Keep Kids Healthy When They Join You
Published February 1, 2026
Hello!
Let's picture this: three weeks from now, a freshmen will join your team. You've never coached this athlete before. But this athlete - let's assume they're a swimmer - has been in the pool since November. They have a big aerobic engine from swimming. The swim coach says they're competitive willing to work hard. You also heard from their middle school track coach that they can run a solid 400.
What most coaches would do is put the swimmer in with the kids they can hang with for the first few workouts, and that makes sense. They've got the big aerobic engine, they can hang on.
But that's a big mistake. In this email, I'm gonna tell you what you can do differently this month to help this kid have a fantastic track season.
The Car Analogy
The reason I think the analogy from my book Consistency Is Key is so helpful is that we talk about the aerobic engine, but we also talk about needing a strong chassis - the bones, the ligaments, the muscles that allow the athlete to stay injury-free. You've got to have a strong chassis as a high school distance runner if you want to stay injury-free.
And that's the problem with our swimmer. They may not have a strong chassis.
Think about it: they haven't interacted with the ground all winter.
I once heard someone say, "Running is a contact sport." We think of football as a contact sport, but all the ground contacts are important. Every time a 140-pound athlete's foot strikes the ground, they're absorbing 2-3 times their body weight in force. That's 280-420 pounds of impact, thousands of times per run.
The chance of this athlete getting hurt in week one is low, and probably pretty low in week two. But if you've coached athletes who are hurt by the third week of the season when they're starting to race, this email is going to prevent those injuries from happening.
The Important Resources
First things first. There are two things you want to do today:
- Click here to get the No Prior Training Plan: Download the 13-Page PDF
- Watch (or listen to) this video where I walk through the plan day by day: Watch: 21-Day Training Plan for High School Runners
If you're somebody who likes to watch videos, this is a fairly concise 30-minute video. One of the things I like to do is just listen to videos like podcasts. As an aside, YouTube Premium is the best monthly subscription I pay for because there are no ads and I can just listen like podcasts.
When the athletes arrive the first few weeks of outdoor track, the risk of injury is high. You don't want to overload them with now training stimuli. What I've learned in 25 years of coaching is that if we can just keep them injury-free in the first 2-3-4 weeks of training and then let them "race" into fitness, they're going to have a fantastic season. And have a blast!
Now, if you're thinking, "I really wish they would have joined me in December and trained all winter," it's an important thing to realize: what we want is not here. And I think that's a really powerful thing we need to realize as coaches. Yes, it would have been nice if they would have been with you all winter to both build their aerobic engine and have a nice progression of strength work and running at race pace or faster. But they didn't do that.
Another thing from a famous Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön: "You got to start where you are."
So think about that - what you want is not here, they didn't run this winter, and you have to start where they are.
So let's be conservative. I've shared all of the training they need in that link above, and that's something worth studying now. The bottom line is you can keep all three of these athletes injury-free.
The Basketball Player
Now let's switch gears from our swimmer to our basketball player.
The basketball player doesn't have quite as big of an aerobic engine, but I'm actually less concerned about them running 800s and maybe a few 1600s when the season starts because they've had a ton of ground contacts. They've been essentially doing plyometrics every time they go up for a rebound.
If we're using our car analogy, their chassis is stronger, and their engine isn't as big as the kids who've been with you all winter, but in a way that's helpful. They're not going to be able to "fake" challenging aerobic workouts. But again, I'd put them in the same plan with the swimmer. Although after two weeks of training, you might want to increase their volume a little bit.
The Sedentary XC Runner
The final athlete is our cross-country runner who stopped training in October.
This one may be counterintuitive, but you really need to have them just follow this plan. They'll hardly be running at all compared to where they left off in cross-country. But they'll be gaining fitness with circuits. Again, go back to our phrases: what we want is not here, and you've got to start - and they've got to start - where you are. Put those two things together, and we need to be really careful with this kid.
One thing to consider that's really a positive with this athlete is they obviously loved cross country if they came out for track, or maybe they at least enjoyed cross country enough to give track a shot. Make sure they're having fun and enjoying being around some of the same kids they enjoyed being around in the fall.
If this athlete has a ton of fun running track, not only are they going to likely train this summer, the chance of them bringing along a friend to cross-country practice this summer is higher.
So don't be frustrated with these kids. Just make sure they have a blast this track season and trust this is going to make your cross-country team even better next fall.
What you'll get in the PDF:
- Every workout for the first 21 days of practice
- Warm-up and post-run work documents with every exercise you'll assign
- Videos of the warm-up and post-run work
- Progression of strides documents
- Pre-race routine
This plan works for kids who will run the 1600m and the 3200m, and it's great for 800m runners too.
Let's go!
Jay
PS - Here's what happened for Coach Collins and his kids after he used the Track Training System:
"Using your framework, I rewrote our middle distance training. For context, we were 2021 State Champions in XC and Track for Boys and runners-up for Girls, but more was needed.
We competed this weekend for the State meet and won both Boys and Girls. This includes: 4x800 - Boys 1, Girls 2 (Both with new school records). 1600 Boys - 1st and 2nd, Girls 2nd (new school record), 8th, 9th. 800 Boys 1st. 3200 Boys 4th and 8th, Girls 1st and 8th.
The boy who won the 1600 and 800 did not lose a race in 1600, 800, or 3200 all season and took his PR from 4:24 to 4:14. The young woman took her 1600 from 5:17 to 5:03 and 3200 from 11:25 to 10:57.
So thank you for challenging me to rethink how we did things and for offering tools to do something different."
— Coach Collins
Jay Johnson
