Intensive tempo

Football28 · February 3, 2010, 4:46pm

As I said, I think max velocity stuff is great, but if you don’t have someone coaching it, it isn’t going to be nearly as good as-if you’re having them coached by people like Charlie and other elite coaches. In itself, the volume is extremely limited and if you aren’t running them with great technique, you’re ingraining even worse technique into the athlete(s). Further, most athletes that are developmental need to get in better shape anyway and flying 20s aren’t going to cut it a lot of times. Nobody runs close to meet speed in practice anyway, so a little bit slower with a lot more volume may have greater effects (especially when ground contacts aren’t completely different) on upright running than doing uncoached flying 20s or whatever else.

I’m not going to say that top speed isn’t important as it is probably the most important part of a training program for short sprinters, but I think the effect of coaching on those runs is quite understated and the physiological effects alone may not be as significant as everyone wants to believe. I think that’s why self-coached athletes or athletes who just have stopwatch coaches don’t get the same effects from doing pure top speed work and get crapped on by guys that do the old school cutdown tempo workouts and the like. Plus, intensive tempo is this ubiquitous term that encompasses different things. If you’re running @ 85-90%, but taking long rests (5 minutes or more) is it intensive tempo? You can probably handle much more volume and run more relaxed @ those speeds and still not have the ‘bad’ effects of what is sometimes called ‘intensive tempo.’

Are you doing those old school workouts?