From Athletics Weekly 27 March 2008
JIM DENISON speaks to the coach of world indoor 400m winner Tyler Christopher
CANADIAN sprint coach Kevin Tyler guided two of his athletes to finals at the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, Tyler Christopher and Adam Kunkel in the 400m and 400m hurdles respectively. In addition, Tyler is the director of the Canadian Athletics Coaching Centre
in Edmonton, a legacy of the 2001 World Championships dedicated to athlete development and coach
education. Former editor of The Coach, Jim Denison, who now lives and works in Edmonton as an associate professor in coach education at the University of Alberta, spoke to Tyler on his approach to coaching after Tyler returned from
the World Indoor Championships in Valencia, where Christopher won the gold medal in the 400m.
Perhaps we could begin by you talking a bit about how you got into coaching?
Well, I’ve always been interested in working with young people. My academic background is in criminology and I was working on my PhD in the area of youth violence and criminal legislation for youth. As a result, I was doing a lot of outreach, working with kids that were coming out of corrections and then also working with kids in the community. And that type of work can be very draining on you emotionally.
Then a former coach of mine asked me to look at some of the girls he was working with and I found it extremely rewarding. That’s when I caught the coaching bug, so to speak.
What about your own athletics background?
I ran track my whole life and also played a lot of soccer. I ran 46 seconds in the 400m and 10.65 in 100m.Then I left the sport at about age 22 and got onto the Canadian bobsleigh team and did that for two years. I competed on both the two-man and four-man sleds at the 1988 Olympics.
What would you say has been your biggest influence as a coach?
In Canada there aren’t too many sprint coaches that haven’t been influenced by Charlie Francis’s work. Despite all of the issues around Ben Johnson, there’s some really good training theory there. But also Mike Murray (Philomena Mensah: 60m in 7.02) and George Werth, who was my bobsleigh coach, had strong influences on my thinking.
As a sprint coach in Canada, how open can you be about Charlie Francis’s influence?
Obviously the Ben Johnson affair was a major scandal here, but at the end of the day his training theory is leading-edge. I believe it is at another level relative to where most North American coaches are in the sprints.
What impact does the long, harsh Edmonton winter have on your approach to training sprinters?
If we were in a warmer climate, it would definitely give us more flexibility around our programme. For example, we could work each of the energy systems throughout the year. Also, because we are confined to running on a hard, flat, indoor 200m surface most of the year and can’t access a softer outdoor track or grass, we can’t run everyday. So we do a lot of activity in the gym. We also do a lot of pool work just to unload the athletes’ bodies. But there are always issues to address wherever you coach: it’s a matter of looking at your environment, looking at the athletes you have and then systematically laying out a plan and sticking to the plan - and of course executing that plan in each of the phases. Most people are familiar with Clyde Hart’s successful training system, but that would not work for us, so we have to adapt to our environment.
Can you speak about Tyler in terms of how you have managed to keep him running so consistently and injury-free, particularly in the recent world championship cycle from Helsinki in 2005 to last summer in Osaka and now to gold in Valencia?
Tyler and I began to work together after he failed to make the 2004 Olympics. At that point, he was a 45.3 runner, but he was getting injured three to four times during the summer. When I looked at all of his results from 2004, I noticed he had run 20.50 for 200m and 31.78 for 300m. Those times correlate with a low-44 second performance, so it was clear our No.1 priority in the first year had to be keeping him healthy.
We also spent a great deal of time on mechanics, because some of his injury issues were related to his sprint position. In the first season there would be days when he would come to the track and run 4x30m accelerations with five minutes’rest and that would be it. And if his hamstrings were ever bothering him, I would come up with some alternative exercises to avoid running. But doing that allowed him to progress and build slowly without any setbacks.
Through the whole winter (2005) of our first year together I was quite nervous because we were doing so little volume. But then he ran 44.88 and 44.72 in his first two early-season races, breaking Shane Niemi’s Canadian record. That showed us we could achieve a lot with very little volume. And subsequently, I have continued to build Tyler’s volume slowly and monitor his reactions very closely. As a result,
he has had close to three years now of uninterrupted training. But I wouldn’t be able to keep him healthy on my own. It requires a dialogue between the two of us. Tyler knows his body really well and he won’t do a repetition if he feels he’s going to jeopardise himself. He’s also really good about getting therapy. In fact, we probably have some of the highest therapy bills in all of track and field, but that’s just the way we operate.
How often are you evaluating and changing Tyler’s programme?
Constantly. Even from session to session. For example, no athlete in our programme runs with another athlete unless they’re doing very low volume, low intensity activity. Anything from 30m accelerations to 60m speed work, or special endurance, they do all of it alone. This enables me to notice any problems and then, if I need to change the session, I will.
What are your primary evaluation tools in terms of assessing your athletes’technique and making corrections during a training session?
One thing I do is move around constantly, and look and watch what’s happening from as many different angles as possible. I also write things down, make mental notes and I am constantly thinking of new or better cues to help the athletes learn. As long as I feel an athlete’s not fitting into the technical model that I want to put them into, or what I think they’re capable of executing, I am going to be looking for new ideas. For me, that also involves talking to a lot of other coaches and I am fortunate because through our centre I am in conversation with so many world- class coaches regularly like Dan Pfaff and Derek Evely.
In terms of a technical model for an athlete to meet, is that based on something you’ve seen and you’re trying to reach or is it based on something you’ve imagined and you’re trying to create?
Fundamentally I believe that being in the right mechanical position is essential for an athlete to improve and excel. And I have a picture in my mind of how that should look for each athlete. Of course, this is also based on what the athlete’s starting point is. And from reading the biomechanics literature, I have been influenced by research into ground contact times relative to flight times, and also ideas coming out of functional anatomy and basic physics. All of this has contributed to my thinking along with talking to other coaches and looking at a lot of athletes over the years. Although, what looks right to me from a technical standpoint could be different for another coach. But I think there would be some very basic similarities. For example, with any sprinter you want to reduce ground contact time during maximal velocity sprinting as much as possible. I also believe that arm positioning is huge. The arms drive a lot of what happens in the lower body and of course developing a good strong core that’s stable and can support the requisite postures is very important.
Speaking of strength, how do you incorporate strength work into your training plan?
You know, that’s an area where I’ve probably made a few mistakes in the past. There was a time when I put way too much emphasis on strength. Is there a requisite level of strength that’s required for sprinters? Absolutely. Should you try and improve those strength levels each year? Definitely yes. But one of the disadvantages of being in Canada is that when the weather’s bad it’s very easy to go into the weight room and do a lot of strength work.
So the mistake I made with some of the athletes I coached in the past was to have them do too much strength work, which I think introduced too much tension into their bodies. Also, as Dr Bondarchuk has documented, the transference of strength work is not as high as we like to think, so ultimately it is better to improve strength five to six per cent a year over a number of years with a mature athlete. After all, you are only having your athletes lift to enhance their running. Then it comes down to your approach: do you think that strength should play a general or a specific role in your programme? For us, we definitely favour the general perspective and the strength work is secondary to sprinting. So we definitely have our athletes lift, but I am watching the effects constantly because each athlete reacts differently based on their training age, their experience and their individual make¬up. For example, an athlete that has a very explosive nervous system might get taxed easily in the weight room, which then might compromise what is the No.1 priority in our programme: acceleration and speed development over the winter. If the strength work is starting to interfere with that then I will make the adjustments.
Now with the winter over and an indoor world championship gold medal in the trophy case, what are your plans to have Tyler back in championship form at the end of the summer in Beijing?
Tyler’s victory at the World Indoors was only a test to see where he was at the end of our first period of training. We agreed at the beginning of the season that the Olympics is the priority and that he would only do World Indoors if we felt he was ready to be competitive.
We didn’t alter the training programme at all for the World Indoors. In fact, many would be surprised to know that he only ran over 80m in about three workouts all winter, and that was during our January training camp in Florida. We are both looking forward to the next phase of training, because we know his speed and strength are good right now, and we are about to get into the specific 400m training in a big way. The big take-away from World Indoors was his ability to
compete over three successive days and his level of preparation. I’m convinced he could run high-44 indoors right now on a facility like Birmingham or Fayetteville, so that is a good place to begin outdoor preparation.