Help with Planning a Middle School Program

I stepped into a Middle School track coaching position last year, and as a distance runner I am quickly trying to digest everything that I can about sprinters as it is just a different breed of training then us milers. Anyway, I have been perplexed about how to go about planning training around the following limitations:

  1. Limited training time. I can only have official practices starting March 1 with the first competition being April 14th-ish. After that it is a 4 meet season, one per week. So, we are looking at about 8-9 weeks total.

  2. Most of my athletes play other sports… So I cannot have much “un-official training.”

  3. Developmentally, they are 12-14 years old and have never run track before. I know that they are at a very vulnerable stage physically.

  4. Limited facilities. We have an asphalt track with limited capacities in terms of available grass to run on. However, we do have a grass hill that can be of use. I also can get them to purchase medicine balls to do some core workouts as well.

How much time should I be devoting to GPP? SPP? What should I be focusing on? What drills/skills/progressions? Block starts or not…? I want to do a good job training them to be competitive and reach their potential… while not over training and injuring/messing with their athletic careers.

Any help/assistance with cognitively planning out these wonderful principles that Charlie is teaching in a way that fits novice athletes would be greatly appreciated.

I wouldn’t worry about the limited time too much, because everyone else has limited time as well. I’m shocked and how much improvement can be made to mostly untrained high school kids in the 10 or so weeks I get them each year for school track.

  1. Most of my athletes play other sports… So I cannot have much “un-official training.”

If they’re playing other sports, this will help them stay in shape.

  1. Developmentally, they are 12-14 years old and have never run track before. I know that they are at a very vulnerable stage physically.

  2. Limited facilities. We have an asphalt track with limited capacities in terms of available grass to run on. However, we do have a grass hill that can be of use. I also can get them to purchase medicine balls to do some core workouts as well.

How much time should I be devoting to GPP? SPP? What should I be focusing on? What drills/skills/progressions? Block starts or not…? I want to do a good job training them to be competitive and reach their potential… while not over training and injuring/messing with their athletic careers.

I have only access to a grass field and a concrete hill. I start making sure everyone has decent arm movement and some basic sprinting form, but I don’t take much time away from it during the runs, and usually make comments when I see issues.

I would probably shy away from training any of them to run 400m. I don’t recommend block starts because they’re not strong enough to use them properly. You can use standing starts, lying down starts, push-up starts, medicine ball starts, …

I consider the season too short to properly split into GPP and SPP, so with highschoolers, I start with a lot of tempo running then transition towards speed and SE (which never really gets there). 3x a week practice, and I start with 2x a week tempo (up to 3000m per day). They regularly do a few short hill sprints. I don’t think middle school kids would enjoy this very much, but my highschoolers tolerate it because they have so much fun later in the season with different training and trips to compete. Once a week we’re usually stuck in the gym due to weather, so I do short accelerations and med-ball explosive work, or quite often have them work on their other event(s).

Depending on their fitness, I’ll drop the tempo to once a week starting in either week 3 or 4, and we do 1x a week for 2-3 more weeks. The tempo day is replace with speed work, which varies, but includes some of EFE & FEF drills, flying 30s, and 50m or 60m runs. I try to keep things simple and re-use the same drills because things are always slow the first time they’re introduced to new drills that aren’t straight forward. I was shocked at how much explanation and guidance was needed before they could setup and do EFE drills without my help.

Towards the end of the season (leading up to zone championships), I’ll drop the tempo and replace it with longer sprints (100, 150, 200, 250).

I coach HS but consult our MS feeder program. Here’s what has worked for our MS in a situation similar to yours.

-#1 is make it fun. 12-14 year olds will quit or or not put in any effort if it’s military like. To mix it up we often do our accel work from various positions as staggered races and we’ll do shuttle relays instead of straight 50m runs. We play games most Fridays since the Thursday meet has passed and their brains are already in weekend mode.

-Speed work right away. We do speed by the end of the first week since the first meet is 2-3 weeks out. The kids have already been running in other sports and just don’t have high enough output to worry about doing speed work right away.

-Since the season is so short we don’t periodize. We run basically the same weekly set-up from the beginning to end with the volume slowly increasing weekly then tapering the last two weeks for league finals.

-With one meet per week we do 2 tempo days with a short speed and long speed day.

-Typical weekly set-up looks like this:
M- Accel (hills, more hills, med ball, sleds, accels, blocks) & Max V (flys, straight 50’s, etc)
T- Long speed (3-6 reps of 60-150m) & field events (includes hurdles)
W- Tempo (1200-2000m) & field events
Th- Meet
F- Tempo and/or game (anything constant motion) & field events

-A typical day looks like this:
Warm-up/stretch
Drills (arms, high knees, basic A’s, B’s, etc.)
Strides
Sprint workout
Field event work
General strength (abs, BW stuff, gen med ball, hops/skips)
Cool down/stretch

-We teach blocks. The focus is on hills and med balls but we do blocks for the mental advantage (“Why does the girl next to me have blocks and I don’t?”) and for concentration. With standing and 3 point starts the kids are wobbling and fidgeting all over the place, blocks help stabilize them and show them where to place their feet/hands. They still stand up straight after 2 steps but we found it definitely helps.

-We really emphasize relays. First the kids love them because it’s social, shy athletes may not do solo events but find comfort in relays. Second they learn that as a team four decent runners can beat the team with 3 poor runners and the one freaky overdeveloped kid with a mustache who wins everything.