Where can i download this graph?
I find interesting your anecdote about Drechsler. What you say about the choice of the lifts for taper confirms what knew, their Bench Press numbers were too low to get any decent stimulus from it.
On the other hand, Bench Press may be use efficiently for women like Block or Sturrup because their upper body capacity for lifts/body weight matches men’s ?
Somehow we Always “managed” to deliver a PB on schedule 10 to 12 days out from the first round of the major tournament of the year.
I use the word “manage” advisedly because, as I’ve written earlier on this thread, weightlifting was never a big priority for me in coaching 400m people. So to give a psychological boost by proving to the athlete s/he was strongest when s/he most needed to be was fairly easy to manipulate since I just held the athlete back doing solid poundage without really ever pushing it in the way I would save for the major taper(s). Maybe we were just lucky, but we definitely did try for a PB every taper - which afterall was only twice a year mostly (domestic selection trial/national title and then the international tournament of that year)
I think the tapering period is the most likely to bring a PB in the weights room “out of nowhere”. The overall load/volume is reduced during the maintenance phase, which keeps your body in top condition -even your mind.
Additionally, at least for the short sprints, the high(est) level of speed work achieved at this point can easily transfer in the gym -rather than the other way round, as Charlie has pointed it out elsewhere.
It’s a combination of things, I suppose, but it happens quite often.
Others with such experiences?
Ten days out is ideal for the muscles and is safe, as you could recover from a minor issue in time, but you need the stimulus in much closer to prime the nervous system for the 100m. This encroaches beyond the 10 day safe zone, where speed work becomes sub-maximal beyond 30m and high stimulus is needed from a safer modality, such as weights.
:eek: Hey, hey, hey Charlie . . . there you go again - sneaking your 100m ALACTIC info into the LACTIC thread. But we’re awake to your fiendish plot. It’s all “burn baby, burn” over here! 
Hey! I was just answering a weights question! Last time I ran a 400 for “real” was 1970 and I’m still trying to get over the burn!
Talking about tapering -
I have used Charlie’s 10 day taper prog with success in the past - for my 100/200m athletes. How do you adapt that for 400m athletes, kitkat? What did you do with your athletes? An entirely different prog?
hi sprint coach
I actually don’t know the details of Charlie’s 10-day taper. I just took his simple but wise advice once about staying away from the lactic during that taper period and found it worked like a miracle for my 400 people. That and the gym PB 10 days out . . .
I do the rest “by eye”, looking for rhythm and flow. By then I don’t usually have to talk about mechanics. I also tend to drop all the drills because they can tend to make some athletes a bit “mechanical” which acts a bit against the highest form of rhythm
KitKat has discussed this in a few threads in the Archieves - I think some of them I started. Try searching “taper” and “400”. Essentially the stimulus session is a 300m and then a similar thing to CF but with a rhythm day the day before the meet. I’ll find a link when I have more time.
TC
Thankyou TC 
. . . I might be suffering “oldtimer’s disease” 
but had clean forgotten about anything I posted pre-“lactate threshold” thread.
2 years ago my coach plannend the next 10 day programm before the natioal champs.
my season started out with a 53.35(400 hurdles)
on the nationals i had 2 races on 1 day(2 hours between races)
my times were 51,90(pb) heats and 51.60(pb) in finals.
also my trraining partner followed the same programm for 10 days, he rane a 51.42.
also our pb’s
this is what we did, maybe you can use it on your 400m taper.
0 2x3x200 r1,5’-10’ come home speed
1 rest
2 1x 7 hurdles from block + 2x100 tempo(11,7) long break
3 rest
4 20 min run steady (heart rate +/-140)
5 2x6 hurdles from the block 15’break
6 rest
7 easy warm up 1x200 then sonme jumps/hops
8 rest
9 tempo(slow paced)
10 rest
comp day 2x400H
WHAT would I do without all the assistance that I get from the Forum!!! I’ll wait for your response. Thank you very much!
sprint coach, this came from a question by Mr C on tapering for a 300m hurdles race (from memory). Anyway this has been retrieved from CF Forum Archives…
I have a preference for a taper pattern like this:
Counting backwards from the day of the first big Race:
1: MAJOR RACE
2: Race Modelling in the rhythm of your race, but without generating lactic acid.
3: Rest Day
4: Race Modelling (as on the penultimate day, for rhythm). Unless you’re racing 400m over rounds or you have a huge block of races AND you’re coming into the taper off a huge amount of training over many months. If the latter describes your situation, then you can contemplate having day 4 as the first of two Rest Days.
5: This is your last chance to blow out the cobwebs, hit maybe two reps with full recovery from a rolling start and working at 99 per cent, so as not to generate much lactic acid. So if you’re running 400m (or 300m HUrdles) you may do a couple of 200m runs (or maybe first six intermediate hurdles) . Maybe one is fast tempo, the other (45mins later?) might be very quick but while consciously avoiding tension in shoulder, neck etc.
6: Warm-up and warm-down, Race modelling, meaning for 400m (or 300m Hurdles) you might want to rehearse entering and exiting the bends from a rolling start, working for no further than 150m. You may restrict your reps (not including normal race warmup)
7: Work the first two or three barriers in the 110m hurdles.
8: Rest Day (Massage, physio, chiropractor, walk and relax)
9: Race Model for Hurdles, working sections of the 300m Hurdles race, so maybe first four hurdles a couple of times at 99% race rhythm, then a couple of runs over the last four barriers. All with full recovery, done for technique, rhythm and relaxation.
10: Perhaps a 99 per cent effort single run over 300m on the flat: a virtual time trial but done without “muscling” the run.
11: Warm-up and warm-down.
12: Rest.
Maybe you could place your prelim race commitment on a 99% effort type day and fit your major championship day(s) into a template a bit like this. kk
Quote:
Originally Posted by tc0710
KitKat,
For a 400m specalist what would be a good example of the “stimulus” session 10 days before the big meet?
CF uses something like:
4x30 blocks, 80, 100, 120, 150 with big recoveries for 100m.
How would this change for 400m?
Thanks,
TC
TC, the answer to your question is in the previous post. If you look at 10: it’s a 300m at 99% with the “time” coming (hopefully) through an aggressive acceleration followed by good mechanics, rhythm and relaxation. So it’s basically a 300 time-trial. But on other occasions we’ve done just a couple of 200m sprints, one in the rhythm of the race (first 200m of the 400m) and the other being faster than that (up to 45mins recovery between the two runs).
I’ve sometimes found that someone can be in great shape for 400m but may be stuck in roughly the same rhythm for 200m.
For example: An elite male ran mid-44 but could clock “only” 20.8 off the blocks for 200m.
Yet the same athlete could run sub-32 off the blocks for 300m which is certainly a better indication of his readiness (of how successful the taper turned out).
You would probably agree that given those indices, something went slightly wrong in the preparation or taper, but it was hardly a disaster. Perhaps there needed to have been a bit more neural activation in the training of distances 200m or shorter to have avoided the dynamic stereotype apparent in his 200m race time of “only” 20.8.
The capacity to go sub-32 for 300m but “only” mid-44 also suggests some extra work was needed to help him finish the last 50m of his 400m race. On the other hand, it is difficult to know how much the rounds take out of a speed-based 400m sprinter. I never prepared an athlete for grand prix-style one-off racing. Always had a tournament as the focus of our preparation.
kk
kk
so if you used a 12 day taper, when was the last actual 400m race that your athletes had before the first round of comm or olympic games.
and did it differ when and if any were chasing qualifying times during the domestic season…
Thankyou,
I’ll have to check the logs and get back on that. kk
More questions for you kk!
I was wondering what your rationale was for the 2x2x360m hill with jog back/45 min recs in gpp…more so the reason for these recoveries?
What do you think the difference would be in doing this type of session v doing 4x360m hill with 15 mins rec?
Another question: when are you setting up www.kitkat.com? 
You’ll be sorry you asked
Rationale: the 360m distance on about a 12-15-degree angle up a grass hill took about 46sec for my best male 400m sprinter and about 52sec for my best female 400m athlete.
I settled on these distances through quick process of trial. I wanted to do some training “over time” rather than “over distance”.
I also wanted to do some specific leg power-endurance training while hitting the cardio-vascular system and in so doing further develop the “flush-and-feed” vascular network, particularly in the legs.
Early in the GPP, however, the athletes did not achieve such times for 360m hill. Top male would sometimes fail to break 60sec and top female out around 70sec after returning from a rest phase.
So it was decided by consensus with these two particular athletes, for whom I had great respect, that perhaps it would be best to run a pair of hills with a slow jog back down recovery.
This was in some way to salve the conscience, knowing that many of their opponents were running massive fartlek (“speed-play”) sessions, and/or running reps of 1000m or rep 600ms etc.
But the effort of putting two hills back-to-back at quite high intensity was severe. Therefore it was not possible to sustain quality for a third rep, so the set was left as a two-rep set.
It was found that during the GPP phase the athletes were pretty well recovered and ready to go for a second set after about 45 minutes.
So we added the second set. Sometimes the athlete could manage only the first rep, but then at other times the second rep of the second set would turn out to be the fastest of the session. This fact tended to encourage us all to implement the second set from the first cycle of GPP.
By the second cycle of the second GPP (prior to the European summer season) and - after a couple of years - often even during the second cycle of the first GPP (post Euro circuit) these two fine athletes (and others to follow in the years to come) were recording pulse readings of under 130-beats per minute just 60seconds after cessation of sprinting to the top of the hill on each of the backup reps.
If I posted 15mins between sets for the long hills, as you write, I apologise. It may have occurred sometimes (rarely) when using shortened distances for the backup rep (as we came into pre-season phase).
OH, I just re-read your post. What about doing 4x360 with 15MIN recovery? If the quality of your reps didn’t suffer (due to loss of form and fatigue in general) you could do that instead of 2x2x360 with jog/&45min.
Maybe your proposed session would be superior. Try it and report back. Better still try both versions in different cycles and share your intuitions about their relative benefits.
But after success with my setup I decided not to try to fix what obviously was not broken.
As a coach I defy anyone to categorically prove which of the hundreds of elements that go into a program for an athlete to achieve world class performances year after year are primarily responsible for that excellence and which are inconsequential. When your top guy goes 44-low and top girl goes 50-low off the same program in the same year then you’re going to be fairly brave to change much of what you’ve done to that point. The changes I did make in the years which followed did not involve the structure of the hills session. I liked the severity of 360H+360H jog recovery. I felt that being able to complete that set left the athletes with no fear of the 400m distance or anyone else who raced it.
In general, the recovery between sets on such tough training was complete, or as full as reasonable without the athlete needing to go through another extensive warmup. However there was always a brief warmup before the second set.
I don’t really know if that answers your question, but it’s about as precise as I can be given that a lot of this work was derived “in the field” over time with some world top8 400m runners as “guinea pigs” [and a total lack of financial resources (and in the pre internet era) preventing us from tapping into successful and mostly highly secretive 400m programs from around the globe].
So we came up with our own plan. I can assure you any resemblance to any other program (with the exception of the 6x200 in 23sec with 200m jog recoveries which was swiped from Lee Evans) is purely coincidental. Either that, or it was nicked from us.
As for setting up an alternate website . . . when do we start? …just kidding Chuck.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer kk.
Yes, I think it’s a futile road to take in trying to figure out what one component makes the biggest difference in 400m training…as you say it’s more to do with the complex mixing and timing of all components alongside the skill of the coach.
My reason for suggesting the 4x360 with 15 mins recovery was that you might get a faster average time for the 4 reps within the 45 minute (+jog recoveries) window…but then again that mightn’t be the point of the session or it mightn’t be even possible…
Only one way to find out though :eek:
Yeah, I’ll get working on the template for the website 
Time to put el Chucko out of business …only joking
Alternative web site KK? Why bother when you can take over this one! Besides, I did a domain name search and “Deprived of Oxygen for Prolonged Periods.com” is already taken!
kk
think the score after that comment is 1 nil to charlie…
any answer to my previous question about when you had their last big race before 1st round of comm or olympic games?
or for example now if you had someone chasing a time how many races would you put them through for the domestic season.
i am amazed here right now that some of our female 400m runners seem to be running a 400 every weekend or even midweek on top of this in an attempt to run a qual time.