Now that Yohan Blake have reach an outstanding time of 19,26 in the 200m, my only conclusion Is that he must do something right in his training.
"On a short-to-long plan, I like the short speed sessions on Monday, as it can trash your CNS where you need up to 72 hours to recover. On a long-to-short plan, the speed and special endurance are early in the week, with the short speed on Friday (and 2 days rest on the weekend!).
For my athletes, they key numbers for workouts in seconds are 3-7, 15, and 40 seconds. Usually, those numbers translate to 30-60m, 150m, and 325m. So generally, those are the key distance I like to work with.
Speed endurance and pure speed have to work hand in hand. People tend to separate them and do speed endurance as a single component and then do explosive speed training as a single component. A lot of time we hear sprinters say that they have not started speed work yet, which means that they have been doing speed endurance work.
My philosophy is that the two should run concurrently and that coaches should try to develop a balance. To keep the athlete fresh and explosive, the load has to be slightly reduced as you go to high velocity and high quality performance in training, the work that is done in the last part of the competitive period leading up to the major completion.
A greater degree of rest is required for recovery and explosive training must be greatly reduced to maybe once or twice per week and a recovery should not be less than 36 hours, 48 hours would be even better. A lot of coaches feel that if you reduce the workload too much in terms of training time the athlete will lose something, but that is not my experience.