Hey KK,
I would also like to hear sprint coaches,and Charlies opinion on this.
I asked this once,but I dont know if anyone saw this.
DAROLD WILLIAMSON has a personal best of 44.27. And Wariner has a PB of 43.93.
Without the footspeed of Wariner,will Williamson ever be able to catch up or be on the same level as Wariner?If so,what changes and measures would he need to take in his training to do that and if he were your athlete,what would you guys do to close the gap?
This kind of speculation is nothing I’d care to go into, which is why I ignored it when this came up before.
I wouldn’t work like that. I work only with the athlete before me. I don’t think at all about his opponents.
I work to make the individual in front of me the best all-round 400m competitor that I can. That means giving focus to all the performance threads, working on endurance if it’s lacking while working on speed in the belief that it can yet be enhanced.
Since I know nothing of the training history of either of the sprinters you’ve mentioned, I don’t feel competent to speculate on the answer other than in the broadest sense which is to say, yes, everyone can find ways to improve. kk
Just thought I would cut and paste this cause it moved me.
…
“everyone can find ways to improve.”
-kk-
KK,
I have a few questions re weeks 4 & 5 of GPP that I can’t find answers to 
Day 3.
300+60,50,40,30; 200+60,50,40,30; 150+60,50,40,30 (30sec rest between long rep and first short rep)
Walback between reps & full recovery between sets?
With the field circuit on Day 4 is this what you mean?
I’d be thinking to throw in a circuit as well which could integrate a grid on a grassy field with various stations along the sidelines and do situps, pushups, star-jumps whatever, with skips or bunny hops, or backwards running, whatever to get from station to station.
You state 6mins, is that 1 x 6 mins continuous? So work out is warm up 6 min field circuit and warm down?
You also state No weights, is that correct? That means only one weights day each of those weeks.
Hi John
Regards the sprints, can you describe the session. I don’t have my stuff with me. Is it the long rep followed by a sequence of short reps? Like 300+4x60m?
If so, then it’s 30seconds between the long and first short rep. Then it’s walk back after each subsequent short rep, turnaround and pretty much go.
Between sets it’s usually a walk lap, but you can sit down and take more time if you need it. I’m mainly concerned for intensity in the actually running sets.
with the grid session, it’s usually 2 x 1 x circuit lasting up to 10 minutes depending on how well you get through the circuit. Somewhere on the thread I have outlined the circuit, on a grass field the area of a football field. It’s pretty crude and there’s zero finesse about the session but it’s a bitch. I like it because it adds a tough of the ruggedness footballers bring to the track which I think makes them dangerous competitors. There’s nothing precious about them. They just do it.
I’ve had athletes dip under 6mins, but they are super fit, pretty elite - either that or they cut corners everywhere, or cut reps, or they’re pure endurance monsters without much potential for the 400m sprint.
oh yeah the circuit is timed, then it can take from 15min to 45mins to recover before doing the circuit a second time. That’s the session.
It’s a fierce total-body workout with a high degree of muscle fatigue due to the numbers of reps and the race to perform them against the clock. You do not want to be doing a weights session after this. It would be like doing two weights sessions on the same day, maybe great for bodybuilders but for sprinters it will mess up the rest of your week.
kk
KK,
the sprint session is
Day 3.
300+60,50,40,30; 200+60,50,40,30; 150+60,50,40,30 (30sec rest between long rep and first short rep) .
the only reference I could find to a field circuit was
I’d be thinking to throw in a circuit as well which could integrate a grid on a grassy field with various stations along the sidelines and do situps, pushups, star-jumps whatever, with skips or bunny hops, or backwards running, whatever to get from station to station.
is this what you mean?
If not I’ll keep searching…
Fully understand what you mean re a double whammy if doing a weights session. Your expalanation of
It’s pretty crude and there’s zero finesse about the session but it’s a bitch. I like it because it adds a tough of the ruggedness footballers bring to the track which I think makes them dangerous competitors. There’s nothing precious about them. They just do it. puts it in context.
KK,
Please bear with me as I am a bit confused.
You state above
Is it the long rep followed by a sequence of short reps? Like 300+4x60m?
If so, then it’s 30seconds between the long and first short rep. Then it’s walk back after each subsequent short rep, turnaround and pretty much go.
Between sets it’s usually a walk lap, but you can sit down and take more time if you need it. I’m mainly concerned for intensity in the actually running sets.
As the session is 300+60,50,40,30; 200+60,50,40,30; 150+60,50,40,30 (30sec rest between long rep and first short rep) then I would take it as a walk lap (or slightly longer) between sets so long as there is sufficient recovery for a high intensity effort for the next set.
Yet earlier in the thread this is provided
also for the “300+60,50,40,30; 200+60,50,40,30; 150+60,50,40,30” which seems sort alike, so I assume the same sort of breaks will be applied here. Only what are the breaks you’re working with? full recovery or not?
[i]In the sessions you have listed, there is a 30 seconds rest between the finish of the long repetition and the start of the first short rep in each set (eg: between the 300 and the 60 there is 30sec rest.)
Then after the 60, all the subsequent recoveries are with a relaxed walk back.
So that would be 300m, then 30sec rest, then 60m (standing or more usually rolling start), then a 50m walk back to a marker cone situated 50m to the finish line, sprint that 50m, then walk back 40m, turnaround and sprint from the 40m cone to the finish line.
All the short reps are marked out before the session starts and all finish at the same line. I always try to line up the short sprints to run with an assisting wind.
Between the sets you take what time you need to recover to a level that will allow you to put in just as much energy as you applied during the entire first set. The recoveries between sets may be 10minutes to 20 minutes or they may be a bit more.
As you get faster in the reps, you will probably need longer to recover between the sets, although when you become fitter and can tolerate the extra speed, the recovery periods may come back in duration.[/i]
Which gives 10 to 20 minutes or maybe longer.
I know this may seem pedantic but there is a significant difference between a walk lap recovery and up to 20 minutes. 
Hi John,
I’m just adding some flexibility into the session, mainly to make allowances for the level of fitness of the individual trying to get through this session, and for the stage of the yearrly timeline.
If you are doing this for the first time in your first GPP, then I would take as long as you like between sets. If you are pushing for general endurance, then keep the recovery between sets to a lap walk.
If you are putting a very high level of quality into each rep, chances are you will need longer between the sets to help you reproduce the same quality in successive reps/sets.
It’s nothing to get hung up about. Make the session fit your state of readiness - ALWAYS. Nothing is set in stone, introduce elements to your needs and in that way make the program unique to you. It cannot succeed any other way.
good luck tonight (at the track I mean 
)
KK,
thanks for your prompt response and patience.
Amazingly, people have called me pedantic :eek:
THIS ARTICLE OR PERHAPS ONE LIKE IT GOT A RUN SOMEWHERE ON THE FORUM, BUT I THOUGHT MAYBE THIS WAS WORTH TOSSING ONTO THE LACTATE THRESHOLD THREAD kk
Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles’ Foe, It’s Fuel
By GINA KOLATA
Published: May 16, 2006
Everyone who has even thought about exercising has heard the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your muscles tire and give out.
Skip to next paragraph
Ben Stansall/European Pressphoto Agency
Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their “lactic threshold,” that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.
But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.
The notion that lactic acid was bad took hold more than a century ago, said George A. Brooks, a professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. It stuck because it seemed to make so much sense.
“It’s one of the classic mistakes in the history of science,” Dr. Brooks said.
Its origins lie in a study by a Nobel laureate, Otto Meyerhof, who in the early years of the 20th century cut a frog in half and put its bottom half in a jar. The frog’s muscles had no circulation — no source of oxygen or energy.
Dr. Myerhoff gave the frog’s leg electric shocks to make the muscles contract, but after a few twitches, the muscles stopped moving. Then, when Dr. Myerhoff examined the muscles, he discovered that they were bathed in lactic acid.
A theory was born. Lack of oxygen to muscles leads to lactic acid, leads to fatigue.
Athletes were told that they should spend most of their effort exercising aerobically, using glucose as a fuel. If they tried to spend too much time exercising harder, in the anaerobic zone, they were told, they would pay a price, that lactic acid would accumulate in the muscles, forcing them to stop.
Few scientists questioned this view, Dr. Brooks said. But, he said, he became interested in it in the 1960’s, when he was running track at Queens College and his coach told him that his performance was limited by a buildup of lactic acid.
When he graduated and began working on a Ph.D. in exercise physiology, he decided to study the lactic acid hypothesis for his dissertation.
“I gave rats radioactive lactic acid, and I found that they burned it faster than anything else I could give them,” Dr. Brooks said.
It looked as if lactic acid was there for a reason. It was a source of energy.
Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70’s. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.
“I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,” Dr. Brooks recalled. But he soldiered on, conducting more elaborate studies with rats and, years later, moving on to humans. Every time, with every study, his results were consistent with his radical idea.
Eventually, other researchers confirmed the work. And gradually, the thinking among exercise physiologists began to change.
“The evidence has continued to mount,” said L. Bruce Gladden, a professor of health and human performance at Auburn University. “It became clear that it is not so simple as to say, Lactic acid is a bad thing and it causes fatigue.”
As for the idea that lactic acid causes muscle soreness, Dr. Gladden said, that never made sense.
“Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise,” he said. “You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent, and the mechanisms have not been found.”
The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.
Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass.
It is clear that the old lactic acid theory cannot explain what is happening to muscles, Dr. Brooks and others said.
Yet, Dr. Brooks said, even though coaches often believed in the myth of the lactic acid threshold, they ended up training athletes in the best way possible to increase their mitochondria. “Coaches have understood things the scientists didn’t,” he said.
Through trial and error, coaches learned that athletic performance improved when athletes worked on endurance, running longer and longer distances, for example.
That, it turns out, increased the mass of their muscle mitochondria, letting them burn more lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer.
Just before a race, coaches often tell athletes to train very hard in brief spurts.
That extra stress increases the mitochondria mass even more, Dr. Brooks said, and is the reason for improved performance.
And the scientists?
They took much longer to figure it out.
"They said, ‘You’re anaerobic, you need more oxygen,’ " Dr. Brooks said. “The scientists were stuck in 1920.”
I think what this basic article does not address is that there are variable degrees of intensity, particularly evident to anyone who has tried to sprint the events from 100m through to 400m.
How we introduce exposure to lactic acid - 400m sprinters certainly can never avoid it and I have always confronted it, if not actually embraced it - is the trick to enabling an athlete to run a fast 400m without killing him/her body/mind somewhere along the route.
The online article can be found here:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/04/19_lactate.shtml
BERKELEY – In the lore of marathoners and extreme athletes, lactic acid is poison, a waste product that builds up in the muscles and leads to muscle fatigue, reduced performance and pain.
Some 30 years of research at the University of California, Berkeley, however, tells a different story: Lactic acid can be your friend.
A student volunteers does interval training for a study of lactate metabolism during intense exercise. (George Brooks photo)
Coaches and athletes don’t realize it, says exercise physiologist George Brooks, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, but endurance training teaches the body to efficiently use lactic acid as a source of fuel on par with the carbohydrates stored in muscle tissue and the sugar in blood. Efficient use of lactic acid, or lactate, not only prevents lactate build-up, but ekes out more energy from the body’s fuel.
In a paper in press for the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism, published online in January, Brooks and colleagues Takeshi Hashimoto and Rajaa Hussien in UC Berkeley’s Exercise Physiology Laboratory add one of the last puzzle pieces to the lactate story and also link for the first time two metabolic cycles - oxygen-based aerobic metabolism and oxygen-free anaerobic metabolism - previously thought distinct.
“This is a fundamental change in how people think about metabolism,” Brooks said. “This shows us how lactate is the link between oxidative and glycolytic, or anaerobic, metabolism.”
He and his UC Berkeley colleagues found that muscle cells use carbohydrates anaerobically for energy, producing lactate as a byproduct, but then burn the lactate with oxygen to create far more energy. The first process, called the glycolytic pathway, dominates during normal exertion, and the lactate seeps out of the muscle cells into the blood to be used elsewhere. During intense exercise, however, the second ramps up to oxidatively remove the rapidly accumulating lactate and create more energy.
Training helps people get rid of the lactic acid before it can build to the point where it causes muscle fatigue, and at the cellular level, Brooks said, training means growing the mitochondria in muscle cells. The mitochondria - often called the powerhouse of the cell - is where lactate is burned for energy.
“The world’s best athletes stay competitive by interval training,” Brooks said, referring to repeated short, but intense, bouts of exercise. “The intense exercise generates big lactate loads, and the body adapts by building up mitochondria to clear lactic acid quickly. If you use it up, it doesn’t accumulate.”
To move, muscles need energy in the form of ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Most people think glucose, a sugar, supplies this energy, but during intense exercise, it’s too little and too slow as an energy source, forcing muscles to rely on glycogen, a carbohydrate stored inside muscle cells. For both fuels, the basic chemical reactions producing ATP and generating lactate comprise the glycolytic pathway, often called anaerobic metabolism because no oxygen is needed. This pathway was thought to be separate from the oxygen-based oxidative pathway, sometimes called aerobic metabolism, used to burn lactate and other fuels in the body’s tissues.
Experiments with dead frogs in the 1920s seemed to show that lactate build-up eventually causes muscles to stop working. But Brooks in the 1980s and '90s showed that in living, breathing animals, the lactate moves out of muscle cells into the blood and travels to various organs, including the liver, where it is burned with oxygen to make ATP. The heart even prefers lactate as a fuel, Brooks found.
Brooks always suspected, however, that the muscle cell itself could reuse lactate, and in experiments over the past 10 years he found evidence that lactate is burned inside the mitochondria, an interconnected network of tubes, like a plumbing system, that reaches throughout the cell cytoplasm.
In 1999, for example, he showed that endurance training reduces blood levels of lactate, even while cells continue to produce the same amount of lactate. This implied that, somehow, cells adapt during training to put out less waste product. He postulated an “intracellular lactate shuttle” that transports lactate from the cytoplasm, where lactate is produced, through the mitochondrial membrane into the interior of the mitochondria, where lactate is burned. In 2000, he showed that endurance training increased the number of lactate transporter molecules in mitochondria, evidently to speed uptake of lactate from the cytoplasm into the mitochondria for burning.
The new paper and a second paper to appear soon finally provide direct evidence for the hypothesized connection between the transporter molecules - the lactate shuttle - and the enzymes that burn lactate. In fact, the cellular mitochondrial network, or reticulum, has a complex of proteins that allow the uptake and oxidation, or burning, of lactic acid.
“This experiment is the clincher, proving that lactate is the link between glycolytic metabolism, which breaks down carbohydrates, and oxidative metabolism, which uses oxygen to break down various fuels,” Brooks said.
Post-doctoral researcher Takeshi Hashimoto and staff research associate Rajaa Hussien established this by labeling and showing colocalization of three critical pieces of the lactate pathway: the lactate transporter protein; the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase, which catalyzes the first step in the conversion of lactate into energy; and mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, the protein complex where oxygen is used. Peering at skeletal muscle cells through a confocal microscope, the two scientists saw these proteins sitting together inside the mitochondria, attached to the mitochondrial membrane, proving that the “intracellular lactate shuttle” is directly connected to the enzymes in the mitochondria that burn lactate with oxygen.
“Our findings can help athletes and trainers design training regimens and also avoid overtraining, which can kill muscle cells,” Brooks said. “Athletes may instinctively train in a way that builds up mitochondria, but if you never know the mechanism, you never know whether what you do is the right thing. These discoveries reshape fundamental thinking on the organization, function and regulation of major pathways of metabolism.”
Brooks’ research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Thanks Speedman, a much fuller dissertation on the topic.
But from my comparative longevity in the sport the notion that lactic acid is recycled to produce, if you like, a second burst of energy is nothing new. I sat advanced coaching exams in 1985 at which our exercise physiology lecturer ( who worked at CAPRI - cardiac and pulmonary research institute in Washington State) stressed this point.
Maybe it was then just a theory and this new paper proves the theory?
Anyway, I don’t know really how it will change coaching practice for the sprints - other than to have a few nutters try to drown their poor proteges in an ocean of lactic acid thinking that More Is Better, when it almost Never Is.
The main point I would have taken out of the research is that it helps to back up what a number of successful 400m coaches have intuitively thought for years: That a certain amount of “aerobic” work (e.g. 3x3x300m) at different stages is required to help lactic acid buffering capacity for the 400m rather than trying to produce huge levels of lactic acid every time an ‘endurance’ session arises??
Maybe I’m way off the mark here :o
extract taken from Better training for distance runners
If insufficient O2 is available for complete fuel breakdown, a small amount of energy can be released wtih glucose conversion to an intermediate substance, pyruvic acid. In turn, pyruvic acid can be converted into lactic acid. Both of these reactions occur in the cytoplasm, with no involvement of mitochondria. In contrast, no such anaerobic energy release is possible with fatty acids, their stored energy can be accessed only when they are completely broken down. Under physiological conditions the lactic acid produced from anaerobic carbohydrated metabolism dissociates almost immediately and completely into lactate ions (Lac-) and hydrogen ions (H+) . The same is true for a large number of other metabolic acids that we will encounter in fuel metabolism. It is accepted biochemical jargon to refer to these acids by the name of their negative ion, for example. Lactate (Lac-) for lactic acid or oxalacetate for oxalacetic acid. We will use this convention here as well.
A summary equation for the anaerobic conversion of glucose to lactate is given in the following equation
C6H12O6 ---- 2ATP + 2 Lactic acid ==== 2H+ & 2 Lac-
Equation for aerobic breakdown of a carb such as glucose rusults in enormous amounts of energy, as shown
C6H1206 + 6O2 ----- 6CO2 + 6H2O + 36 ATP
Comparing the two, we can see that anaerobic metabolism provides only 1/18 about 5.5% as much energy as aerobic metabolism, 2ATP as compared to 36ATP ) Thus, anaerobic fuel metabolsim is extremely substrated costly, meaning that large amounts of glucose are consumed with minimal energy return. Also, the rapid accumulation of H+ ions as a result of lactic acid dissociation eventually inhibits eth enzymatic breakdown sequence. The enzymes involved in fuel breakdown operate best within a specific narrow rance of acidity. ie, the number of H+ ions.
ThanksBoldWarrior,
Without flooding me with H+ ions 
do you have anything on the adaptation process, especially as you may interpret it’s relevance to conditioning for the 400m? kk 
KK,
Can you take us through a race of a 400 runner if properly executed?How should they feel at certain points of the race(60,150,200,etc)?What is the mental mind set at certain points of the race and keys to remember while racing?Things of that nature to help understand the race more…
ok can someone dumb this down just a tadbit. The main thing i guess im looking for in this great thread is how TRULY beneficial is the lactic to anaerobic training (100m sprints, 60m sprints etc) can running on a bike or elliptical, doing tempo improve top speed performance a tadbit or is it ALL in speed endurnace the last 40m? You can explain this in complex terms i will pick up on the jargon.
I’m pretty sure it’s on this thread already, with attention to mechanics considerations into and out of the turns, leftside tall, triple extension maintained through the turns etc
Although the Lac- portion of lactic acid can be used by many tissues as a fuel, the inhibitory effects of the H+ ion on its meabolism must be minimized. One substance that minimizes the influence of H+ ions in this regard is sodium bicarbonate (NaHCo3). This substance circulates in the bloodstream and also is in the interstitial fluid that bathes cells.
Na+ & HCo3- & H+ & Lac- ===== NaLactate & H2Co3 === H2o & Co2
this equation illustrates the socalled buffer action of NaHco3 in the blood perfusing working tissue. Many of teh H+ ions resulting from lactate production combine with teh HCo3- ion of NaHCo3 to form H2Co3. This decreases the rate of formation of acidosis, since only the H+ ions themselves contribute to acidity. As blood H2Co3 passes through the lungs, it can dissociate to Co2 and H2O, with Co2 being excreted. The NaLactate contributes Lac- ions to working tissues as a source of fuel.