Help Convincing Coach

[tb2010]

@Stikki

-my coach thinks that by not doing his program i’m preventing myself from shining. any advice how to confront this?

What happens to his athletes times as the season progresses? Does a guy in the 100m open with say 11.2 then run 11.5 the next week, 11.5, 11.4 etc and spend most of the season working back to the opening time? Or do the times open with 11.2 then get stale and stuck on the same time the rest of the year? Look at big picture, male/female across multiple events to look for trends. The goal would be a progression with times peaking when it matters most, hopefully the last few weeks of the season.

-my coach belives that it IS always true in reverse, and not necesarrily in the other way (ie. the idea that its the effort which improves the sprinting speed, not actually high intensity) any advice on how to convince him of the contrary?

If your maximum bench press was 200 pounds and you wanted to increase it to 300 pounds would doing reps with just the bar or even 100 pounds until your arms gave out (full effort mind you) help you reach your goal?

-what are some tell-tale signs of overload i could point out to my coach when he doesnt believe me that ive probably worked too much? i’ve had past injuries resurface and feel fatigued sometimes, but he just thinks i’m whining. is there any more obvious ways to prove to him?

How heavy are your or your teammates foot strikes? Is anyone able to be light on their feet or is everyone plodding? Does this deteriorate over time?

Another way is to measure power by tracking your vertical or standing broad jump every day. You’ll see normal fluctuations day to day but if you see a constant downward trend you’ll know your power is decreasing.

-both my head coach and sprint coach (who was a state champ 300m runner, so its not fun having to disagree with him when he has that behind him) were football players/coaches, and football does involve non “medium” speed running, so they see no reason to train track runners from football players (though i’m not a fan of my school’s football program either). does ur statement apply for football too?

Not as much as soccer and basketball. The football guys tend understand full effort/rest better than those other sports but they are also dealing with a 48+ minute game so they have conditioning considerations. Whereas high school track competition is 11-65 seconds of all out effort then 20 or more minutes of recovery.

The big thing I find though is lots of football coaches still run gassers for conditioning so the athletes run those only fast enough to not get yelled at. When they get to track they revert back to the mentality of running gassers, I have to teach them that they can can give it full effort because I’m giving them plenty of rest to recover.

question/comment by bullet again:

-this trend with the times does happen (except for me this and last year bc i trained the fall on my own and sat team workouts) as the times towards the middle of the season are certainly slower than the beginning, but if the end of the year time is .1 faster than at the beginning, my coach believes thats how its suppose to work because hes never seen anyone really see bigger improvements. sadly i think he has that mentality (ironic for a coach to have) that speed is incredibly difficult to develop so a .1 improvement is great

-i like your benching analogy. i may bring that up if he questions my sitting of a workout, though even in the weight room almost all the lifts we get assigned are in the 15 rep range, and we share a weight program with the distance kids, hmm… i forgot to mention this in my other post, but also the other reason he sites running repeat long runs is because “by the third heat of the 55m at championship meets you’ll be tired and this will help you get your knees up in that final heat”. though it seems to me that this isnt taking into account the difference between handling larger volumes, speed endurance, and the special endurances. what do you think?

-during this year i have felt heavy on my feet sometimes, though ive always tended to being a “heavy” stepper. i think i’m really the only one who gets overtrained though because i actually do high intensity training outside of meets i do believe that my vertical has slightly deteriorated in this season, maybe i can sight this, though he might say that if id been running the team workouts it wouldnt have (though i fail to see how ladder drills or repeat 4’s would help a vertical)

-and yeah, most of the stuff we do is like football training thats more like conditioning. if its not repeat 400s (which the football team wouldnt do, but track does) then its like repeat 50 yd dashes from a standing position with the rest being the time it takes for the other athletes to do the run and clear the track. and with the way our football players have been mentally conditioned, at leats the better track ones actually do run as hard as they can on each one, so since we dont do pure speed training we don’t run into that problem you brought up

thanks a ton for your time!