John Cook--THE DRILLS

Familiarity with hurdle drills, form drills, etc. are certainly beneficial. Anyone have information for the OP?

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There's a video on flotrack of the Inidana Elite guys going through a circuit using medicine balls and lot of body weight/plyo type stuff with some form sprints and drills in there. Look for it. Pretty complete vid to show all the exercises. Not sure on the seasonal progression of the work presented there. But back in college, we did something similar twice a week. Build up to 3 full trips through the circuit over the course of the season, and when the big races were approaching we backed it off to 2 then 1. Much like a traditional taper.

Just checked out the Indiana Elite circuit--great stuff. It's a lot like the FSU routine.

Anything else out there?

What about specific neuromuscular, sprint, form, hurdle drills and progressions?

Some light drills are great as a dynamic stretching and warm up before really fast work. Drills will also improve the contracting ability (i.e.power) of the muscle fibers but you could do this by a lot more running specific way like running. That´s as specific as it can be. Hills are very effective on training particularly the strong glutes and the recruitment of the highest possible percentage of muscle fibers simultaneously.

Traditional plyos or jumps are not that good for runners which is a cyclic sport demanding cyclic power, unlike jumping and throwing where you want to build very high levels of acyclic power. Cyclic means that in sprinting the power is brought into action repetitively and rapidly and the rhythm of the movements is explosive. This top-end work should be done only after some general and maximum strength training and increasingly more intensive sprint work. Weights will help you to reach higher cyclic power and that will improve the overall running efficiency and particularly your ability to sprint. Try this with women and the benefits will be even greater.

If you haven't seen it already, search Flotrack for the Shalane Flanagan workout.

He seems very secretive on the drills. I know there was a big long thread on letsrun a while ago on it, but little specifics.

When Cooks said something to the effect of "not just kicking down the door and going running" Im sure a lot of LRers had mild to severe heart palpatations.

it's about the miles run right? Doesnt the guy with the prettiest training log win the race?

Pretty sure everyone here already knew Cook's general training strategy. Personally I was surprised when he mentioned Flanagan running 80-90 miles a week while training with him - I thought it would be less.

They're similar to the plyos that Cathal Lombard did to gain his improvements.

edumacator wrote:

Pretty sure everyone here already knew Cook's general training strategy. Personally I was surprised when he mentioned Flanagan running 80-90 miles a week while training with him - I thought it would be less.

He didn't say 80-90 miles PER week. He said she reached 90 ONCE. He made 85 sound like a big milestone. Keeping that in mind, I think you're stretching quite a bit to say she ran 80-90 per week. It was much more likely an average in the 70s, I would guess.

Magness posted a link to his drills on his twitter account earlier today:

"Want to know the Dan Pfaff/John Cook General Strength drills? Here you go

http://bit.ly/bJSAUO

"

anyone know of a place that explains what some of those names of the drills are?

like: rocky's, crossack extensions, KSCT, etc.

shows each exercise in the pedestal and waterloo routines.

Agree, I think in the interview he implied typical mileage was in the 60's, but that may have not been specific to Shalayne.

He said the drills could go as long as 45 min. And I'd love to learn more, but it was clear from his talk that it wasn't just the specific drills they did, but what they did and when.

It is sooo different from what I have done the past 30 years (and may explain a lot ;-))

Perhaps I should have been more clear. I personally was surprised that she EVER got up to 90 miles in A week with him. I agree, somewhere in the 70's is probably a good guess for an average training week. 10 miles a day plus 30-45+ minutes of drills/exercises of varying intensity is certainly still a lot.

there's like 4 videos up there from him