My Season Distance Coaching a 100m / 200m Athlete Using HRV

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Hello all,

You may know me from such training journals as “My 400m Guys Preparation Heading into Olympic Trials”, or from some of my attempts to run a respectable time as a masters athlete. This season was decidely less impressive for my 400m athlete, and I will follow up on last year’s journal with some updates soon. It’s less positive, so I figured I’d start with something a little bit more uplifting- like taking over a 23 year old post-collegiate 100m / 200m athlete from another coach, and working with him long distance.

The athlete in question, Mike, has been running on the Ontario track circuit for a good few years now. In fact, he runs so many meets in Canada that All-Athletics.com thinks he is Canadian! He is a Michigan native, yet truly dislikes USATF Michigan- and to be honest when we review an incident that occurred during the indoor season at one of their meets, you will understand why!

Mike ran track in high school, and also played some football and continued running track through his college years. He had two separate ACL surgeries a few years back, so he is not exactly injury-free, but he seems to be a rugged type of athlete who can handle a fair volume of work. His personal bests coming into the season were:

[b]60m: 7.00

100m: 10.98 +3.7

200m: 22.10 +2.5[/b]

He left his previous coach after feeling that the program was not moving him forward in a manner that worked for him. To be fair, his previous coach seemed quite football focused and coached a lot of high school athletes, and because Mike keeps meticulous journals about workouts, I was able to take a look at the program he was doing prior to coming over to work with me. They did everything in the weight room and there was zero sprinting in the program up to a week before they ran their first meet. They never did any low intensity work (e.g. tempo, medball circuits, etc.), and only did three days of high intensity work a week, but workouts would occasionally be canceled, resulting in perhaps a little less than three days per week average of high intensity work.

Before I start, I have to say that Mike is one of the most dedicated guys I’ve ever seen. He will carry out workouts on his own- there are few dedicated post-collegiate athletes who will seek out ideas and do work on their own if need be. There are few post-collegiate sprinters to run with in his area, just outside Detroit, Michigan. He never, ever gets discouraged no matter what the outcomes of his training session, or of his races. This positive attitude toward hard work makes him a great guy to work with- his work ethic and level of dedication are absolutely astounding and above reproach. This type of athlete would motivate any sane coach to do their absolute best for him. I used Charlie’s Short to Long graph to try to plan out the season carefully, and ensure progressions were sensible. Obviously, I am still learning as a coach, but if this ultra-dedicated guy can’t motivate you to improve yourself as a coach as he tries to improve as an athlete, then nobody could!

TRAINING CAMP - Examining Issues Using “The Jane Project” as a Model

One of the nice things we were able to do was to go on a ten day training camp to Austin, Texas over the winter break. There, I could see how he operated on a day to day basis, as well as see what kind of overall issues might need to be addressed. Because of the unusual program he was doing prior to my involvement, it was easy to see that because we were going to use a CF Short to Long approach that some changes were definitely going to be necessary.

Overall, his previous program had very little technical correction, and it appeared some changes would be needed there. But before we get to that, lets talk about some of the global issues that would obviously need to be addressed before we get into any mechanics. I have obviously purchased every single item on the CF.com site, and I watched The Jane Project at least five times before leaving on the training camp to remind myself of the “big picture” thinking that would be required if I was looking to help Mike improve on his personal bests this season. I absolutely love this product- it truly showed how important it is to get the big things right and not get caught up in getting mega-fancy with your athlete’s training.

DIET

Now I mentioned that his previous program was entirely weights based, and that in the GPP phase of September- October- November there was actually NO sprinting involved. There had been three days per week of weights, involving power cleans, squats, upper body work such as bench press, as well as jumps on the Bear Squat machine. The number of jumps on the Bear Squat machine would reach upwards of 40 per set, meaning they would get into lactic territory. One of the first things I noticed when we got down there was that his diet contained almost no complex carbohydrates. He ate like a bodybuilder (in fact he was quite the T-Nation fan).

When it came time to do tempo workouts, he would legitimately have insufficient energy to carry out the workout at any kind of reasonable pace. He would become incredibly talkative during the warmup, which frustrated my other athlete, as we didn’t realize it prior to the camp, but we carry out a lot of our workouts in relative silence! By the second tempo session, I had figured out what was going on- due to the carbohydrate deficiency in his diet, he was taking LOTS of the Jakked 3D supplement to stimulate himself sufficiently to be able to carry out the workouts! Obviously this was counterproductive, but considering that he was only doing three workouts per week on his previous program with zero low intensity recovery work, one can understand why he was careful with his carbohydrate consumption- he would have been a fatso if he had eaten like a regular sprinter!

WEIGHT ROOM

While we were in Austin, our good friend Ku2u#1 made the drive down from his home north of Austin and kept a close eye on the weight room workouts. We lifted at Hyde Park Gym, which is a fantastic zero-bullshit gym for the hardcore bodybuilder and powerlifter. The first time I walked into the washroom and saw a shower curtain instead of a door covering the washroom stall, I said, “Now THIS is my kind of place!” You can grunt and drop weights to your heart’s content, and no dickbrain whose workout consists of walking 200 miles on the treadmill will be offended…there are no treadmills!

The next major issue for Mike that was problematic was that workouts in the weight room were extremely intense, with him loading up very heavy and working to failure on certain lifts. Once again, coming from his program background this was understandable, as during GPP all they did was lift, and once sprinting started the lifts disappeared from the program. If you’re lifting and there is no other competition for your resources, maybe you can get away with an Ultimate Warrior spec weight room program- but in a CF Short to Long program, the sprints are king and the weights are secondary. This would have to be adjusted to reflect the new reality of his CF program.

MUSCLE TONE

The final key issue to adjust was muscle tone. When I first felt Mike’s legs in Windsor at the meet about 18 months ago, I was stunned. He had the highest muscle tone I had ever encountered. In other works, he was freakishly tight, and had pain and a burning sensation in his hamstrings. I had met up with him a couple of months prior to the training camp, and again his tone was astoundingly high. He was still working with his previous coach at that time, and I suspected the Bear Squat jumps to be the culprit. Still, once he had gotten away from the Bear Squat machine, he was still unbelievably tight, and it didn’t seem to be relenting. He showed me his ab routine, and it was very high in volume and had been derived from Manny Pacquaio’s boxing abdominal routine. I showed it to ESTI, thinking it had some good ideas but the volume was perhaps too high. ESTI is way smarter than me, and he immediately said, “Dude, there is WAY too much hip flexor work in this routine. Cut this stuff entirely out and do only stability work (planks, side planks) for a while and see what happens.” Of course, he was right. Prior to going to Austin, I convinced Mike to part with some of his cash and get a series of massage sessions before the training camp. I told him he needed at least eight sessions, but we ended up compromising at around five, which was pretty great, as you practically need a crowbar to pry open a Michigan native’s wallet. With a less volume-oriented abdominal program (and the reduced hip flexor work as per ESTI’s advice) coupled with some seriously deep massage, the tightness dramatically subsided! While we were down in Austin, we also went to see a local therapist who was incredibly helpful. Kiplimo Chemirmir, who worked on Leonel Manzano in the season leading up to his oustanding Olympic sliver medal run in the 1500m, helped the guys out with some incredibly detailed massage sessions while we were in Austin. He is a tremendous massage therapist, and an even better guy.

Now that we have the big issues identified, we can move into some specifics…more to come!

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I don’t think the bear is causing the issues if anything its the volume. His coach is following the program the company sent with the machine.

Week 6:
fast jumps 1x40
angle jumps 2x35
angle squats 1x25

FYI - i love the bear machine…

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Buy a 20kg bag of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate)
15 - 20min as hot as you can handle, followed by 30sec rinse off in shower.

Potentially nap afterwards - my last one i fell asleep for 2hrs in the middle of the day.

The general gist is:
Calcium fires muscles
Magnesium returns the calcium and therefore relaxes the muscle

Many studies show a mass reduction in peoples magnesium levels over the last 50 yrs.

This is cheap as too…
$6 for a small bag (300g) from the local grocery shop
or $20 - $50 for a 25kg bag from a Produce shop

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Great post t slow. Really enjoyed reading it. Looking forward to the updates.

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Hi RB,

I don’t think the ultra-tightness was caused the Bear Squat machine either, but I’m not comfortable using this machine on a guy with two surgically rebuilt ACL’s. Waldemar is very adamant about “maintaining good space between the joints”, e.g. hanging on a slant board on a 45 degree angle or so, as well as doing pool work. Following his recommendations, I feel that sprinting is stressful enough, so I don’t want to look for new ways to stress Mike’s joints. Not to mention, he no longer has access to the Bear Squat machine, so it’s really a non-issue.

Once his extremely voluminous abdominal program was replaced with stability work, the tightness subsided, and the massage was then able to be more helpful. When I first tried to work on him myself, my hands were basically bouncing off his quads. They were totally impossible to work on- I have never seen anything like it. I think that the fact that he was doing high intensity work three days a week for YEARS with ZERO recovery activity in between was probably the biggest overall factor in the tightness. As I was mentioning to DavidG, when guys have never had massage, they don’t really know what “tight” or “loose” feel like, because often times their muscles are just permanently way too tight, and how would you know what appropriate tone felt like if nobody ever put their hands on you?

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Hi Bold,

Thank you for the tip. I will have him try this. We didn’t do much in the way of epsom salt baths this year. Waldemar also recommends sea salt baths. This makes a great deal of sense. I’m going to start experimenting with your PH testing idea as well this year.

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The bear played a major role in Gio Bernard (first rb taken in this year’s nfl draft) Acl rehab program in 2010. He had surgery in late August - squatted 400+ for reps by December - joined the team for winter workouts in Jan 2011. Then killed the ACC for 2 years. Hey - I don’t know your situation but bol.

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RB, that is interesting stuff. Was the guy doing strictly jump squats on it? Mike’s program was all jump squats. I’m not a fan at all. The machine is not popular around here, and I don’t know much about it other than I don’t like the look of what it’s doing- perhaps subjective, but I prefer to stick to what I know. I’m not saying one could not design sane programs using it, just that I wouldn’t know how.

What do you like about the machine?

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Squats in the early stages and they were very comfortable for the athlete and later stages jumps. The athlete never experience any swelling or set backs along the way. I believe when training Acl athletes you gotta get them squatting and bending “ASAP” the bear allowed us to do this while giving the athlete confidence along the way…

Why don’t you like the look of the machine?

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TRAINING CAMP Intervention #1: DIET- The Cult of Nutritionism

One of the things I have noticed about many athletes is that they tend to inherently trust in “Nutritionism.” This was a term coined by author Michael Pollan in his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He argues convincingly that people will accept the idea that food consists of protein, carbohydrates, and fat and whatever vitamins and minerals we have identified and that’s about it, nothing else is important except how it breaks down on the label. He argues that food is more than the sum of its parts, and I tend to agree. An antibiotic-laced chicken sitting in a cramped 20,000 bird pen does not at all taste the same, nor does it have the same nutritional profile as one that is pasture-raised on a farm such as that of the monks at Little Portion Monastery. When I spent a couple of summers in Fayetteville, Arkansas I compared pasture-raised chickens from Little Portion Monastery with regular chickens from the grocery store. The difference in flavour alone was astounding. I could cook them with salt and pepper only, and they were far better tasting than the waterlogged and flavourless grocery store variety. Without any prodding, people commented on the excellent taste and texture. The concept of eating quality food was one of the first things I picked up on in The Jane Project when I first watched it a few years ago, and the timeless advice Angela gives in this film really made me think.

Excessive Supplementation, Not Enough Real Food

Taking the idea into the supplement world, it amazes me that many athletes will pay upwards of $50 for a container of GREENS+, which purports to take the goodness out of greens and put it in a freeze-dried concoction. The concept is preposterous- what makes us think we know everything that is beneficial in leafy greens? Most athletes I know will also pay big money for micro-processed whey or pre-workout supplements with massive retail markups yet if you ask them to go to the grocery store and buy organic greens, grass fed beef, pasture raised chicken or organic fruit they start balking at the $1 organic premium you tend to pay for a head of broccoli or collard greens, or the few dollars premium on beef and chicken. This never ceases to amaze me. The first day we arrived, we went to Whole Foods and did some shopping.

Take for example grass fed beef: it is leaner than regular grocery store beef because the cattle are not brought to a feedlot and stuffed full of grain to fatten them up and increase their weight. When you cook feedlot ground beef that is upwards of 30% fat, much of it’s initial weight is lost in the fat that is cooked out. Purchasing naturally leaner grass fed beef is not that much more expensive when you do the fat math. Not only that, the fat profile of grass fed beef is different.

If you doubt that leaner grass fed beef can be very tasty, try this recipe. The secret is to shred the mushrooms finely with a Microplane grater, mix well, and it will create a fatty mouthfeel that makes up for the fact that grass fed beef is leaner (and has less saturated fat than feedlot beef). Even people who “hate mushrooms” tend to like this recipe.

http://www.americangrassfedbeef.com/recipe-mushroom-onion-burger.asp

Increasing Leafy Green Consumption

Outside buying some quality meat and eggs, the next intervention was to find a way to force some leafy green vegetables into Mike’s system. This was definitely going to be more difficult than making him eat salads- he’s an adult. Last year I caved in and bought a Vitamix 5200 blender, and though they are expensive they are in my opinion an excellent value, and I packed it in my carry-on. The texture you can achieve with the Vitamix is far and away better than what you can achieve with a Magic Bullet, Ninja, or any other less expensive blender. Still, if you can only swing a Ninja, go for it, they are pretty damn good for the money (but make no mistake-they are nowhere near as good as a Vitamix or Blendtec).

The other key thing that makes the Vitamix something I use every day is the ease of cleanup. There is nothing to take apart. One drop of soap and a cup of warm water, turn it on, set it to “High” for 30 seconds, rinse, and it’s clean and ready to use again. I don’t care what anyone says, there is no juicer on the market that is this easy to clean and I avoid juicers like the plague for this reason. Before anyone (rightfully) gets on my case, I have no financial stake in Vitamix, this is just my opinion as a user of their product. The Blendtec units are just as good, they are just a little different. To each their own.

With the Vitamix, the high powered motor ensures everything comes out extremely smooth- in other words, it’s easy to hide greens in a smoothie without anyone being the wiser. It’s advisable to start off by using sweeter fruits as the base of your smoothies for an “entry level” series of shakes so that the athlete will be fooled easily by the sweetness at first. Eventually, you switch over to lower glycemic strawberries, blackberries and blueberries as the base of your shakes over time, and they are just as enjoyable. You can of course add protein powder (preferably unflavoured and without any artificial sweeteners) for a nice pre or post-workout shake.

With Mike, he was rather wary of greens, so I should have started with a mango base. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up mangoes. Instead, I started with the following:

Berry Smoothie Recipe

1/2 cup (120 ml) water
1/2 cup (120 g) plain full fat yogurt (I use Pinehedge Farms because it tastes great, and comes in a glass container)
1 1/2 cups strawberry / blueberry / raspberry mix
3 leaves of dinosaur kale (stalks removed to avoid bitterness)
1 leaf swiss chard (stalk removed to avoid bitterness)
1 scoop artificially sweetened protein (disgusting, but that’s all the guys had)
a few ice cubes

Because he was using a sweetened protein I was able to get away with the above recipe as his first shake. The great thing about smoothies is you can consume quite a bit of uncooked greens in this manner. This keeps the nutrients more bioavailable according to most sources. In addition, you retain the fibre contained in the blended food allowing for less of a glycemic spike than with pure juicing. Greens contain a stunning array of nutrients, many of which we surely don’t fully understand yet. I was able to get Mike to consume one or two greens-spiked shakes almost every day. I think it worked out pretty well considering his prior leafy green consumption was nearly zero.

I didn’t expect that I was going to change his approach to eating overnight, the overarching idea was just to present some alternative ideas to get him thinking about the politics of food and how as an athlete it’s probably a good idea to broaden his scope beyond just consuming supplements.

Learn By Doing

One of the things I wanted the athletes to do but we didn’t get a chance to was to work some volunteer kitchen shifts at Casa De Luz in Austin. This was a major error on my part. I have worked as a volunteer here numerous times. It is one of my favourite places to eat in the world. It is an organic, non-profit, vegan restaurant that is open 7 days a week. They avoid the excessive use of salt, sweeteners, and stimulants (caffeine, etc.) in their foods and EVERYTHING is made fresh in house. They use only fresh, organic, seasonally available produce, and this means you could find yourself preparing burdock root, soaking and cooking a variety of beans, trimming unfashionable roots such as radishes, as well as unusual heirloom vegetables. It’s a great learning experience.

They accept two volunteers to work in the kitchen per meal shift. Make no mistake- you better be ready to hustle, because chefs Rosa and Aida will not suffer your lazy volunteer ass gladly. The food is of the highest quality, and their cookbook has some excellent ideas. Despite the new-agey appearance of the place, there is absolutely zero preachiness. It made me rethink my approach to eating, and even though I eat meat, I have taken tons of great ideas from Casa De Luz and incorporated them into my diet. The staff are fiercely proud of their work, and they have a right to be. If you’re ever in Austin, do yourself a favour and check this place out- $12 for an all you can eat 100% organic dinner is a steal!

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Great post.
About a 1.5 years ago I got into ‘juicing’.
I use a slow, 80 rpm, vertical ‘auger type’ juicer, as the slow speed and ‘crushing’ prevents oxidation of the juice.
Though best drank right away, juicing with this type of juicer allows for up to 3 days of refrigerated storage before starting to lose nutrients.

I only juice organic fruits/vegetables. And, if on ‘race day’, keep with lower glycemic fruits/vegetables in the mix.

Also, I juice beets and once a person becomes ‘accustomed’ they are incredible… within a few minutes lowers heart rate/blood pressure, giving a ‘calming/relaxing’ effect… full of nutrients and scientifically proven to increase endurance in distance events by over 15%.

http://jap.physiology.org/content/110/3/585.full

Another option to juicing beets or other vegetables is buying Biotta bottled beet juice, or other juice, organic and tastes great!
I have bought many many bottles from luckyvitamin.com, which is the cheapest and shipping was free.

http://www.luckyvitamin.com/p-267632-biotta-naturals-beet-juice-for-your-immune-system-169-oz

Strange how many news articles compare ‘regular’ foods with ‘organic’ and the ending argument is that ‘organic’ isn’t necessarily more ‘nutritious’… they are missing the point, it’s not so much what’s nutritious, it’s what is NOT in the food… the pesticides, hormones, GMO etc.

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Hi Rick,

Great post- your juicer is definitely one of the best out there to use. My brother’s family has a similar one and they use it regularly.

Due to my ADD, I’m brutal at cleanup, so for me a Vitamix has been a great help. Juicers are an awesome option. I agree with everything you said about organic vs. conventional as well. Often it’s what’s missing that is the most important, and I really think we should start from whole foods and build outward when trying to construct a quality athlete.

Many in the high performance world talk about glutathione as “the king of antioxidants” and a marker of overall health, and there are a lot of studies to suggest there is a very strong link. I know one team locally that tries to boost glutathione levels with targeted supplementation, but eating organic is a solid place to start I believe.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/glutathione-the-mother-of_b_530494.html?

There is actually a short podcast out there by Dr. Barry Fudge (the UK sports physiologist who works with Mo Farah among others). He did a study on altered warmups for 800m athletes, which included a discussion of the benefits of beet juice for endurance athletes as well. I look forward to increasing my understanding of useful supplementation this year- it is a fascinating topic!

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His quad muscle tone was so high I don’t know how any contraction occurred at all. If you picture doing massage on a wood floor, and you get the idea of what it was like that day I saw him. There is another therapist in town here who is known for her work on very muscled bodybuilder guys and does a great job doing that work.

Doing Charlie’s fast abs in GPP video, I had made mistakes in the past giving athletes too many than they should have been doing and found athletes had incredible quad soreness/tightness following. That is what led us to eliminate many of the hip repetitions. It’s not that they are bad, but the progressions obviously were interfering with running. This runner also had a history of other muscle issues/tightness/strains in the past.

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Technique

At the training camp, we would have some time to work together on technique. Probably due to his extreme tightness, Mike had short choppy strides that relied on frequency to get him down the track. Arms pulled more back at the waist than down towards the hip, and there were significant backside mechanics with the legs.

Coaching mechanics is a real struggle for me, as I wasn’t sure exactly how to take someone from a backside mechanics dominated technique to a more balanced sprint technique. It’s very difficult as a rookie coach to fix this kind of thing. I feel that using cues can be very variable in their effects.

I re-read CFTS and re-watched the South Africa Series. I noticed how Charlie would perfect things at lower speeds / over short distances first, then stretch them out. My chief problem is that Charlie has such a highly developed eye, and I am certainly still only in the beginner (hopefully heading toward intermediate) eye stage. I take a lot of video of my athletes running, but only at 30fps up until recently. With the new 60fps IOS upgrade, I look forward to higher quality video replay.

I will search for some video from the early part of training camp and see what we can post of Mike’s technique before intervention, as well as after intervention. Again, he would be training on his own after this camp, so getting technical changes to stick would prove to be a tough situation to manage. Thinking back, I definitely didn’t do as good of a job at this as I could have, but I just didn’t have the experience at the time. When you’ll be training someone from a distance, I now realize you need to be ultra-practical with your drills to ensure you don’t ingrain any bad motor patterns, as I am not there to correct issues on the spot.

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I’m coaching a guy who had a 10yr non training break from sport.
His goal is a 120m race.
He is spending more time doing therapy than any other aspects combined.

We don’t plan on introducing any speed until his range of motion will allow him the potential ability to hit the sprint position.
It’s a long road and he can see the value in waiting.
In the meantime we work on general fitness, tempo. Mediball. Dumbbell complex routines and Hill special endurence. . And dropping the body fat back down.

He still has another 6 x months before the race.
Sounds like a long time but ideally I believe the race in 18months time he will exceed in.

Personally I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach sprint mechanics if their mobility won’t allow it. You’ll teach wrong firing within the nervous system.

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Sounds good to me. Us Americans love the quick fix.

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He still has another 6 x months before the race.
Sounds like a long time but ideally I believe the race in 18months time he will exceed in.

Good job Bold, this wouldn’t happen to be a race at easter time in central victoria run over 120m.

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You got it Grooster.
This guy will be fast by then. He is 32 now. I might start a journal for him?

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I definitely agree- that makes a lot of sense. It was true in our particular case as well. There wasn’t much we could do mechanics-wise until he had loosened up. It was just astounding how tight he was. He did loosen up tremendously after changing his ab routine per ESTI’s recommendations, followed by a number of massage treatments. He came into the camp with much better tone. Still, it was tough to change those ingrained movement patterns.

At the same time, it is a fine line. Telling a sprinter he can’t sprint for an extended period of time might be very discouraging to some, so that would be a very individual coaching decision based on the coach’s judgment.

20

Good luck with it Bold, it is a great race to be in and better to win. Would be excellent to see a journal on this if you have the time.