Sprints! Yahy! I’m going to have a semi-assistance role with the sprints camp, this year. Our new coach has very little experience coaching sprints (jumper) and he said he’d be both willing to work with me to plan a program! I’m very excited (how many times have we heard the EXACT opposite from bedraggled high school athletes?)
Anyway, I haven’t a concrete plan, but if I could get a few choice words of advice from people, that’d help immensely.
Keep in mind I’m trying to make a ‘Cookie cutter’ for about 20-30 sprinters of varying ability. Most around 12.2-13.1
With that ability level in mind, I realize that what will help these sprinters most is their speed endurance. So I have about 13-14 weeks to work with them. I was thinking the first few weeks being mainly focused on tempo work, plyos, and bodyweight stuff.
Speed Endurance: The key in these guys is going to be increasing their race from 30-100m
Acceleration: Not going to need much emphasis, as this isn’t the win/lose part of the race for these kids.
Top speed: Holding it is going to be much more valuable than having a lot more, but worth developing as much as accel.
Special Endurace: Worth a good amount of emphasis, particularly for those runners who’re doing teh 200m, but not so important for the jumpers and 100m runners.
I’ll do a weekly breakdown when I’ve a bit more time.
I’d specifically work on thier conditioning with medicine ball work if you have access to them. Also quite a bit of tempo work (as in days per week relative to speed) but not too much volume - they need to be able to handle it.
You will need to work on acceleration in order to work on speed endurance but you don’t need to give them as long rest breaks between runs as you would a higher level sprinter.
Post some ideas for the progressions you might use.
Ugh! Writing stupid essay and keeping up with homework… this is tough. I’ve whipped out my old E-book CFTS, but a lot of it is geared towards the higher end sprinters. Even the youth references are ment for 10.8-10.3 type sprinters. 12.1-13.x is a different race!
Get their fitness up with med ball and GS circuits on the tempo days. Because they’re not as fast, it doesnt take as much of a toll on their CNS when they sprint. Early on work on hills for up to 40m to reinforce proper angles, and since these are slower runners this will help a lot for acceleration and getting to a faster top speed. If you remember Charlie’s graph, the most improvement can be made in the latter stages of a race with speed endurance. So try and focus on developing the alactic sheer speed they’re going to need to succeed in the future, while at the same time stress the last half of the race and maintaining the sprint position and what speed they already do have in through the finish line.
Hope that helps, and just ask if you need anything more specific, since that was pretty vague.
I also think that should work blocks with them. Most kids won’t probably know the fundamentals of working with blocks and you could work on their early accel by seeing them go 10-40 meters or so out of the blocks.
I would like any advice on my current situation. I am a teacher, football, and track coach at a small high school. My main passion is football, and football is a big deal here, especially compared to track. Our school currently doesn’t have a track - we train on the football fields, gym, and streets. We don’t have spring football so I mostly coach track to work with the athletes in the spring (this sounds pretty bad I know - I do want to do track and the people who like track justice - that is why I am looking for advice). By the same token, most of my athletes come out for track simply to get ready / more athletic for football. I know track speed is not football speed. However I try to train for both football and track speed by working acceleration, light / simple plyos, and sprint speed up to 40 yds with everyone.
In addition to this “football speed” work, we will try to hit the specific qualities that track requires - the longer distances.
I have played with a lot of different plans over the past 3 seasons, but it is hard to gauge our success due to lack of motivation to be good at track by most of the athletes. We have had very good sprinters and long jumpers, but not much success in anything over 200 m. This lack of success in the longer events could be due to talent, motivation, or the coach’s plan.
I would like to try to train the athletes for both track and football the best I can under the circumstances (I pretty much coach the whole team myself - 30 to 40 athletes of varying ability, plus I work out the golfers / non spring sporters 3 times a week in the morning).
My current plan: Work on short sprint speed explosiveness first on MWF (high intensity, low to medium volume) followed by more specific work (100 through 3200 - that is another issue).
On T/TH we would go with tempo / slower distance runs in addition to special events (throwers, HJ, Handoffs, Blocks). The serious distance runners would be encouraged to get another distance run in on the weekend.
Everyone will lift twice a week minimum, a lower body ME lift and an upper body ME lift. A lot of the athletes are in a weightlifting class during the day and lift 3-5 times a week there. I am not sure when the best time to put the ME lower lift would be. They kids lift in the morning, anywhere from 7 to 12. Practice starts at 3:30.
Please critique this vague plan and offer any suggestions.
id just work on their fitness and start them with speed work. i dont think speed endurance will do them any good when they have no speed to build off off. speed endurance will come from meets.
Looks like I’m gona be doing some coaching for my high school. Right now I had to plan a workout for the whole group :eek: but I think later on I’ll be planning workouts for the sprinters.
What I was thinking was the beginning (we have 3 practices a week) I would work tempo one day, speed endurance another and weights another. Then after a couple weeks when fitness levels are high start to focus on speed work instead of tempo and gradually increase the intensity and lower the volume of speed endurance and weights.
Any suggestions would be helpful. I’m working with guys that could be anywhere from 11.8-13.5 and girls that could be anywhere from 13.8-16.0 so I don’t really have a balanced group. I will probably make the workouts slightly specific for some of the more gifted athletes and keep the rest very general.