With all these matters, the issue which invites program structure experimentation is the need to improve front-end race rhythm without damaging (and indeed continuing to enhance) back-end speed. Individual sessions are obviously important but it’s how they are sited within the plan(s) that enables the athlete/swimmer to take what s/he wants from each session - be it pure speed, pure power, speed endurance, power endurance etc. Again, contrast and recovery within the plan are key and so the concurrent structure enables that, imo, better than the traditional long to short (pyramid) or even short to long (inverted pyramid).
I look forward to reviewing the interview you spoke of in a previous post.
As for what you’ve described here, have you given thought to how the needs may be addressed within the block system structure? I ask because, the very premise of its creation hinged upon the need to further intensify the specific needs of the training without continuing to increase the annual load volume and the nature of cyclic disciplines, such as swimming, are highly conducive to its use.
Hi James
I guess it’s all in the implementation. I did use the block process for many seasons. It is what I learned when I sat for the various coaching levels. But even then I was having trouble and in formulating the concurrent method, I was able to get results without changing volume at all. The intensity didnt change either, not for the front-end race sessions. By intertwining the volume cycles with the high intensity cycles we were able to improve speed and endurance concurrently throughout the year and could come up fresh enough on short notice to race reasonably well, even without a taper.
What I mean by “no change to volume or intensity” is that the effort was no greater at any stage of the annual plan. The speed came as specific fitness rose. And you know that especially with the 400m you cannot just go out there like King Kong and bash the race. You lose the elastic response when you get that aggro and tighten up. So that is by way of saying, no, the intensity didn’t change although the time to run sets was reduced as we went along…
Results speak, I appreciate you sharing your experiences in this regard. That said, I’m interested to know your thoughts on why the adaptation response was more directed towards sport improvement when you transitioned from a block system to a concurrent one. Considering the cyclic nature of the sport structure it would follow that the opposite of the situation that you described would have occurred- (ergo the concurrent method would have eventually ceased to provide a significant enough stimulus for the high level athlete to continue to yield positive adaptation and thus a block approach became necessitated in order to provide the necessary stimulus without increasing the annual load volume).
I do, however, fully appreciate the advantage presented by concurrent planning with respect to the need to perform at a high level on short notice; something that someone in the middle of the ‘wrong’ block would be rendered caught with their pants down so to speak.
I would have to review what the actual block system that you used consisted of and compare that against the concurrent one that followed in order to make sense of the situation and I’m certainly not going to ask that you share either one as that is proprietary information. None the less, I appreciate the dialogue.
Hi James,
I have laid out in this thread the processes and structure of the concurrent program as I developed it for my own athletes who trained for the 400m. I am not a sports scientist, nor a professional coach. I could not survive a week on what I’ve ever earned through coaching. To me there has always been something wonderful about the way athletes improve but I have said before and will state it again now I am not sure why they improve. I could put forward some thoughts but I could just as easily be wrong and the athletes improve in spite of the reasons I propose, rather than because of them. I leave it to others to tear the system apart and come up with the reasons it works. But work it does because the results are on the scoreboard. So as Charlie has said, this is a history lesson. If others can improve on it, go right ahead. But it is not a scenario where something was right or wrong. It’s just a little bit of personal history that I went through with several athletes. I say that now to the coaches I mentor. I’m up front and totally honest about my own - no doubt many - deficiencies as a coach.
As for increasing the loading over time to progress year by year: Much of that was organic. The program states that on a given day you try to run 6x200m off 2mins in 23sec or faster. But the athlete may start out being able to jog only between reps 1 & 2. And they may not be able to run more than the first two reps in target. And even then they may have run 23.9sec. But over the course of numerous cycles and seasons, the athletes have built up to the point where Darren Clark, for example, was able to run all 6 reps in 23sec or under (a few were into the mid 22secs) and the recoveries went from walking 2min+ to jogging on average 1min 40sec.
I appreciate your candidness. My first year coaching was the year I joined Charlie’s site (in 03) and I’ve no doubt been through this thread and collected exceptional data from it over the years. I only mentioned my curiosity regarding the swimming program because your reference to initially having employed block system training got me thinking that it may have been something other than what has been discussed here already.
Interesting that you make the 200m repeat reference as this is, on the surface, reminiscent of Clyde Hart’s philosophy; though only at first glance as you’ve already made clear that the loading wasn’t linear which, as an aside, is something that I’m compelled to question about Hart’s programming due to the exceptionally clear argument Charlie provided in reference to the pitfalls of the linear approach in which work capacity is lost over time due to the insufficient volume that exists by the time intensities are high enough to develop race specific speed and, by default of the approach, too much time goes by before the runs are actually fast enough to develop speed.
I agree with you on Hart and yet there is old Clyde with a phenomenally successful set of high end results. Then again he had his pick of some mighty talented sprinters. I’ve met and talked to Clyde a few times. He gave me his home number and I’ve used it. He’s a wonderful guy in my personal experience. Once again, his work and results are a history lesson. Take it or leave it, his system works. But as we have seen in the Beijing Olympic year, it works best when he’s running the show because he is a master of his own methods. He probably does things intuitively as much as work off his own charts.
THIS INTERVIEW IS ULTIMATELY A DISCUSSION ABOUT PROGRAM STRUCTURE, RELEVENT JUST AS MUCH TO ATHLETICS AS TO SWIMMING COACHING…
Inside story of James Magnussen’s success - Q&A with his coach Brant Best
• Mike Hurst
• From:The Daily Telegraph
• September 02, 201112:00AM
Excellent interview and great read kitkat1
Interestingly enough, I found his answers to be much more consistent with block versus concurrent methodology.
- He seems not to include any sort of general organism strength work in the training
- while he shifts emphasis of the cycles (speed, race speed, speed endurance, back end) their seems to be unidirectional, not multi-lateral, focus during any given cycle and the cycles are long enough (3-4weeks) to induce strong adaptations via concentrated loading
- the strength work appears to be very specific and by his own admission, if it doesn’t directly relate he isn’t including it in the training
With respect to duration of the cycles only, there are issues of impact which the swimmers do not need to address, but issues of impulse which are common to both sports/events (100 Free & 400 track) which relate to quality of contact (with the water or track accordingly).
Michael Johnson: 400m Guide
and the 1997 race they refer to
PART 1
BRANT BEST, 39, NSWIS elite swimming coach, is best known for having coached James Magnussen to win the 100m freestyle gold medal and set up victory over the USA in the 4x100 Freestyle Relay at the FINA world swimming championships in Shanghai, China in 2011.
Magnussen clocked 47.6sec which is the fastest time ever swum in a textile swimsuit. Virtually unknown coming into the championships, Magnussen became the first Australian to win the blue riband event at the world titles and the first to win at a major since Michael Wenden in the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games. Magnussen’s coach explains how they did it.
By Mike Hurst
MH: You said you knew James Magnussen had it in him to win the world title. On what basis did you form that view? The quality of his sets in training?
BB: Yes. He’d made enough of a leap forward. I knew what product of training and in our key points that it took to go 48.2sec which is what he did at Trials and before that when he went 48.9. Certain components were adding up to that speed (47.6). The speed he was doing in training was faster than he’d done at Trials.
MH: What do you put that down to? What kind of training processes?
BB: He was technically better. His physio was better. We worked with a physio who is very good and who invested in the team. Dave Pugh at Drummoyne would go out of his way. He’s very good and also very devoted to our squad. He would take it upon his own back to say ‘I want to have a look at this in the water.’ He would look at how we could find some exercises and bash him around a bit in order to get him into the correct type of movement. That enabled me to make some technique changes with him that he wasn’t previously able to make because he wasn’t holding together in the right way. His shape has changed a lot.
MH: So form follows function. You improved the function of the joints and the muscle function as well.
BB: Absolutely.
MH: A couple of weeks out from the world championships you were confronted by every coach’s worst nightmare: illness. This is not a head cold. This is pneumonia. You’ve come through that, obviously with fantastic medical intervention from the Aussie team staff. But he comes up, swims a virtual world record – it was the fastest ever in a textile suit. What do you learn from the fact that he’s had nine days out of the pool? That’s unheard of.
BB: Yes it is. The big issue for me was whether he was going to keep his ‘feel’ for the water. He’s a ‘feely’ kind of athlete. The first thing was , I knew the work we’d done. He had just come off Adelaide where he swam his first real 200m. He had never raced a 200m and at that stage we had not done a lot of work towards the 200m. But he came out and won the Australian shortcourse title. He wasn’t even seeded in the top 30 going into the meet. He had to swim from the slowest heat to get into the final.
So, I knew he had the background. I knew he had the technique. If he was rested I knew he could swim fast. Then it was all about keeping his head together. I just assured him, OK, we’re in taper. You’re going to be resting anyway. You may as well be resting like that. And then we justr got back on the basics as though we’d never left it. I had to find my compass again. It was like someone had picked up my compass and thrown it in the bushes. We had done a few tapers so I know where he is at each point. But (in this instance) I had to coach a lot more than just follow a plan. I had to work out where he was on the watch, how much he could handle without burying him because if I gave him too much I’d make it worse. So keeping his head together was the main thing. Knowing that he had to maintain world class freestyling. He had no buffer to stuff up the race. He had to swim the race well.
He couldn’t muscle up the race and win it. When he tries to muscle it anyway he doesn’t do so well. It was about some good quality freestyle all the time. You can’t afford to swim poorly. You can’t afford to be an Alpha male and bash the shit out of it. “
MH: You’re calling for speed without effort. Take some of the tension out of it and get rewarded with the elastic response.
BB: Exactly right.
MH: Your program structure. Would you describe it as long-to-short, short-to-long or concurrent?
BB: Across the whole macro-cycle? Ooh. That’s a good question. For James we start off with some short stuff, we go into some long, we come out and do some short.
MH: You’re cycling through the work.
BB: Yup. We come up and down, depending also on (the siting of) competitions. But I’ll progressively load on top of a fairly simple base of finding speed early and then progressively load and bring intervals down within that time (cycle). Once he’s found his speed, make things a little bit tougher, let him find his speed (again) and then interfere with that a little bit more. I’ll let him find his race speed again and then we’ll interfere with that again. We’ll just go through the cycles and I’ll just load, and load and load as much as I can on top of the speed that he’s already got established to get to where he wants to get to.
MH: Brant, how long would the cycle last?
BB: I run four weeks at a cycle.
MH: Do you unload before you load him up again?
BB: Yes, yep. It depends on what sought of cycle we’re in. If we’re in a longer, more aerobic cycle with three-and-a-half weeks on and a half-week off. If it’s a more intense cycle we’ll go three and one “off” where we come back to maybe 60 per cent of everything.
MH: Within the cycle of work is there variation? Is there contrast?
BB: Yes, yeah. Front of the cycle is faster stuff, back of the cycle is more back-end (of the race pace).
MH: I love it.
BB: Yeah. It works for him. And James get a chance to swim fast when he’s fresh. Then we’ve just got to try to hold onto that through the back-end. It’s a load of neuro-muscular stuff early and then try to hold onto that as we go more into the back-end stuff.
MH: It’s a concept requiring an understanding of speed endurance as endurance at race speed, or better. But you’ve got to have race speed before you can work on your endurance.
BB: Exactly right.
MH: It’s not the chicken and the egg scenario anymore. That issue has been resolved.
BB: Yeah. Find the race speed and then load it. Load the shit out of it.
PART 2
MH: I love it. It’s what I try to do with 400m track sprinters.
BB: Yep. It sounds like there’s a lot of similarities between what your guys do and what we do in the pool, besides the load runners have to bear which is obviously a completely different issue.
MH: Runners have impact and gravity.
BB: And we are floating, which is a completely different issue.
MH: But your swimmers have a power-endurance issue which is significant. But the time scales are very similar: three-quarters of a minute, give or take a couple of seconds. James swam for 47.6sec and a good time for a male 400m runner is 44sec.
BB: And we’re got a dive start. They break out at four or five seconds. So you take that out and race time/distances are pretty spot-on the same.
MH: Why do we suddenly have a world champion in the men’s 100 free. We’ve never had one. We had Michael Wenden win the 1968 Olympics and we’ve had a few near misses in Michael Klim and Eamonn Sullivan. It’s obvious James is a great athlete, but we’ve had great swimmers before.
BB: I don’t know the differences. I wasn’t involved with Eamonn specifically in that preparation, or Klimmy specifically in that preparation. But we work on James’s composure before we work on his race. In training we’ll work on his race: work on his starts. We’ll do 50 starts, we’ll do 50 first 25 metres. We’ll do thousands of second 25m. We’ll do heaps of back-end, over and over and over again. So I have no doubts he can execute all that. But he needs to be in the frame of mind to get it, so we work on his frame of mind – at the meet. Not necessarily at his race. He knows how to race. He knows his race components. They are so tightly and specifically practised over and over again. He knows how to do that. I just know that he composes himself well enough to go: What I’ve got to do is execute my race well and be in the frame of mind to do it. If I’m in the right frame of mind that I can execute my race to my best then I know at least half the field will get very tense. They’re going to get angry and they’re going to do as Alpha males do and they’re going to get into the contest.
I was reading a good book about ‘emotional intelligence’. They were talking abiout how the IQ just drops away when you get into an emotional state. When you’re angry all the blood goes to your hands and feet because you’ve got to fight. When you’re afraid, blood goes to your legs because you’ve got to run. It goes away from your brain. But if you’re composed or if you’re happy, blood flows to your brain. If you’re not emotionally distracted you’ve got to be in a better state to be more intelligent to execute the way you want to execute. And that’s what we do going into meets, more than we do talking about everything they’ve got to do during a race because they know what they have to do. They know how to do it. They’re racers.
MH: Do you work with a sports psychologist at all?
BB: Just started to. From world champs to Olympics I wanted him to have contact with our sports psych who has just started at NSWIS. They had one or two chats before he went away (to world champs). So that was good.
MH: So that’s value added largely since the world titles.
BB: Pretty much. So James did a couple of sessions before he went to China and I talked to him about some issues, but I really wanted to just introduce that so that we have another part of the team to go to.
This world championships wasn’t about this worlds. This worlds was about London (the Olympic Games in 2012). That was the whole thing, even going into the final. It was: mate, feel the way you want to feel behind the blocks next year at London. Give yourself a practice run. And if you can hold up that against these boys here, you can do it next year and so that’s a good advantage for you. So if you come third and you hold together that’s great. If you lose the plot and come third then we’re no further ahead and in fact we’re probably behind where we want to be next year. Feel the way you want to feel behind the blocks and you’ll execute as well as you can. You’ll give yourself a shot at them.
MH: Are you doing anything different with him. He was always a good finisher was he not.
BB: Yes he was.
MH: So the task was to improve the front end of the race.
BB: The task was to make the front end faster but not to compromise the back end of the race. I didn’t want to throw away his strength for the sake of his weakness. There’s a temptation. A lot of people were telling me: ‘You’ve got to work on his speed.’
We don’t have to work on his speed. Not his top-end speed. We don’t have to work on that at all. A lot of other sprint coaches are working on top-end speed. We just do a lot of practice at race speed and make him faster at race speed, so his easy speed is faster. Not his fast speed is faster. His easy speed had to get faster. We do a lot of easy-speed work , rather than top-end speed. A lot of coaches were saying you’re got to get his top-end speed up. But that’s not the way he swims. He doesn’t even swim with a top-end speed stroke. It’s almost a 200m-type timing. We did a lot of work to make that better and he’s now now a second faster than he was at Trials last year down the first 50m. But his stroke rate and his stroke count are the same.
MH: Kenneth Graham (NSWIS senior sports scientist) came to you last year with a couple of ideas, some depletion sets. On the track it was maybe three or four 60m sprints off a minute and then 30 seconds rest before sprinting a flat-out 200m. The 400m boys said the 200m then felt like the last 200m of a 400m race. They had to run the 200m without any phosphates stores which had been depleted by the explosive set of 60m sprints. They had no nitro to cheat with. Was that concept any use to you?
BB: Love it. Absolutely love it. I love it because it’s short and it’s sharp. I like it a lot physically but I think psychologically for them, they can give it to themselves, give it to themselves and give it to themselves and then go again. And then I can rest them. They can give me 100 per cent on that set, rather than them thinking oh here we go again, he’s just going to bash the shit out of us until we can’t move.
Here’s a set with purpose that we can focus on. It’s short enough, we can try to go fast. Absolutely. Psychologically they can give me effort. Physically it’s very specific to the back-end of the race when they haven’t got anything even neuro-muscularly through the back of the race as much as they haven’t got any phosphate system running. Neuro-muscularly they’ve been stuffed. They’re aerobic system has been screwed because we put them on about 10sec rest before the last 50m.
MH: Similar work I like is the longer rep followed by short reps. It’s a different type of depletion. Have you tried any of that?
BB: I’ve done some of that stuff with turns.
MH: Where to now?
BB: Good question. I don’t think he’s swum a perfect race. He’s swum components of a perfect race and the relay swim was pretty good. He did a pretty good job. But he’s still a fair way from swimming the perfect race. He’s still a fair way from being the perfect swimmer.
So rather than saying, here are our goals, it was kind of a surreal moment at the meet. Everyone was jumping round. It was crazy. And I was so stupidly calm. I wasn’t there in the moment. Instead of jumping up and down I was looking at my watch thinking geez that’s a good swim, he’s done a good job there. He’s put all his components together. And I was happy like that as if we were at the state titles and a 10-year-old had just done a race well. Both the relay and the individual race were like that for me.
It’s not about where do we go, where does he go now. It’s about here’s the parts of the race I think he can do better. Herre’s where I think he can improve. Lets just improve these parts of the race and, if he’s composed enough, he’ll execute under pressure.
PART 3.
MH: So as you have done with your overall programme, you have taken a
modular approach to putting your race plan together.
BB: Yes.
MH: The great thing about that is you’re not a bloody great oil-tanker that
takes three months to turn around. If there’s anything going wrong, you’ll
catch it in one rep and you can make a change instantly. You’re not
encumbered by this massive base that locks you in place. I’ve always thought
swimmers overdid the volume.
BB: Yes, and non-specific volume.
MH: Even at the end of a marathon, you’ve got to be able to sprint. It has
to be part of your physiological and psychological preparation.
BB: You’ve got to be able to ‘go’. Your brain cannot be telling you, ‘holy
shit. This is the first time I’ve done this. I better shut down and go into
protection mode.’ The competitor needs to know, I’ve done this before. I
know it hurts, but I’ve done it before. It’s familiar. I am not going to
shut down because this isn’t familiar. It’s about familiarity as much as
anything we do.
MH: Are the other swimmers in your group responding to this. Are you getting
similar improvements across your group?
BB: Yes. It’s across the group. We had a pretty decent Nationals. Kids kept
on popping up from nowhere. My fly boy who hadn’t made a semi-final before
at Nationals got third in the 100 Fly and he was a 50m boy. He’d get to 35m
and just about stop. A sniper couldn’t stop him as quickly as he’s stop in
the fly. At shortcourse last year he touched equal first at the 25m with
Geoff Huegill. Him and Skippy touched together. And by 50m he was seventh!
He stops. But he got third this year and took 1.7sec off his 100m and got
third. Missed the team by 0.3sec.
So across the board I’m working on similar principles.
MH: You’ve actually given new meaning to the hackneyed word “specificity”.
It’s a byword in coaching, but you’re actually applying specificity.
BB: Doing it as closely as possible. Brian Sutton is incredible with his
specificity and he’s a good head to listen to. And I’ve worked with Scotty
Volkers, Stephan Widmar and Jim Fowlie who are really big on specificity.
If you’re not targeting it, you’re not not doing it. I’ve been really lucky
to work with some of the best coaches in history and just pick their brain.
I just then stuck it together in what I thought was a model that works.
MH: Brilliant. Can you see a ceiling on the 100 Freestyle. Can someone go
sub-47?
BB: It’s definitely possible. If we’re talking about James, it’s just about
how well we can get those processes going. It’s about going out quick easy
and coming home fast. The suit record is 46.9. The suit rewards excess speed
so the guy who holds the record was able to go out like a maniac and he was
able to hang on because the suits stabilizes them through the core and
invites extra speed. At the moment, the harder you go early the more you
die. With the suits the harder you go early it rewards you due to the corset
nature of the suit and how it traps the air and holds you together. Without
the suit, you can lose your core and you just can’t produce force. So 46.9
would be nice but it’s a suit record. About 18 months ago they were saying
it would be 20 years before we can reach these suit times. He’s within a
half a second of it now.
MH: Do you do sit-ups.
BB: No. Oh, there are situps of sorts that we do in the gym but they are
modified a little more specifically to bear load. We’ll do some stuff with a
medicine-ball above the head. I’ve got Michael Hetherington down in the
NSWIS gym who is just brilliant coming up with new things and I’ve got Dave
the physio. If the exercise hasn’t got a purpose we don’t do it. Sit-ups
develop the wrong set of abs for me. I think we need to develop the abs a
little deeper and abs that twist us rather than abs that hold us. We do a
lot of twisting, between the shoulders and the hips. The torque we develop -
we call it a coil - between the shoulders and the hips develops that chain
of power. We can’t do straight situps because that will sit us forward and
we can’t be sitting forward like that in the water because bananas don’t
swim quick.
MH: I would be really chuffed to think any of the ideas I put together for
the Australian 400m record-breaking track sprinters - Darren Clark and Maree
Holland - a quarter of a century ago has relevance to you today.
BB: Absolutely they have. To be able to sit around and have a chat about
those ideas and what you were doing with them and the different
interpretations of how you were using them (the ideas) and comparing that
with how I have been using them is part of the value of NSWIS where people
can walk in and say what are you doing today? And, how did you do this?
To talk to someone who’s doing the same thing. Coaching is an island. You’re
there by yourself and you’re so busy managing it you don’t see outside as
much as you should. So to be able to reflect with someone, even outside
swimming, and say well this is what it does to my athletes, this is how they
feel, just reinforces.
Like, we were doing some of it but to go and have the confidence that we’re
on track and here’s some other ideas around it as well, mate no doubt. And
to talk about your rest cycles and how you put it in, how much rest you put
in between sets . it just ticks the brain over. There’s no doubt
conversations like that is gold to me. So yeah, bring it on, let’s talk
more. "
Follow Mike Hurst on Twitter @mikehurst_aths
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Today 30 October 2011, Darren Clark signed on as one of the mentor coaches for the New South Wales Institute of Sport 400m Fast Track program. Clark, 44, holds the Aussie 400m record of 44.38sec which he clocked in 1988. No other Aussie has ever broken 44.7. After more than a decade out of touch with track and field, the two-time Olympic 400m fourth-placer and 1990 Com Games individual 400m gold medallist is resurrecting his career in the sport. I’m excited about the contribution he can make and those athletes (among others) pictured were thrilled and much the wiser after just their first day with Clark who was one of the most respected 400m sprinters on the world scene from 1983 (when as a 17-year-old he ran 45.05 to beat the US Open champion Mark Rowe to win the first of four British 400m titles) through to 1993 when he split 21.0sec for the first lap and predictably blew up to finish with the bronze medal at the Toronto world indoor championships - his first time on an indoor or banked track.
In this photo Darren is talking with Newcastle podiatry student Ethan Millward, the 400m silver medallist at the 2011 IAAF Oceania Area Championships in Samoa, while Kevin Moore (2010 Delhi Commonweaslth Games 4x400m relay gold medallist) walks ahead of them catching his breath.
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Left to right: James Grimm, Kevin Moore, Darren Clark, Ethan Millward and Matt Lynch - all squad members of the NSWIS 400m Fast Track project. The photos were all snapped today by moi.
This photo is deceptive. James Grimm from Wollongong leads a 300m in 33.0 from Kevin Moore of Gosford area, but Kevin had run a solid 350m 8mins earlier as the first rep of a long ladder with declining recoveries. Grimmy did not run that 350 and was fresh for the 300m which accounts for his margin over Moore who still ran 34.0 for this 300m, with a 200, 150 and 250 to follow.
Great pics KK and good to see Darren involved, I am sure everyone will benefit from having him there. You must be working them pretty hard as not a lot of fat to be seen 