Been incorporating speed development sessions with max speed work in 30-60m intervals. Usually base sessions on modified versions of Justin Rinaldi training with Fast 8 track club. Have enjoyed doing these and find them helpful but have struggled sometimes to recover for other workouts and recovery runs after. Wondering if people more experienced have anything specific they do to recover from true max velocity and speed development workouts?
30-60m intervals really should not take much out of you. You are probably overtraining with the hard stuff in general
Never really thought about this since mileage has been low but maybe right. Essentially added speed day on Monday then try to turn around for Tuesday tempo and race pace Friday workouts. Speed has definitely been the determining factor for tired legs, since used to doing Tuesday/Friday workout. Still need to figure balance of doing 3 sessions in week with mileage and long run. Anyone with helpful balancing tips also appreciated!
What do the speed sessions on Monday look like exactly? Something like 4-6 x 30-60m with FULL recovery shouldn’t be taking much out of you.
Usual Monday session is 20 minute jog warmup, full routine of drills (progress from walking drills, skips, to plyos and 4x 100 stride), then short sprints (usually something like 4x 30 and 2x 60), then finish off with 800m pace work like 2x 150. Been basing these off of stuff from Fast 8 track club.
What kind of rest are you taking? The rule of thumb is a full min for every 10m sprinted but maybe more. You need to be fully recovered for each sprint or your form will go to hell.
What kind of rest are you taking? The rule of thumb is a full min for every 10m sprinted but maybe more. You need to be fully recovered for each sprint or your form will go to hell.
Did not know that rule! Usually take plenty of rest between short sprints but haven't been taking much time between 60s or longer sprints. Usually figured if I can feel relaxed on longer sprints I'm ok but seem to feel it more next day. Trouble with coming back to sprints after distance training!
Been incorporating speed development sessions with max speed work in 30-60m intervals. Usually base sessions on modified versions of Justin Rinaldi training with Fast 8 track club. Have enjoyed doing these and find them helpful but have struggled sometimes to recover for other workouts and recovery runs after. Wondering if people more experienced have anything specific they do to recover from true max velocity and speed development workouts?
MoVB
How would you describe the recovery issue? If it's muscle soreness then after a few sessions it will mostly stop popping up. If it's fatigue then I'd lower the dose first by taking the 2x150 out and keeping the sprints at 60m or less for now. That stuff between 80-150m (speed endurance) has the most fatigue from trying to coordinate a very high precision, high output movement for a comparatively long time. The reason we delineate 150m as the ceiling of speed endurance is primarily because past that we can't really maintain the high level of coordination the entire time.
Boo Schexnayder sometimes would suggest you have athletes try to start and stop a stopwatch as fast as possible (after testing when you were fresh/not overtrained) as a way to test CNS fatigue. I've never tried it in a group, but he's smarter than me and while I don't know if he did it either, it's not a bad notion to think about more than the muscular and metabolic fatigue that is distance runners are used to, but also to know how to tell when we just don't feel "snappy"
Been incorporating speed development sessions with max speed work in 30-60m intervals. Usually base sessions on modified versions of Justin Rinaldi training with Fast 8 track club. Have enjoyed doing these and find them helpful but have struggled sometimes to recover for other workouts and recovery runs after. Wondering if people more experienced have anything specific they do to recover from true max velocity and speed development workouts?
Boo Schexnayder sometimes would suggest you have athletes try to start and stop a stopwatch as fast as possible (after testing when you were fresh/not overtrained) as a way to test CNS fatigue. I've never tried it in a group, but he's smarter than me and while I don't know if he did it either, it's not a bad notion to think about more than the muscular and metabolic fatigue that is distance runners are used to, but also to know how to tell when we just don't feel "snappy"
Interesting and useful post as ever, V.
Did he include a baseline-reference reaction time for the start-stop on the stopwatch?
doing Tuesday/Friday workout. Still need to figure balance of doing 3 sessions in week with mileage and long run. Anyone with helpful balancing tips also appreciated!
If these max speed development sessions (alactic sprints) are producing big recovery costs, most likely you are “embarrassing” your central nervous system. Take it aa assuring that you are performing the alactic work at more than the minimum effective dose to force adaptations.
Your max speed work is basically like plyimetrics, or weight lifting in motion.
Like a new high-intensity lifting session, when you get home from that first lift, you feel almost drunkenly clumsy from all that CNS fatigue. But then there is sort of a second wave of this felt-fatigue again after you reap the CNS adaptations from your first few sessions. what I mean is, you may then feel a second lull because your CNS got better at activating much faster than muscles have time to adapt yet. so your CNS becomes more ABLE than your musculature to perform the task of lifting, plyos, max speed dev. The result? That second wave of fatigue that is more a blend of CNS fatigue and perhaps DOMS. But then after all of this has had time to integrate through a meso cycle of supercompensation, then when you got to do these max speed sessions, you will be scratching your head wondering, “did I go hard enough?” In the same way you might have experienced thinking to is after a big workout that your body was well-adapted for.
doing Tuesday/Friday workout. Still need to figure balance of doing 3 sessions in week with mileage and long run. Anyone with helpful balancing tips also appreciated!
MoVB
Change to a 10-14 day training cycle.
Appreciate all the responses! Think this might be my biggest problem though. Started out thinking speed development was just little more than strides and treated it as a sort of half workout, so didn't adjust other workouts around it. Fatigue I feel is usually feet and ankles (sometimes up to lower shins between bottom of calves and ankles) and almost always on my Tuesday tempo day and Wednesday recovery day. By Thursday usually all good and feel fine for Friday workout but have had to scrap some tempos because legs just feel totally weak and tight. Going to play around with schedule more this week, as did speed yesterday and took longer recovery between short sprints.
Did he include a baseline-reference reaction time for the start-stop on the stopwatch?
Yes. You would want to test this first when you know your athletes are in a pretty safe spot on training so they have a baseline where you know they aren't dealing with fatigue. Then you'd compare a new test against the reference to know if they aren't as fast as usual.
Did he include a baseline-reference reaction time for the start-stop on the stopwatch?
Yes. You would want to test this first when you know your athletes are in a pretty safe spot on training so they have a baseline where you know they aren't dealing with fatigue. Then you'd compare a new test against the reference to know if they aren't as fast as usual.
Thanks for sharing such valuable knowledge!
How much of a difference in time would you consider the workout over? 10%, 20%?
How much of a difference in time would you consider the workout over? 10%, 20%?
Truthfully I haven't used it as a metric so I can't say with any authority. I don't think it would have the statistical power to make the call within a workout. I imagine it more as a thing you ask an athlete to do when you notice something is off and you want to confirm your suspicion.
When we did timed 10m/20m flys we had a little more confidence on when to stop a session based on times. With a fairly fast kid who can consistently go near 0.98-1.01 you know they're feeling off when you see a couple of 1.05s or slower and we'd probably call the session a rep or two early. 5% off of their lower range is still pretty significant if we're meant to be in a block that we expect them to be firing on all cylinders. Now if we had a long run the day before or didn't spike up or something like that then we can understand seeing slower times and not being phased.
I'm usually in the camp that would rather sprint a little more on the days that we're seeing 0.98-1.00 just because we're getting more out of it than trying to force something if they're closer to 1.03-1.06.
I'm usually in the camp that would rather sprint a little more on the days that we're seeing 0.98-1.00 just because we're getting more out of it than trying to force something if they're closer to 1.03-1.06.
Wonderful! Your perspective makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the quality advice - it’s very enlightening.