefit and actually has a chance to make athletes faster -- If the injury factor wasn't so overblown by old school coaches who are afraid to sprint I think more coaches would switch strides with speed development.
I bolded a part of your post, V, that I would love to hear you talk more about because I totally agree. I only do strides now as part of a warm-up before workouts, hill sprints or wickets.
Not sure how much more I have to add with it.
The rationale I hear from most coaches on doing strides are that they:
1) Make athletes feel better the next day so they're primed for a workout
2) Help athletes build efficiency running faster
3) Build speed
Number 3 is nonsense if they're actually referring to making an athlete develop a better top speed or anything remotely close to sprinting ability.
Number 2 I can understand, but when we're already doing workouts pretty often I think strides as a way to build efficiency are just a drop in the bucket compared to the volume of quality we already get from our workouts that are often as fast or faster than strides.
Number 1 I'm fine with. I don't know if I've ever really noticed a stark difference in workouts from when we did or didn't do something to prime us the day before, but I do it before every meet so whether it's tradition or something there I'm not going to rally against it.
To me, what it comes down to is, if speed development or a quality hill session can still make us feel better the next day, still build efficiency at faster speeds, and actually build speed, then why wouldn't that be a priority over strides?
There are times that we might opt for some 100's or 200's after a run, but when we do it's nearly always because we aren't seeing those paces (800m-mile) during other workouts so we're getting in something here, but that's pretty much just over the summer when we aren't doing as many workouts or they're generally slower tempo work. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The only other part that usually gets brought up is injuries. We sprint year round and we've never had an issue. You don't want to go all-in your first session, but I think your athletes are at a bigger risk if they never sprint and someday need to than sprinting often.
The college program that I ran for would genuinely have guys there that hadn't run at their top speed for 4-5 years. We were good in cross but I really think we struggled translating a lot of our talent to the track.
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I agree about putting speed sessions as a priority over strides.
However, I recently discovered a useful niche for strides: long run embedment. Basically, on a longer run of say 45min-2 hours at whatever stage in the training, I have found that if or when the legs start feeling a bit flat or "pounded" due to fatigue, stopping and doing a few strides does wonders for making the rest of the run feel fresher and more pleasant. This is anathema for distance runners for whom stopping during an aerobic run is sacrilege (and more likely to be unnecessary due to their predominance of ST muscle), but for 800 types it is very useful and probably more beneficial than forging on stoically, especially when done with some brief stretches or even drills. Whatever keeps the form strong and legs bouncy is more critical than the ability to run for hours continuously no matter what.
What do you suggest in place of "hills" for those of who live in honest to goodness flat areas? Seriously -- I'd have to arrange vans and bus my kids to get hills. It's just not an option for each week/10 day cycle...
What do you suggest in place of "hills" for those of who live in honest to goodness flat areas? Seriously -- I'd have to arrange vans and bus my kids to get hills. It's just not an option for each week/10 day cycle...
Flat sprinting is still a good avenue. Resisted sprints are an alternative as long as you aren't trying to replace hills that you would see in a cross country race. And while I don't advocate for them, but stairs aren't the worst thing if you don't have access to hills. You just need to keep in mind that the coordination demand and feeling of "don't miss the step" is going to be the limiting factor there in terms of output on any given rep.
What is your take on the current double threshold fad?
What are some changes you’ve made to your program the last few years that have made a big impact?
I haven't tried it so I'm certainly not an expert on it. Realistically I only have a few athletes that recently got to a level that we would consider it as the next step in development. Hard to say what it would take for me to pull the trigger considering those athletes have already improved close to a minute from the year before over 5k doing what we're doing.
I'm a huge proponent of lactate threshold so I'm definitely intrigued by it. I would be interested in seeing what the comparison would be between two moderate threshold workouts done the same day versus adding another moderate threshold workout to what you're already doing (i.e. back to back threshold days or having a MWF workout schedule with two of those being threshold and one being your other standard workout).
Basically, is the magic in the volume you do throughout your training plan or is the magic in them being done on the same day?
I don't think I would ever consider doing it until we were trying to get past 12,000m of volume. Something like 12x1k staying on the controlled side of LT just isn't that punishing if you've built up to it over time.