word. wrote:
Flo'da Boy- thanks. You're right, it's difficult to know when to rest as well as how much.
Since I only have about 3 weeks left of sprint training, how much rest do you think I should take if I'm doing sprint work 4-5 days a week? Should I sprint train one day and then rest the next, or would it be wiser to go all out for several days in a row and then take the weekend to recover?
All-u-can-eat has it right, and frankly, as a sprinter, what I see here is about as offbase as if I asked Sprintzone how to runa a marathon and posted it here.
First, WHAT, you are training, which Bad Wiggins had exactly wrong...
When you start out from blocks, the ATP production from creatine phosphate tops out in two seconds. That's right, TWO seconds, but it releases an enzyme called AMP, which tells your glycolytic system to get its act together.
Between 2 and 7 seconds, you use more and more glycolytic energy as you have less and less alactic. At 7 second seconds, the two combined can't produce enough ATP to maintain speed, and that's why world class sprinters accelerate to 60, then relax/maintain. This is also why you need overdistance for any event over 60 meters or 7 seconds, and why world class people like Bolt do a lot of work between 300 and 450 meters at 80-90 percent speed (what sprinters call intensive tempo).
If you keep running fast, the ATP produced by lactic means tops out at 15 seconds, and beyond that you need aerobic support. That's 15 seconds, not 50.
The other thing that's important to understand is that whether you squat heavy, do VO2max intervals twice a weak, or do sprint workouts, you create a fiber transition of IIb/x -> IIa, and that makes you slower. A lot slower, and the way you reverse that process is to cut training waaaay back leading into a race. For someone like me, who will do 6000-7000m a week at 400 pace and faster in base, 1500 m/wk in specific prep, it means 400 meters a week for the last couple of weeks into a major race. You build something up to taper off of, and then you taper sharply. During comp, sprinters only have one hard workout a week and that is normally a race, with everything else submax. So for the last 2 weeks, you might just do something like 80+100+120 or 100+200, with the rest being just sessions of 30m starts a couple of times a week. It's only during the taper that you see the speed you've built up in training, and you don't really know what speed you have until you cut way back and start competing.
There a philosophy in sprinting that you can train on back to back days if you train different energy systems, so a lot of high level programs to a week like:
long-short-off-short-long
....but not during competition stages, and not for beginners that have not built up work capacity to handle this. A lot of beginners can't handle more than training twice a week without losing performance and getting injured (remember, for sprint programs there are also weights in here), so a lot of beginning programs have one day of speed (5-8 second sprints at 100%) and one day of speed endurance (8-15 second sprints at 95% speed with 5-20 minute rest).
Beginners often do better with less track work and more weight work (mostly squats, cleans, bench, and rows) and speed endurance on the track. This is because beginners can't accelerate as far and reach as high of a top speed, so the speed really comes from speed endurance until they build up the capacity to accelerate longer.