Podcast 007 – Patrick McHugh Interview

Peter did no running in the summer time. Between his Junior and Senior year in high school he was in Central America doing a service project for 8 weeks. That being said he was always an amazingly active person. I am sure every day he was away he was playing some sort of game — soccer, ultimate frisbee, basketball for an hour plus.

I think what is interesting to me about Peter’s development as both a track and cross country coach and an athletic director is that he played a lot of different sports. He played four years of soccer and 2 years of basketball in high school. I do feel that contributed to his greatest strength which is his first step acceleration. I see a lot of kids drop other sports I feel too early to specialize in one because they hope to achieve a performance like Peter did in their sport whether that sport is football, basketball, field hockey or soccer. I do not know if that is wise before the junior year. A different sport helps kids move in different ways. I also feel that competition in different sports also pushes them in different ways. Unfortunately, this may be less and less realistic as the depends of sports seasons in high school become greater.

I do not feel comfortable commenting on his current training as I am no longer overseeing it and I want to be respectful of what Princeton does. I will say they have a program that is very flexible to the individuals needs. There is no one program dictated to the athletes.

Great podcast once again, Jay! Great interview with Patrick that was very informative about specificity and also the importance of and advantage of dedication to regular ancillary work.  I’m really interested in the various functional strength training movements and routines you guys discussed, but I’m having trouble finding good examples. I searched on Vern’s website, but didn’t find any listed.  Could you do a post of a handful of specific functional strength movements for runners to work on? You mentioned band work, medball work, and even shotput work, but I’m not really sure where to start.  Thanks!

The “Burn with Vern” circuit is a pretty simple circuit with a lot of possible variations. Basically it is 30 exercises alternating Upper Body, Core, Lower Body throughout. As long as you keep that pattern you can basically insert the appropriate exercise. But I like it best when we use as little equipment as possible. That way we can get a lot of kids moving at once. We do use light dumbbells, med balls and 12″boxes typically. There are all sorts of ways to tweak it. The way I have typically done it is by timed sets. So we would typically go 30-45 seconds on (depending on how hard we want to go) and a 15 second rest. We also like to add an aerobic component after every third exercise. For the aerobic component we go 1 minute hard. I like stationary bikes or jump rope best. But you could use ellipiticals or even treadmills (treadmills get tricky though). When I have someone who really wants to make it tough, we put an aerobic minute after every exercise. So this is a circuit that you can make anywhere from 25 minutes in length to an hour depending. But the key is the pattern of Upper Body, Core, and Lower Body exercises. We typically do this once a week in the winter when the weather stinks. Sometimes twice if I have a particularly into it group and Chicago winter is harsh. If you get a large group all going at once, it makes for a really great environment. By the way for those of you interested in Vern Gambetta’s ideas and stuff, he shares a lot on his blog http://www.functionalpathtrainingblog.com and his own website http://www.gambetta.com