What Tinman Does Well wrote:
In performance athletics, with everyone looking for an edge, it's easy to latch on "the answer" for improving. The facts are, that if his coaching methods weren't founded in best practices they wouldn't produce consistent results and improvement with minimal setbacks.
Therefore, he has not only succeeded in improving the athletes he works with but has also branded important fundamental training principles in a novel way that has garnered a lot of attention, which benefits both him and his athletes. It's honestly encouraging to see how transparent the group is with training, and maybe more people should try to emulate and learn why it's working, before voicing criticism that the training isn't different from other coaches. The visibility component is important. If the best coaches are applying similar principles, isn't that a good thing that shows maybe there are some best practices you can follow? Many coaches have egos and are secretive about "their system" when really it's all based on the same natural and physical principles.
Adaptation and maintenance aren't novel concepts but it's amazing how often they are ignored in training. A specific stimulus will yield a specific adaptation given that the stimulus is progressively harder and there is proper recovery and nutrition. Why so many coaches and athletes ignore the recovery component of training is truly baffling, as the result is dampening adaptation and working overall harder when they could improve more efficiently doing less and getting the most improvement from their quality sessions that most contribute to performance.
Because of specificity, each type of training stimulus starts at a beginner level, improves quickly at first, and then becomes more difficult to keep progressing (minimum effective dose / diminishing returns). Is your athlete not responding to the same training or improving at the same rate? Do something else. Maintain it and work on something else, there's lots to work on. If they maintain the same fitness level across their developed skillset and improve new ones they will improve overall.
Once you've built a skill, it's easy to do a little of it to maintain your progress without detraining, but you still have to do it occasionally if it's not in a stage of building. Multi-paced sessions are one of the best ways to maintain what you've built in a higher volume way without taxing any one system too much, and that's why they work so well, especially if your goal is to have everything firing and not be too tired for a key race. Covering a wide base of skills with steep initial improvement curves drives holistic improvements, and usually produces more well rounded healthy athletes.
Hammering specific race pace the Tuesday of a Saturday race, even if it's for a confidence boost, is often not the best move and can leave you flat in other areas that make up the final product, and not fully recovered in the main contributing system to the event.
There are a lot of skills that contribute to track and field performance, and there isn't enough time to work on them all in a training week, or a season, or a year. There are many ways that you can go about the process of developing and maintaining the total skill set necessary for a given event, but it's highly individualized, which is why you see a lot of different training methods achieving or not achieving similar results. It's also why you see improvements when an athlete moves to a different coach, or goes to college. It's often because they work on new skills they needed, on top of maintaining what they've built, and find the confidence to make a jump. It's also not hard however, to just incorporate that variability in the first place.
If you want to be a better coach, just do your homework. Learn the basic physiology, learn the basic biomechanics, learn how to best communicate with other people so you can explain the why's and have good reasons behind your plan. That builds trust, confidence and buy-in. Be creative and open minded in your approach, because people are different and one system won't work for everyone, and make sure the athletes are treated as human beings first.
There isn't a magic answer, but you always get results doing the fundamentals well.