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