reading around pfaffs workouts, seems like alot of neuromuscular work, and some intensive tempo. What i find from athletes who do similar workouts is that they improve very quickly, but chances of injury are that much greater. I also heard those trained under pfaff to improve dramatically in training as well. Is there any truth to this? If so can intensive tempo have some benefits, from its metabolic effects if any?
what are some example workouts? Ive never seen any myself
Yea… you should probably post the workouts 
From what I have gathered, his athletes get a LOT of therapy and who knows what else…
re: intensive tempo. Ive seen people improve quick and but they plateau quickly. I’ve seen it a many times especially in youth athletes They improve by seconds!!! and then they stop improving.
Maybe intensive tempo is good upto a point then start the high intensity stuff??? Maybe a few weeks in the begining of a SPP or if you dont do indoors?
Using a large volume of intensive tempo would put the athlete at a huge endocrine peak due to the lactic-type training. The peak would last for a 4-6 weeks.
But if you don’t have the base of speed, this peak is useless as you will just hit the wall where you CANNOT run faster.
So go through GPP and also build speed through indoor, and then do this type of training at end of indoor/start of outdoor?
How would the workout look like? 6x200s? 8x150? and how would it fit in with speed training?
Track Man, check out KitKat’s posts in the lactate threshold thread.
Some of the workouts in there, namely the (3x3x300 and 6x200) are definitely this type of work. They are murderously hard but get the job done quite nicely.
yes, but i’m thinking more for short sprinters, intensive tempo is talked about extensively in relation to long sprinters. I plan to do some in the comp period as i already did lots of speed work and have a good work capacity built from work in construction, and early complex type training and a carpload of tempo last year. Have’nt got a serious injury yet.
Int tempo for the short sprinter should be done in gpp and maybe the first 3-4 weeks of spp. Sample workouts:
6x200 rest 3mins
8x150 rest 3mins
10x120 rest 3mins
2x300-250-200 rest 4mins
250-200-150 rest 3mins
Excerpts from Tom Crick interview with Pfaff The bold writing is just me!:
The 1st priority is health. We look at what entities can be addressed to increase the wellness of the athlete.
Is it mechanical?
Is it inappropriate training?
Is it how training elements are being combined?
Is it nutrition?
Is it sleep?
Is it lack of coordination of the therapy groups and styles?
The 2nd priority is increased mechanical efficiency because statistics show that the more mechanically efficient you are, the less injuries you have, the higher the degree of performance and the less energy you expend so you then have more energy to spend on rehab and prehab.
Generally with most of the ageing athletes that come to see me, dealing only with those 2 parameters is the whole deal. If you get those 2 things going, the rest will take care of itself.
A lot of people are into a stimulus/adaptation motif when it comes to training and instead I feel there are 4 steps to improving performance.
Once you have stimulated the athlete and he/she adapts to the stimulus, then you have to spend a certain amount of time allowing that new performance level to stabilise. Then in the 4th step the athlete must learn to actualise it in any kind of environment and under any kind of stress, at any point in time. I think a lot of coaches fall into the trap of stimulating and adapting and as soon as the athlete looks like they have things under control they then change something and push forwards for greater gains and, in doing so, compromise the adaptation process and set the scene for injury.
Unless you have integrated sports medicines, therapy, rehab and prehab, you must reduce the overall efficacy, volume and density of your training. You simply cannot afford to do this at the elite level because it is a slow virus; you do not know how much you are losing until it’s too late. What you learn from the therapy sessions also guides what you do in training. If an athlete is not receiving regular therapy, there are less checks and balances.
One of the analogies I use to describe my approach to sports medicine is that joints are pulleys; muscles/tendons/ligaments are ropes and this pulley system is driven by a computer.
To achieve high performance you have to do correct therapy to rehab and prehab the ropes so they do not fray.
You have to ensure the pulleys are clean so that everything can slide efficiently.
And then you have to clean up any viruses in the computer programme to remove guarding or dysfunctional movement patterns.
If you get away from that trinity you are doomed to failure. Now I think there are some very good therapists that can fix pulleys, like chiropractors, but the most common thing you hear with a standard chiropractor is “Yeah, I felt great but the next day it was back!” This happens because they fixed the pulley but forgot about the soft tissue and it rolled the joint right back out of alignment again. Then there are therapists that are really advanced and they fix the joint and clear up the soft tissue pulling at it. However even then they do not go in and fix the viruses that are controlling the whole thing. So injuries start to go away but do not have permanence because they have missed the role of the coach - to fix the computer. And so the coach and therapy team must work closely together.
Have you all downloaded Fundamentals 2: Solving Problems?.
Rest & Recovery are significantly under-appreciated by coaches and athletes alike. We spend copious hours and tons of energy studying work. We research it to death and talk to our colleagues about it. If you had a microphone on and if you monitored how much time you and the athletes spend thinking and talking about work and you compared it to how much you spend on rest, you would be shocked. It’s probably less than 1%. As I have aged and coached ageing athletes, I have come to appreciate that designing and implementing rest and types of rest is perhaps more important than work and the types of work. I think taht is why in some countries we see great youth programmes, great junior programmes and then when they get to the emerging and elite level, it stops. The culprit is the work to rest balance and when that is not correct, the injuries mount.
Have you all downloaded CF Lecture Series : Rest & Recovery?
If things are not going well, we move to plan B, and a rule of thumb plan B is “try to stay as close to plan A as possible!” This means that we do not stop training just because we are injured. If we cannot run we do bike workouts to keep the chemistry going. If we cannot throw, we look at what things we can do in the weights room to replace that.
There was a time when Obadele Thompson had a nerve entrapment in his foot and did bike workouts for 3 weeks. He did a test sprint workout one day before he flew to Japan and then he did a lifetime best in the 200m - 19.97 into a 0.9 m/sec wind, and he had not even run a step in 3 weeks!
Have you all downloaded CF Workout Series : The Bike Workout?.
Even for more serious injuries that require surgery, it’s important that you keep training going as much as possible before the operation so the athlete’s systems are amped up ready for recovery.
yeah have to mix it up abit, since long rest for short volume sprints of around 200-250m of speed work is not cutting it.
A guy from here spent a week with Pfaff earlier this year and without doubt the emphasis on and amount of recovery work was the thing he noticed. The planning was actually a pretty similar structure to what most here are familiar with via CF.