How to train athletes to maximize long term development?

Aerobic development--a combination of moderately high volume training and judicious high end aerobic work, with an eye for building and maintaining general strength, efficiency, and all-around athleticism. Avoid hard, long intervals for most of the year. Learn that running fast and running hard are different. Stay healthy, train in a way that can be repeated and built on over the years. And be patient.

juhgyfdeswaxgg wrote:

Aerobic development--a combination of moderately high volume training and judicious high end aerobic work, with an eye for building and maintaining general strength, efficiency, and all-around athleticism. Avoid hard, long intervals for most of the year. Learn that running fast and running hard are different. Stay healthy, train in a way that can be repeated and built on over the years. And be patient.

Easier said than done.

Don't - Over - Train. Care about your runners. It's not just DI coaches either. There's one DII coach who gets a "ton" of talent 4:20 milers in HS ect... and if they don't fit in or loose interest there forgotten. There is a trend that sometimes the athletes that tend to hold back a little do well over the years. just my opinion.

Staying healthy doesn't just mean never getting injured, it also means being smart and catching injuries early instead of trying to run through them. But yes staying healthy is a big challenge which is why general strength is important, as is avoiding too much 'hard' stuff

Take base training seriously. The summer is a part of the season. Your season is halfway over when you have your first team practice.

If you neglect base, the only way to get into shape in time is to do a ton of hard running. For long term development, this is a really poor tradeoff.

I also think that most athletes would be better off if they'd treat winter as another base period instead of making it a serious competition season. Do a few indoor races if you want, but peaking for indoor probably isn't a great idea, especially for a world class competitor who is going to be racing late in the summer at the WC/OG.

Great development is still efficiency, speed and toughness. Aerobic development is important but not the number one priority. It's always easy to come back and play makeup with aerobic capacity, given six to twelve weeks of available time. The three things I mentioned are always hard to achieve, and requires constant attention. It's the reason the Ethiopians have had such success, because they make those three things their priority.

wuzthere wrote:

Great development is still efficiency, speed and toughness. Aerobic development is important but not the number one priority. It's always easy to come back and play makeup with aerobic capacity, given six to twelve weeks of available time. The three things I mentioned are always hard to achieve, and requires constant attention. It's the reason the Ethiopians have had such success, because they make those three things their priority.

Are you kidding me?? Anyone with natural speed can be quickly developed into race shape, aerobic base can only be formed when a very solid time of the year is put towards it.

a year is 52 weeks, I'd say 35 weeks should be put towards base and pure aerobic workouts with 17 weeks put towards the "sharpening" phase. 7 for cross country and 10 for track.

Any more then that is redundant in terms of long term development

juhgyfdeswaxgg wrote:

Aerobic development--a combination of moderately high volume training and judicious high end aerobic work, with an eye for building and maintaining general strength, efficiency, and all-around athleticism. Avoid hard, long intervals for most of the year. Learn that running fast and running hard are different. Stay healthy, train in a way that can be repeated and built on over the years. And be patient.

This is basically what I've read in several training books from a variety of successful coaches and runners. If this advice is so widely known (supposedly), why do so many coaches and athletes decide not to follow it? It seems the vast majority of coaches out there overtrain their athletes and emphasize hard interval work over consistent training at a bit lower intensity. Part of me would like to become a college coach just because of how easy it would be to be superior to 70% (or more) of programs out there.

You crazy Americans need to stop racing so much. I read on here about people doing 4 races in one day.

It seems that the coaches don't care about what is good for the athletes. "Burn out or injuries? Yeah whatever just make sure you run 20 races and get some points for the team."