James…
You’re better than that.
While I don’t disagree with you Davan, (hence my refusal to engage with bear anymore), I cannot believe that you weren’t laughing at some point during that read.
I certainly was!!
I certainly laughed!!
I disagree with a lot (although not all) of what he has to say (then again, he has coached a female who runs a faster 200m than me as a male in high school–so maybe I should shut it about any disagreement!), I feel he is at the very least coming to the lion’s den to debate the topic and provide some more info on his beliefs. Whether or not I disagree with it is not the point, I just feel that you are a person who has helped many here and other other boards and to make comments like that diminishes to an extent the character that has done those things.
Sorry bud but I’m with him.
Mr. Ross–
Where does work on the track fit in with this strength work? Is any of this detailed in your book?
Davan, interesting that my character is the one which you question. I urge you to not allow fragile sensibilities to cloud your judgement.
After all, I initiated my presence in this thread questioning the character of Barry as I am perplexed by the fact that he stated that
“A significant number of Olympic sprinters do exactly that, from Ben Johnson to Maurice Green. That is because they did not zero in on the effects of gravity, but put more focus on relatively unimportant parts of running mechanics.”
For him, or anyone, to attempt to find flaws or claim how they can capitilize on world class performances is, in my view, irresponsible. Especially regarding Ben, as his 9.79 performance is argueably the biggest blowout (relative to the second place finisher) in the history of the modern era sprints. (Michael Johnson’s 19.32 is surely another). And because Ben was NOT running world class times as a teenager- this points all the more to the subsequent TRAINING
So the primary point here, again this is my view which appears to be a minorty one at this point, is that we all need to know our role and certainly we must exercise discretion when theorizing/postulating or what ever else in regards to methodology which has repeatedly proven itself at the world level.
Again, this is not, as Barry even stated, a function of whether the athletes already possess great potential; this is a function of world class competitors whose biological potential combined with unique training lead to qualification of the absolute highest level. Thus, I question the arm chair arrogance of ANY individual who dissects their perceived flaws in the said competitor training; NOT because questions are unwise (as they are, in fact, fundamental to the learning / pedagogical and training perfectioning process), but because of the context in which they are asked or positions are stated.
Some analogies:
shall we track down Abadzhiev and attempt to find holes in the Bulgarian model despite the national teams repeated success at the world level, or maybe we should find a way to contact Bubka, or Sedyk, or Timmerman, or Beyer, or Borzov, and share with them how they were all flawed in their Gold Medal winning, world record setting, training methodologies.
While we’re at it I’m sure Alexeyev wouldn’t mind if we told him how he really should have emphasized the development of alternative motor tasks and don’t forget about Rezazadeh as he surely is wasting his time on this and that.
Fruitless endeavors, ALL of them. What we must do, however, is learn from what has taken place before us/in front of us and theorize and postulate how it may be perfected without diminishing the achievements, either in training or competition, of the athletes or their coaches.
My view and no one elses, take it for what it’s worth.
I believe that I exhausted my current capacity to explain myself.
Do you give someone credit for bringing a knife to a gunfight? Or is it just stupid?
I was enjoying this thread until a few posts ago. 
James makes some great point here and we need to address what is given to us in terms of talent. I have been given huge talents and every winter I get the bad news bears and must kill myself to get them to medal at states.
First I do like to hear how people get 28.0 to 24.8 since that is the majority of track athletes in HS. HS is not a sexy level to coach since you will not be on ESPN too much and speak at conferences (with groupies).
Charlie worked with Ben since he was a mid/late teenager and, RE your inability to recolect Ben’s teenage performaces, Ben was not setting junior world records at that time. In fact, the degree of improvement over the course of the subsequent decade is nothing short of monumental.
Devils advocate how many athletes get the chance now to work with an elite coach from 14-25? Many go to college and get destroyed by mega volumes. James shows in his post that talent surfaces faster and many athletes that “blosom” late are products of excellent gardeners (coaches that are patient).
I do respect Barry for producing Miss Felix but again we don’t see a factory do we. I do admire Barry for being in the HS trenches since it is hard work and little pay and the changes of getting talent is scant as best. He has every right to write a book if he feels his info can help those but attacking John or Charlie is lame.
Just wanted to say that I read Ross’s book and I thought it was pretty good. It looks at training sprinters more from a strength perspective rather than a sprint/track work perspective. I think it’s better than alot of crap publications that are out there (I read alot). The book should be especially useful for the coach who is working with novice athletes and trying to get them some strength that will help their performance and not just bulk them up.
It should be noted that Ross isn’t critical of Ben or Mo in his book. In fact there are no big criticisms in the book, just information and explanations…I guess that Mo/Ben stuff just came from some message board that he posted on.
Some of his stuff may be “wrong”, some of it may be “right”. Who knows. I think his philosophy can work in alot of situations.
If all of us knew the answers to everything like we think we do then we’d all have 10.00 guys.
[QUOTE=James Smith]
What we must do, however, is learn from what has taken place before us/in front of us and theorize and postulate how it may be perfected without diminishing the achievements, either in training or competition, of the athletes or their coaches.
[QUOTE]
I agree with this. All athlete’s performance from crappy to elite levels is a function of a monumental number of variables both in input and output. Ultimately coaching is an extremely complex optimization problem. We need to apply the right input variables to make the athelete run faster at the right time in the season. Unfortunately (or fortunately as this make things more interesting) all we know is that athlete X did Y and received Z time at competition (assume these variables are not scalars). Since we don’t know all of the variables, nor the entirety of the surfaces of the variable spaces, we can only interpolate with any accuracy (find places between the best performers and the worst performers). When we extrapolate outside of known data, our accuracy goes to heck. This make especially good sense when one considers athletes whose variables are very finely tuned (e.g. the olympic level), changing variable anything slightly could have large effects, usually bad.
Of course i am only postulating, as i have not coached anyone in athletics. This analogy sounded good to me, for what its worth.
Damn, i guess totally destroyed my own argument in duxx’s soccer model thread. 
Mass-specific force is the amount of ground force application in relation to bodyweight. As ground contact time decreases the time to deliver potential force decreases as well. Top speed can be defined as the maximum force delivered, in the shortest contact time, in relation to bodyweight. Strength to bodyweight ratios do not consider time.
Then why focus on strength to bodyweight performance in the deadlift since there is no time factor? Why not instead focus on something like a power snatch or a depth jump?
Also there was some talk on muscle fiber conversion. It’s my understanding that the IIX/B to IIA conversion is primarily a result of prolonged eccentric tension which causes eccentric induced microtrauma. It makes sense from an adaptational perspective. The fast MHC isoforms are fuel hungry and fast and do not like to be damaged. When they are damaged the muscle adapts so that these fibers are better able to conserve energy (better tolerate endurance). - which unfortunately makes them contract a little slower as well.
Perhaps this is one advantage to Ross’s plan. By avoiding the eccentric one can still train the nervous system and boost the gap between limit and absolute strength, (or get as strong as they’re capable of for the amount of muscle they already carry), yet they also avoid eccentric induced microtrauma and avoid fast to slow conversions. Fred Hatfield said he used to do this training up to a powerlifting meet. In an effort to maximize FT expression he’d do concentric only squats leading up to a meet. He said he always got a pretty big boost in performance out of it.
The disadvantage is, if one has captured their strength potential and has a small explosive strength deficit (meaning that they could build more “MSF” by increasing the cross sectional size of their available motor units), how are they then going to improve on a program that doesn’t allow that?
Is fiber conversion different from the pure laboratory setting (only weights) when engaging in high intensity speed and plyometric development as the main focus, concurrently with weight training?
Did the book give a clear picture of how the strength work fits the sprint program? Any examples of a weekly schedule that shows all training elements and their timing?
Unfortunately, no. It gives a clear picture of the strength work (based on alot of Pavel T’s stuff) but track work is not really discussed.
The strength work volume is very low and there isn’t much eccentric stress upon the athlete (focuses on deadlifts). The strength work is done before the track work.
Like I said, this book is a good book for high school coaches and the like. It’s not a highly technical book regarding sprint training as Ross is a strength coach.
I think it would be great for a situation where track season begins and you only have a few weeks before your first meet. It’s not a multi-year plan or anything like that.
Where did you get this information? Never heard about.
Also,rememebr that the famous study that shows IIb–IIa conversion ( http://tinyurl.com/7efju ) was using lactic weight protocol. In the new study of the same scientist the results were different : “The mean percentage for myosin heavy chain and titin isoforms, muscle fiber-type distributions and areas were unchanged.” http://tinyurl.com/c4ftp
Interesting info thanks for posting those papers Fulkrum. Be careful in making assumptions about the types of training protocols causing different adaptations though. Couple of obvious differences in the papers, (1) the 2000 paper used untrained subjects not involved in regular exercise, in contrast to the 2005 paper used recreationally active subjects that were doing about 6hrs a week of other training and (2) different muscles were biopsied, vastus lateralis in the 2000 paper and gastroc in the 2005 paper. The other interesting issue is training frequency with the subjects in the 2000 paper training 3x per week in contrast to the 2x a week in the 2005 paper…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the greater overall increase in relative training load for the 2000 paper subjects (in a less trained muscle too) was the cause of the shift away from IIx rather than the different modes of training per se…
As with Fulkrum I would also be interested in any papers detailing the eccentric cause of the fibre shift which you allude to Kellyb
Gofast i am quite sure about the type of training of the 2000 paper because my friend (who also use to post in these forum) was speaking with one of the scientist of the team about training protocol.