I’m a 25-years old track athlete in Europe. I’ve been training more or less seriously ever since 1987 and since last September I’ve been training VERY seriously. My personal bests are: 100m 11,23 / 200m 22,66 / 400m 49,78. This is my current training program: (I do my weight training in the mornings and track work in the evenings)
My weight training consists of squats, leg press, bench press, power cleans, dumbbell curls and single leg curls/extensions. I’m not particularly strong, I bench press about 90 kilos and I’ve never parallel squatted more than 150 kilos.
So is it the lack of strenght that keeps me from running sub 11 seconds? Or is there something wrong with my program?
Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
You may want to start the week off with a true speed session to get things rolling. Your special endurance work, which is on Monday now, should fluctuate in distance over each cycle (sorry if you are doing this). Also, you can drop the 100m from the end of the workout. On Tempo days, you can increase the volume a bit as well as drop the intensity to make sure it is recovery, more about feeling than specific percentages. You could be running into a problem with Tuesday being a lower body weight routine, then Wednesday being plyos followed by speed on Thursday and then legs again on Friday. This is 4 days in a row of stress which should be spread out. You can put upper body work with tempo and lower work with speed. On Thursday, you are spending too much time on block work (if I am reading it correctly, 10 block starts). If you switched Monday to true speed work, then Wednesday could be special endurance work. You can keep the plyometrics in there, as well as they are low enough in volume to get everything going.
Sorry for rambling through my suggestions. Hope this helps.
The thing that jumps out at me about your program is that you have a high intensity/CNS-stressing element in every day of your training program (Monday - Friday) That is, on every day you include either speed work, plyos or weights.
You would do better off making Tuesday and Thursday just tempo and calesthenics for recovery and do the speed, plyos and weight on Mon/Wed/Fri (if you can recover!)
So, for example, you could rearrange something like this:
Monday: Starts/accelerations (<60m, 95-100%) and weights (both upper and lower body) Pick just a handful of big multi-joint exercises. Do the weights after sprinting and if you are fried because of a good track session, don’t sweat it.
Tuesday: tempo (<75%) and calesthenics
Wednesday: Speed endurance runs (full recovery), maybe some plyos and weights (full body)
Thursday: tempo (<75%) and calesthenics
Friday: Speed (flying 10s/20s/30s) and weights again (full body)
Saturday: tempo (<75%) and calesthenics
Note that this is just a sample of what I’m talking about. It can (and should) change based on where you are in the training year and what you are focusing on. For example, speed endurance will have a lower priority for a short sprinter during the winter. However, Charlie’s concept of ‘vertical integration’ means that you should include all training elements throughout the year.
As far as strength levels, that is quite hard to say. First off you didn’t tell us what you weigh and relative strength is more important than absolute strength. Secondly, you raw squat or bench numbers are highly dependent on your specific body levers and morphology. I would simply keep working and attempt to get as strong and powerful as possible while remembering that the focus is first on speed work.
