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.
Felt good, right hamstring was a little tight. I skipped out on tempo yesterday, that might have affected things a little. Overall , this workout has been tough. 3 minute breaks in between reps gets a little tough for me, not in terms of quality of run but I definitely feel it at the end of a few runs. The good thing is that the first 20m is very good quality throughout the workout, and degrades a little on runs 11 and 12.
I just got hit with a nasty stomach flu this morning. I woke up with some aches and it quickly progressed to the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach and complete lack of energy. It sucks, I look forward to workouts so when I have to miss one it drives me crazy, but oh well.
I would have done 3x4x40m grass hills. Instead a trip to the store for some pepto is all I’ll be doing today.
Hell of a day, I felt so crappy with the chills and the worst stomach pains i’ve ever had, so I went to the emergency room. They took a urine and blood sample. I waited about 3 hours and they determined it was probably a virus or bacterial stomach flu. I feel much better now but im incredibly weak from not eating and a slight fever. The results of the blood tests showed that I was slightly hemoglobin deficient, which was surprising. They said its possible linked to iron deficiency. This could be contributing to my terrible aerobic capacity problems too. Anyway, hopefully this will clear up by tuesday.
Ok, so this whole week has been a bust due to my illness. Damn.
Anyway, it coincides with my down week so less harm was done to my overall training schedule. Today is the first day where I’ll actually be doing some work since last friday. I’m going to be doing some jogging, light plyos and stretching.
Next week marks the beginning of phase 2. This is the fun stuff. I feel as though I’ve got a decent amount of acceleration work in and my general fitness is definitely up. Gone from struggling to run 1 lap around my track to doing 4 no problem. During this phase, acceleration is moved to a single day of 12x40m tire pulls. So the overall intensity of my accelerations has gone from:
12x20m tire pulls and 12x40m hills
to
12x40m tire pulls
Although the volume will be down, the intensity is higher on those 40m tire pulls. I doubt I’ll be able to lift after doing that, but I’ll see what I can manage. Speed now comes in to play and this is where I’ll start to see some improvements. From what I’ve previously posted:
from 12x60m 20 intensity limit 3 minutes break
to
8x60m FEF 5 minute breaks and 8x60m 30m intensity limit 5 minutes break
This is an interesting month since it marks a decrease in acceleration volume, increase in intensity and increase in speed volume increase in intensity. The overall load will surely be higher than the previous month on the CNS, but muscle wise I think the weight room will serve a good stimulus to balance things out. I might try to hit up some speed testing towards the end of this month to get a handle on progress. I already have a feeling I’ve improved my crouch 30m time slightly. I’m not too worried about that aspect anymore like I was in the past, I think i can finally say that my acceleration is decent. My new focus for this season is to see a solid increase on my flying 30m time, which hasnt seen a decent increase since I started sprint training. So this will be a great test of how all this planning is going. I definitely think the intensification plan will result in some solid improvements. My guess is that I’m now entering the 3.7x high range from crouch 30m and my flying 30m has pretty much always been 2.9x mid to low.
My goal is to hit a consistent 2.8x by the end of November. Lets see how it goes!
Overall phase 1 has been successful in:
1-Improving general fitness
2-Phasing in to high intensity work
3-Establishing acceleration
4-Setting up a 60m work capacity
Just got back from my workout. My legs were incredibly fresh. The tone in my legs was amazing today, definitely a result of the down time.
Did about 1500m warm up jog and then some random broad jumps, skips and about 20 50inch box jumps. All felt pretty good. Hopefully sunday will go just as good, if not better.
So, I thought that coming down from 12x60m(20m intensity limit) with 3 minute break to 8x60m FEF with 5 minutes break would be a cake walk. I was so wrong. What a tough workout, the increased breaks made it so much more difficult.
Here’s how it went:
4x20m accelerations
2x4x60m FEF with 5 minute breaks
I had to call it at 6 60m FEF, I figure I’ll build up to 8x60m FEF over the next few weeks.
My weights workout only got to:
3x5 front squat
3x5 1 arm rows
I was messed up after this workout. Luckily, I have a great ability to recover from high CNS loads in between workouts. Mainly because I get 10 hours of sleep pretty much daily. I figure if I can manage these types of workouts for a while, my CNS will be stacked in no time.
This was my first workout on a track off the grass so it could have contributed to the difficulty as well as my first day off of a down week.
Workout today:
8x30m tire pulls with 5 minutes break
In the gym:
3x5 deadlifts
various core exercises
Overall great workout. I feel as though my acceleration is progressing nicely, and that I can accelerate past 20m to almost 30m. Overall CNS stress for this workout was much lower then sunday’s workout. I think it can handle 8@40m with this workout, so I’ll test it out next week. Not this weekend but the next I’ll be getting tested with some electronic timers. The timing of the testing isnt the greatest because I’ll be at the end of week 3 of my 4 week cycle. So the times probably won’t be as flying as they could be but hopefully it’ll give me some indication of where I’m at.
After 1 month, general fitness is way up. Probably from a combination of the past months tempo and the few extra laps I jog during my warm up. Typically by the 4th rep in my tempo I’m breathing all heavy and go to my knees for a breath but now I can walk it off no problem. I think its time to step up the tempo. Maybe either 2x4x150m or 3x4x100m.
2x4x60m with 30m intensity limit 5 minutes break.
3x3 cleans
3x5 push press
4x5 back extension
Feeling vary fast on those 30m run ins. I’m now trying to learn relaxation, I feel as though all this new acceleration and speed im having a tough time holding form and staying relaxed. I think this is a good feeling, because usually whenever I’ve felt this way its all an issue of speed endurance and relaxation. Now that I’m moving acceleration up I need to adapt to it.
I had a similar feeling last outdoor season during my season opener. I ran a windy 10.91 and it felt like I had so little control over my speed. But what that told me is that when I did learn to control and relax I would run much faster. And I did, 10.7s by the end of the season in total control. So I think that uncontrollable speed is a good indication of progression.
Stepped up the weight a little, felt good. I’m having a tough time figuring out where to fit plyos into my workouts. I’m usually exhausted between sprints and weights so I figure that everything in between is doing just fine. With the majority of my work and fatigue coming from sprints. Well see, I might try to squeeze in some low vol plyos in at some point in my spp. Going to read up a bit more before I do anything about it.
Yesterday:
2x4x100m tempo, big time stiffness from tuesday’s workout
Today:
2x4x60m with 30m intensity limit 5 minutes break
gym:
4x3 cleans
4x5 back extension
Another great workout. Started to feel CNS fatigue at around rep 7,8. Its crazy how hard these actually are. When people see us working out they say “You guys take so much break inbetween reps”. I’m just thinking, these workouts are tough even though 5 minute breaks are being used, and during competition we’re up at 1 hour between rounds, so thats not a long recovery at all. Anyway, things are going great. 9 hours a day of sleep.
I had my first day of testing. We tested standing 30m. While I wasnt expecting big pb’s at this stage because I was just hitting week 3 of my 2nd block and I was feeling the effects of the previous 2 weeks. I would get a good idea that if I ran something half decent that I was definitely on track. The past 6 weeks have been focused on my acceleration and making sure that I’ve got a pattern that can take me to my goal.
Standing 30m electric
4.02s
3.90s
3.93s
I was sort of stumbling running these because we were using 4 point starts and I’ve been using 3 point in all of my training, so the pattern was somewhat unfamiliar. I think these were pretty decent. If I consider after this block, acceleration volumes will taper down a bit and I’ll bounce back from this difficult week that would probably put me at 3.85s, and then with a solid taper before competition I think I could hit 3.8s once all of my speed (30-60m) is in place.
Considering this time last year I was testing at 4.01s I’m definitely going somewhere.
Now for my next two blocks of training they focus on top end speed. My current pb in a flying 30m is 2.91s. If I can get that down to something in the 2.8s range I think I’ll be in pretty good shape.
Now we’d be looking at 2.85s+3.80s+.15s= 6.80 and I’d be really close to my goal for this year. So by the end of december I’ll be looking to test out my flying 30s to see if I hit my goal.
My strength has been increasing pretty consistently even though I’ve been completely coping out on the work doing sets of 2 instead of 4, cutting out exercises all together and so on. Just as Charlie had explained in his weights for speed video. Even though i’m not doing 5x5 all the way through it is still 5x5 because i’m getting that component before.
Even though I have felt as though i’ve been completely slacking on strength work my front squat max has gone from about 235 to 315.
I know things are going well if strength is increasing without even trying, that means im hitting my acceleration component really hard and that its affecting a large portion of the fv curve. Next test will be if my jumps improve without even trying when I’m hitting speed hard.