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 
Kk many years and conversations have passed since you posted details regarding your GPP and transition, have you reviewed your set up and changed anything?
What would your thoughts be now on this development?
On a more selfish note, what would you set as reasonable targets on the second run through of GPP for an athlete hoping to better and improve on a 47.3 pb? I understand this may not be appropriate to do
A-J not much has changed. I spoke to Charlie about John Smith’s belief that runs of 40sec at race-pace were required and it was Charlie’s belief that there was no need to go beyond the 320m mark as I was using (mostly post GPP & Transition period) because the split runs would cover that area. The main difference now is that I sometimes vary the depletion sets away from always using a long rep (200 to 300m) to build a little acidosis in the blood and tap into muscle glycogen fuel stores before than asking for a back-up rep of relatively high quality. Such as tempo 300m, 30sec rest, 100% 150m sprint. Instead I’ve attacked the opposite end of the fuel route by exhausting the phosphates stores and then asking for a longer rep to complete the set. For example 4-6x80m at moderate pace on 30-45sec recoveries (mostly 30sec is requested) with a 30sec “rest” before sprinting 200m to 300m at 100 %. The 400m sprinters who have done this set says the 200m feels exactly like the second half of a 400m race. Other than that, not much has changed. The results achieved by those who followed the original programme have stood the test of time fairly well, with Darren Clark’s 44.38 and Maree Holland’s 50.24 both in or near medal contention in 2011. But of course elite athletes do a lot more to get themselves ready than follow a programme. They did so much rehab and regeneration work, as much as they could afford (ie, massage, physiotherapy) and they were both meticulous with diet and drink. Over the years I coached Maree she brought her bodyweight down from about 60kg in 1984 to 54kg or just under in 1988. She did not “diet” she was just sensible avoiding fatty foods, sugary items and alcohol etc. Darren’s wife peeled the skin off the chicken she cookede and he ate a lot of balanced salads during 1988.
a-j
I’m not going to be much use to you here. I just tried to get more quality into the second cycle of GPP. The times were recommendations for those particular athletes chasing 50flat and 44-flat objectives. So you need to water those target-times down a notch or three. I found performance improvements came automatically on the second cycle, perhaps becauser it was by now familiar territory and the fear factor had been eliminated to some degree. I mean, you know it’s going to hurt but you also know you’ll walk away and be fine at the end of the week so long as you adhere to the general philosophy of Rest, High Intensity (fastest or toughest session), and on the third day Low Intensity (cardio-vascular development mostly).
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Chirosports chiropractor Jacqui Johnson is seen here at Rotary Field, Sydney, treating James Grimm before training yesterday
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This is Harry Scouller from the NSW south coast near Jervis Bay. He turned 17 this month, he’s more an 800m prospect but comes to our group to develop his 400m. He is now 2nd at NSW all-schools in both 400 and 800. His 400 PB is down from 51 to 49.5.
Wow. Elbow running along the t band… that can not be fun.
Great pictures KitKat.
thanks for posting them.
Haha yeah the elbow gotta hurt massively lol
Kk thanks, I understand the original program has proved it’s place.
I like the idea of the phosphate depletion prior to the SE rep, very good. Would you perhaps multi set that? Repeating the sequence after full recover? In GPP or spp?
Again thank you