Speed Development: Intro, Part 1 and 2

Posted on May 13, 2009 by CoachJay

I wanted to share the speed development day (04.23.09) for the simple reason that this is the one workout from Sara’s recent training cycle that I’d insert into most HS program’s two week cycle, especially the day before a dual meet where you have a miler running several races as VO2max work. Also, this is the only workout that I don’t have to “*” for elevation; I’d assign the same volumes and the rest intervals for an athlete at sea-level.

I will lean on the comments section below to illuminate this workout – write in a question and I’ll answer every one…though it might take a day.

I know that most HS coaches are busy with the end of the school year and the State meet, so feel free to bookmark this series and come back to it later this summer.

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  • Frank58

    Hi Jay, I notice that Sara does her warm up drills, plyo excels, etc, on the surface of the track… I usually keep my high school and club kids on a soft surface (field turf) for their warm up drills, is there a physiological benefit to the harder surface? Thanks!

    Frank D.

  • http://coachjayjohnson.com CoachJay

    Frank -

    Yes, we don't do the sprint drill on any other surface than the track. I think there are benefits to doing these on grass, especially in the fall and/or doing them barefoot or in Nike Free's, yet at this point in the season we really want the plyometric nature of the drills (see the straight leg bound) on the hard surface so that the eccentric/concentric is coupled as quick as possible. But again, early season there is a lot of benefit to doing the A-skip and B-skip on the grass…and next year I should probably take the time to do this on a soft surface, but this year I'm limited to meeting Sara just 1 or 2 times a week and so there is lots of things we should do if we have more time.

    Check out this video as an example of plyometrics that are done in the sand as a precursor to doing “real plyometric” work on a hard surface.

    http://www.runnerspace.com/video.php?do=view&vi…

  • Frank58

    Thanks Jay, that is what I thought your answer would be and it makes perfect sense. I think I'll bring the kids out to the hard surface for the warm up a couple times a week and see how that works for them. Funny you should mention straight leg bounds and the plyometric nature of them; I saw a pretty good female high jumper compete the other day and part of her approach to the take off was none other than a straight legged shuffle to a bound. Just before she made her turn into bar she activates the knee drive and POW! Great take off, great height.

    Does Sara do much in the way of plyos? I mean over the tops of hurdles or box jumps, depth jumping. Some of that stuff can be a little scary. Since most of my athletes are 14 years old and younger so I try and keep plyos moderate to easy.

    Frank

  • http://coachjayjohnson.com CoachJay

    The end of the video below shoes her doing some box jumps…I'll get some of this on tape later this summer as she does a lot of squatting/box jump complex work.

    http://www.coachjayjohnson.com/2009/03/to-plyo-…

    …I doubt this is appropriate for your athletes, yet playing basketball and rebounding or playing volleyball and trying to spike the ball are both appropriate and both meet the definition of plyometrics – a quick coupling of an eccentric then a concentric contraction.

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  • thomas_t

    Jay–

    When I wrote to ask you about progressions for speed development I never thought you'd write a whole article on it for Running Times, but thanks! It was great=) Anyway, my question now is how to work this into a season schedule. We have the majority meets on Thursdays with a handful (2 for everybody/2 varsity including state) on Saturdays. This generally breaks down to hard workout on Monday, (hills, fartlek, some work at race pace, some at a little faster), moderate on Tuesday (sometimes just generic distance, sometimes 10-15 minutes of tempo depending on what we did Monday), pre-meet Wednesday, meet Thursday, dress up/fun run Friday, long run Saturday (usually as a progression with a pretty significant negative split).

    So where does the speed development go? This track season I was committed to doing more focused speed development and early in the season I chose to “sacrifice” (bad choice of words I know, not thinking of it as robbing Peter but…) one day to focus on speed rather than maybe 3k pace stuff (I can't remember what I was debating between) but the most anybody did was probably three sessions over the course of the season. Most kids only really did one true day of SD and towards the end of the season the kids who were going to run at state's strides were a little more focused (ie 3 x 150 ins and outs, 2 x 100 m accels with last 10m being best relax, etc).

    Now, looking back at XC season, I suppose, Mondays' workouts and Thursdays' races are probably providing a lot of the same training stimuli and from a physiological stand point it might make more sense to have one of those workouts be faster than race pace (since Saturday–if not Tuesday is more tempo based). But, psychologically, I think it's important to have those hard Mondays, especially for the younger kids, I think it's a lot less daunting to be on the starting line of a 4k saying, “I did this (or something roughly equivalent to it) on Monday” versus “I ran some hundreds really fast on Monday.”

    I'm guessing the answer might be to sneak it in at the end of other workouts as “more focused” strides, for example, Tuesday after a generic shakeout (but if the point is to run fast and you're still pre-fatigued from yesterday's workout…) or maybe on pre-meet days (provided we've been doing something similar leading up to hard workout days before the competitive season starts) or maybe on Friday's after the meets (but, it's gotta be hard to run fast when you are dressed up as a pirate/ninja/superhero/whatever-crazy-thing-the-captains-dream-up). If the off-season is spent with a good focus on doing hill sprints and/or hill strides, is every two weeks often enough?

    Thanks for the blog, it's not only a great place (to try) to organize my thoughts but I also get much better feedback here then when I try to organize them in my head=)

    Thos