Keep Your Athletes Injury-free This Season

Published December 5, 2024

You might be wondering, “Wait - Jay emails me on Wednesday and today is Thursday.”' Yes, that's true!

The reason I'm emailing you today is I've got specific instructions and workouts for how you can keep your kids injury-free when the season starts. Tomorrow, I'll follow up with an in-depth email about 800m training. While it's more emails than usual, these strategies could save your season.

I'll dive deeper into the Track Training System next week, but here's something exciting:

If you enroll in the next few days, you'll receive 8 copies of the second edition of Consistency Is Key. This new edition includes three new chapters and two new team profiles (Niwot and The Woodlands). Plus you'll get my new Craft of Coaching course. I'll share more details about the TTS and these bonuses next week.

For now, let's focus on those athletes who arrive at the first week of practice without any winter training. These students typically practice well for 2-3 weeks before developing some type of low-level injury—shin splints, extremely tight Achilles tendons, IT band issues, or hamstring problems.

If you've experienced this situation, you know how frustrating it can be. These injuries often surface just as competition season begins, leaving you with a difficult decision: Should you let an athlete race at less than 100%, or should you have them skip the competitions (which they find more enjoyable than training) in favor of cross-training or modified workouts?

Fortunately, there's a better approach.

Today, I'll show you the exact training method from the Track Training System designed for athletes who haven't trained during winter. We'll place these athletes in what we call the 'no prior training plan.'

But first..

Live Class On Sunday

This Sunday, December 8th, I’m doing a live class covering track training from December through May. The class is free, and there will be a special bonus that night if you join live.

The class is at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. You can watch it on YouTube or Facebook.

If you can’t join live, the class will be recorded, yet the special bonus is only available for coaches who tune in live.

No Prior Training Plan

I'll be honest, I sort of stumbled onto the "no prior training" plan when I was working on the Track Training System in 2021.

The concept is really simple.

You're going to have kids who come out for the team in February who've done nothing over the winter months. So this could mean the second, third, or fourth week in February. You've got kids who not only aren't fit, but their legs haven't had any impact on the track or pavement, so they’re at risk of a lower leg injuries.

In my book Consistency Is Key, I talk about how metabolic changes occur faster than structural changes. What do I mean by that?

It means that athletes can build their aerobic engine faster than their chassis can keep up. So we need to have strength work on the very first day that will help strengthen the muscles and bones and tendons and ligaments and fascia, so that as the athlete's aerobic engine grows, we don't have an overuse injury.

If you've coached for some time, you know this too well. The scenario we talked about above - where the athlete comes out for practice, trains well for 2-3 weeks, but then has a minor injury and you don't know if they should race or not - is something we can fix. Here's how we're going to do it.

A Cautious First Two Weeks

The first thing I want to acknowledge is that if we're going to have an athlete run well, whether it's in the 800m, the 1600m, or the 3200m, we're going to have to build the aerobic engine.

As we talked about in yesterday’s email, there's a lot of aerobic fitness that can be gained by doing the warmup and the post-run work, in addition to the running.

What's important in Week 1 is that you teach the athletes the warm-up, and you get them focused on going immediately into the post-run work after their run.

We have a great opportunity with these athletes to develop their aerobic engine this first week because their heart rate will be high doing just about any activity. This differs from your fit athlete who ran cross-country, took a couple of weeks off, and then trained most of the winter. Their heart rate won't be as high during the second half of the post-run work.

Again, this athlete who was sedentary this winter will be getting an aerobic benefit during the entire practice, so long as you don't take big breaks between the warm-up and the run and the post-run work.

Let's go day by day through what these athletes need to do.

Day 1 - Monday - Learning the Warm-up and Post-Run Routine

We're going to make an assumption that this Monday is the 1st day of state-sanctioned practice.

The first day we're going to teach them the Warm Up. The warm-up is Jeff Boelé's warm-up, which you can watch on YouTube (or click here to get the warm-up on your phone).

This warm-up will eventually take athletes 13 minutes, but the first day you teach it, it could take as long as 20-25 minutes. That's fine. Have your upperclassmen on the first day of official, state-sanctioned practice. The week prior, tell the upperclassmen that part of being a great teammate and part of having a great team culture is taking the time to teach the new athletes the warm-up and that they will be doing this all week.

What's the workout? It's extremely simple.

They're just going to run for 5 minutes, and then they're going to go do 5 x 100m strides. The strides are going to be at roughly 5k effort. These are not fast strides, but rather controlled strides.

If you're wondering "Jay, why are we doing strides on the first day of practice? Isn't this going to lead to injury?"

Absolutely not. In fact, the converse is true.

You need to be doing strides on the very first day of practice.

If you've got kids returning later in December, kids who ran cross country and are fired up to train this winter, you must have them do strides on the first day of winter track. I talked about this in detail in an email back in November. Click here to read that.

For this group of sedentary athletes this winter, remember that we're only doing these strides at 5k effort. And when you think about it, it's their 5k effort, not your fit kid's 5k effort. For some of these kids, that's an 8-minute pace or 9-minute pace. The key here is that we need to have their body moving for for a total of 500m on Day 1 at a faster pace than their easy jogging.

Tell them to just have fun, smile, and think of the cue "up tall" when they're running. They won't sprint too fast if you give them those instructions.

Don't overthink where they run these 100m strides. They can do a 100m stride on the back stretch and then walk the curve. Do it on the home stretch and walk the curve. Or they can go back and forth down the back stretch. They can do it on the turf on the football field.

After completing their run, athletes immediately transition into the post-run exercise routine. This part requires either coaching from you or guidance from an upperclassman who can demonstrate the exercises. The post-run system uses a color-coded progression of difficulty, starting with Red (beginner level) and advancing through Orange, Yellow, and Green (most challenging).

Each color level has two versions: an "easy day" routine and a "hard day" routine.

New athletes begin with Red Easy on their first day. They'll do Red Hard on the workout days, then advance to Orange Easy and Orange Hard.

Your more experienced athletes might be working at the Orange or Yellow levels, which involve longer duration and more challenging exercises.

While this might sound complicated, athletes typically master these routines within a couple of weeks. In fact, hundreds of track programs across the country successfully use this system, and students often learn the exercises more quickly than their coaches expect.

To access all the exercises for both Red and Orange routines, download the mobile app, which includes instructional videos and printable PDFs. You can also view these materials on your computer, where you can watch the demonstration videos and download the exercise guides.

There you go. That's Day 1!

Day 2 - Tuesday - Circuit Workout

Let's go back to the three parts of the car analogy.

We must build the aerobic engine, strengthen the chassis, and rev the engine, just like I talk about in Consistency Is Key (click here to download a free PDF with the chapters that cover the car analogy).

We built the aerobic engine yesterday. We revved the engine with strides, and we did some chassis strengthening work with the post-run work.

Today we will push the envelope on this chassis strengthening work and have a very challenging day aerobically.

How are we going to do that? We're going to do it with running circuits.

Running Circuits

If you've done circuits in the weight room with athletes where you do certain lifts and you go from lift to lift to lift with no breaks, then you're familiar with the concept. However, we are not doing this in the weight room, but rather we're doing bodyweight strengthening out at the track, and we're running in between.

The athlete is going to do some amount of running - it could be 200m or 300m on the track, or you could also do this at a park (so long as the grass isn't super wet) as they'll have to lay down on the grass at times to do some of the exercises.

I've got a detailed PDF with QR codes that you can scan to see all these exercises I will describe.

The Workout

A really nice way to organize this would be to have athletes at roughly the 110m hurdle start line, and have them do the following exercises:

Lateral Lunge: 10m down, 10m back
Body Squats x 10
Lateral Leg Lift: 8 x toe in, 8 x toe neutral, 8 x toe out (both sides)
Groaners x 10

After they do this, then they can run 200m to roughly the 300m hurdle start line. At that point, they'll do another set of exercises.

"Jay, what pace are they running for this 200m?"

Great question!

They need to run easy on these first trips through the circuit. We're going to do the circuit for a total of 20 minutes. If, in the first 10 minutes, they're doing all the running portions really easy, that's absolutely fine. They can always speed up the running portion in the second half of the workout.

But what you're going to find is that 10 minutes into a 20-minute circuit, most kids are working really hard and not going to speed up on the 200m. These 200s will probably not be at 3200m pace, they'll probably be at 5k pace at the most.

That being said, if you had older athletes doing this, they could run 5k pace and probably 3200m pace for these 200s. For those athletes, we'd have longer running times, such as the 300s or even the 700s. But for this group, we're going to keep the running to 200s and they just need to be moving.

Back to the exercises...

As you can see above, we're doing lunges and bodyweight squats as our first two exercises. Throughout this workout, the first two exercises are always going to be challenging for the lower body. Then exercises 3 and 4 are going to be more about mobility.

This means that their heart rate is elevated when they're running, and then during the first two exercises, their heart rate is also elevated. The heart rate might dip a little bit in the third and fourth exercise, but because these kids aren't very fit, it's not going to dip much. Then once those exercises are over, they've got to run again.

What you're going to find is this 20-minute workout is essentially as challenging as a 20-minute threshold run would be for these athletes.

This is the magic of this workout!

These kids are strengthening their chassis while they're getting a fantastic aerobic stimulus.

If you were to add up all the 200s that they run, they're not even going to cover 2 miles in this workout, so we don't have to worry about overuse running injuries in the first couple weeks because they simply aren't running that much.

Here's what they do for the second set of exercises...

Front Lunge x 10
Wide-outs x 10
Prone Pedestal x 30 seconds
Supine Pedestal x 30 seconds

After they did these exercises, they'd run 200 more meters, and then they'd be back to the 110m hurdle start.

It's worth revisiting something we said above: You can do this anywhere.

It doesn't have to be at the track. You can do this at a grass park or even you could do this on a trail if there were places off the side of the trail where you could do the exercises.

The final thing to say about this workout is it's extremely challenging. The second chapter in consistency is key is called "Build Your Attention Span for Hard Work.”

What I love about circuit workouts is that these kids are going to have to focus for 20 minutes. One of the neat things is that because they're working hard together, they'll all be able to do this work. It's great for team culture when all these kids have been working hard for 20 minutes and are tired at the end but feel good about having worked hard.

Now that we're done with the circuit, the question is probably whether we should still do some post-run work. And the answer is no.

We're not going to do Red Easy or Red Hard today since we did that type of work in the circuit, but we are going to do some barefoot work. I love this barefoot routine that you can view for free on YouTube. It's fantastic. It sets kids up to keep their lower legs injury-free during the track season. I won't go into detail about the different exercises, but you can click here to watch them.

Now we've got two solid days in the books. What should we do for Day 3?

Day 3 - Day Off or Easy Run with Strides?

Let's consider how the 3rd day of practice can best support these goals.

I'd like to suggest that there's a possibility that they take a day off today. They wouldn't even have to show up to practice, and they could get some extra homework done.

I think in most programs, that's not what you'll choose to do, and what I'm about to share is what you'll choose to do.

But consider for a moment the fact that if somebody hadn't done anything for months all winter and then did everything that we just laid out in days 1-2, they're going to be a little sore, and they're going to be a little tired. So, at a minimum, if we do some work today, we're not going to do more than we did on Tuesday.

But if you do have them work out here's what we're going to do…

Jeff Boelé’s warm-up
5 min run
6 x 100m strides
Red Easy post-run work

We're doing the same workout as Monday, but adding one more stride.

Remember, these kids are going to run PRs week after week in April and May if they just stay injury-free.

If you believe that consistency is key, then what we need to be doing on the 3rd day of practice is setting them up to stay injury-free so they can train consistently and race consistently throughout the year.

Extending The Aerobic Stimulus

If they go straight from Jeff's warm-up into the 5-minute run, then straight from the run into the strides, jog in between the strides, and then straight into the post-run work, they're going to have a solid workout. Let's break that down time-wise.

Jeff's Warm-up: 13 minutes.
Run: 5 minutes of easy running.
Strides: Let's assume they cover three laps and they're averaging an 8-minute pace. Let's say this takes 6 minutes.
Red Easy Post-run: 14 minutes.

13 + 5 + 6 + 14 = 38 minutes

A lot of programs might send an athlete out for a 3-mile run on Day 3. I think that's a horrible idea, but I do know a lot of programs do that.

In that scenario, let's say a kid runs a 10-minute pace for 3 miles. They get a 30-minute stimulus aerobic stimulus. Our athlete got a 38-minute run aerobic stimulus and will be better prepared to PR later in the year. And their volume/mileage was only 1.2 to 1.5 miles at the most.

We're setting the athlete up to stay injury-free because we do so little running on Day 3, yet we continued to build the aerobic engine.

I understand this approach differs from conventional training methods. But remember the beginning of this email where I painted a picture that you've seen so many times:

An athlete trains with you for 2-3 weeks, and has had a lot of fun
Then they have some sort of injury
Now you don't know if they should be racing in the first meet

That doesn't have to be their reality, and it doesn't have to be your reality.

But you are going to have to do things differently in 2025 than you've done them in previous years. If you simply do the training that I'm laying out here, you're going to have a great 2025!

Okay, Day 3 is in the books.

Day 4 - Thursday - 15-minute Easy Run with Strides

This is another day where we're going to extend aerobic stimulus.

Here's how the workout will look on the training document.

Jeff Boelé’s warm-up
15 min run: 7 min easy, 8 min with 4 x 20 sec strides, then go immediately into post-run work
Red Hard

So what's going on with the run?

They'll go immediately from Jeff's warm-up into the run at an easy, conversational pace for the first 7 minutes.

Where things are a little different from what you're currently doing is that they'll go into an 8-minute segment where they need to get 4 strides that are 20 seconds in duration. To be clear, there is no break between the 7 minutes of easy running and the 8 minutes with the strides.

The strides should be at 5k effort, but obviously a lot of kids won't know what that is, so just tell them it should be fun and a couple notches faster than their easy run pace.

For the recovery between the strides, they simply go back to easy running and run that effort for as long as they need to until they feel ready for the next stride. The 8 minutes were taking here is plenty of time to get in 4 strides at 20 seconds.

Published December 5, 2024

The first time we do this, we simply want those 20-second strides to be faster than their easy running pace. In the subsequent weeks, we'll start following the progression of strides document that is so crucial to my training.

At the end of these 15 minutes, they go directly into post-run work, and today we're doing red hard. Red Hard will be challenging for these athletes, and there is zero doubt in my mind that their heart rate will be elevated for at least 10 minutes. For most kids, it will be elevated for 15 minutes.

We're getting their heart rate elevated for 30 minutes, but they were only pounding the pavement for 15 minutes.

That's Day 4. Now let's move on to the final day of the week.

Day 5 - Easy Run and Strides

Today we're doing the same thing that we did Monday. They're just running for 5 minutes and doing strides. They're going to do a Red Easy post-run workout.

While this may seem like a very easy day, it absolutely is intended to be that way. The kids are getting a better feel for the warm-up today, so it shouldn't be taking quite as long as it did on Monday and Tuesday. And they're getting accustomed to doing the post-run work at the end of the running portion, even though the post-run work is really challenging.

Could they do more today? Absolutely they could, but that's not our goal.

Ask yourself this question: If they do more today are they going to be excited to rejoin the team on Monday?

And if they do more today, are you guaranteed that they'll stay injury-free next week and the week after and the week after?

Looking back at everything they accomplished this week, it's truly a fantastic week of training, especially considering their inactive winter.

There you go - your first week of training for the kids in the "no prior training" plan.

I know this was a long email, but I hope you enjoyed it.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about 800m training, including an in-depth look at a workout you can use next spring.

If you have questions about yesterday's email or today's email, simply reply and I'll get back to you.

Live Class on Sunday

And don't forget about the live class on Sunday night. It'll be fast-paced, and you'll learn a ton. As I said, there's a bonus at the end of the class for coaches who tuned in live.