Flying runs is pretty much all that I’ve done in the past. I remember having done some FEF type of work but only over 150m, so 50F 50E 50F and I remember that it seemed to have an outstanding effect on my SE for my 100m. The thing about my old coach is that when we worked speed it was either 8 accels or 6 or so flying sprints on a given speed day and usually all with about 4-6 minutes break. I always found that I was able to progress a little smoother when I took longer breaks in our speed sessions.
With this season I’ve got 60m FEF and 6xflying 30’s (8 minutes rest) and then going doing to 3x60m with 15 minutes rest in the next block. I’m excited to see how that works out. The thing with progressing speed is that its really easy to progress but it also plateaus quickly. So after 4 weeks of speed with my old coach we would see zero gains in speed because he never progressed the workouts to greater quality, they were always essentially the same thing with the same rests.
Roughly my progressions from block to block for speed is
12 reps @ 3 minutes rest
8 reps @ 5 minutes rest
6 reps @ 8 minutes rest
3 reps @ 15 minutes rest
With my old coach he only ever worked me in block 3 so I’ve had limited speed gains. I actually had a chat with him the other day, because he is still my school’s head track coach so I need to be in contact with him, and he was asking about what I was doing and was suggesting that I’m missing out on a “base” season because I’m doing speed all the time. He insists that I should be doing his 15x100m workouts in 14-15s with 90 sec rests for at least one month. No thanks, haha. The worst part is that this guy has coached an Olympic athlete, so he thinks he is completely justified in his training but in reality he lucked out big time with the talent and has barely progressed her in relation to that talent.
Anyway, in the gym I’ve found that if I’m really hammering out max strength, I’m talking 1’s and 2’s, then it kills my CNS big time. My CNS becomes incredibly fried in that rep range when I combine it with speed workouts so I try to be really careful about no hitting too much max strength work in that rep range. I guess depth jumps complexed with a 85% squat at 3 reps is my favorite combo for speed work, but it hits the CNS incredibly hard as well. I’ve sort of learnt my lesson about killing it at the gym and not on the track. I fell in to this last season and all my lifts and jumps went up big time but my speed just died a bit. So now I’m really careful to plan bigger track loads and smaller gym loads.