Charlie Francis Seminar Review: Layton, Utah 2008
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m currently living in Salt Lake City, Utah training at the Utah Olympic Oval as a long-track speedskater. So imagine my surprise when I found out that Charlie Francis (along with Canadian strength coach Derek Hansen) were giving a seminar at a new training facility up in Layton, Utah (about 25 minutes north of where I live).
Now, I’ve been influenced heavily by Charlie, I read his book Speed Trap annually (and never fail to learn something new), his Charlie Francis Training System, outlining his system of sprint training also provides many many bits of useful information. Given that I’m currently in a sport that has some sprint component, I couldn’t miss it. And given that my coach has essentially developed a system of training similar to Francis’ but applied to speed skating, I took him with me.
The Facility
The seminar was held at CorPerformance in Layton, Utah. This is a brand spanking new facility dedicated to training athletes. And it’s just beyond amazing. The owner, Mike Doyle, clearly has a massive passion for training and has installed just about every training tool you can imagine to train athletes.
Full Olympic sets (including a beautiful Eleiko training set), powerlifting equipment (including boards, bands, boxes, etc), kettlebells, thick bars, punching mitts, some choice piece of selectorized equipment, a reverse hyper, two glute-ham raises, on and on it goes. He has a 30m track along with some turf for sprinting/running drills, plyo balls and rebounders; if it’s useful for training he’s either got it or intends to get it (Tendo unit).
It’s a training geek’s wet dream and just a flat out amazing facility. If you’re in the Utah area and need training for sport, contact Mike or Kim. They were amazing hosts and snacks were available all weekend long, along with a catered lunch on Saturday during the break. I ate a lot of cookies.
Friday Day 1
The seminar started at 6pm Friday evening. Charlie and Derek introduced themselves and so did everyone in the room. A moderate sized turnout brought people from the Utah area, Florida, Philadelphia, Canada, Vegas and probably a couple of others that I have forgotten. These are coaches who came to learn from the best, along with a couple of athletes. When I wasn’t busy being a touch obnoxious, I was doing as much networking as I could, these are the folks doing good work in the trenches with athletes.
The first day was mainly introduction with a good bit of training theory. I won’t bother detailing every bit that was talked about since there was just too much of it.
Of course, since I’m just that kind of nerd, I got Charlie to sign my prized copy of Speed Trap (his ‘biographical’ look at his training career). As mentioned above, I highly recommend folks pick up this book. Even though it mainly tells the story of his work with Ben Johnson and his other athletes, there are training gems hidden within it. It’s completely out of print in hardcopy, although you can download it in e-book format via his website (see below).
Saturday Day 2
Saturday was loooong, we started around 8am and finished around 6pm or so. A great deal more training theory was provided including a discussion of recovery and regeneration. More interestingly this was a day for demonstrations. CorPerformance was preparing a football player for his college combine and we got to watch Charlie and Derek work with him hands on.
They took him through warmups, Charlie stretched him out and they moved to various drills such as A skips. Problems were fixed with basic cues and he then moved to standing starts. Charlie coached minimally, giving only small cues for the player to work on and this is where his true brilliance really started to shine. Any coach can overload an athlete with information, the best coaches can get you doing what you need with minimal information. With each repeat, the player got noticeably faster off the line and into his short sprints; they had to open the door at the end of the track so he wouldn’t run into it.
He then moved into another combine exercise which is a test of lateral movement and agility. Derek did more work here although it’s still all sprinting. With even minor fixes, you sould see the player getting faster and faster with each repeat. It was impressive as hell to watch.
Derek and Charlie also took one of the seminar attendees (my coach wouldn’t let me do it since I was tapering for my finale) through some basic sprint drills, accelerations and block starts. Again, watching Francis work first hand and fix major problems in a matter of minutes with simple cues was a sight to behold. This is why the man is arguably one of the top coaches of the Twentieth Century. Frankly, I think watching him work with an athlete for three days straight might have been as informative as hearing him outline his approach to training and training theory.
We also did an EMS demonstration with yours truly as the guinea pig (since I had shorts on). Charlie placed pads on my inner, middle and outer quad along with the tensor fasciae latae. After a 5′ easy warmup, they moved me into the strength program. I dialed it up to a decent level during the hard parts and it was freaky watching and feeling my entire leg contract and contract hard (I was sore the next day). We did a bit of that and then played with the recovery program, a light pulsing mode that felt pretty good.
Some informal discussion about things such as vibration plates, the Omegawave, and other recovery modalities came afterwards until we finally broke for dinner where more conversation and general ranting and ravings went on over food. As I’ll come back to below, Derek Hansen (who is quite the technical boy) had some good data using heart rate variability to track training, I’ll blog about this in the future since I’ll be using it this coming season for myself.
Sunday Day 3
Sunday was awful because the clocks had moved forwards and we had to get up even earlier than we should have to start on time. Everybody was looking pretty exhausted by that point but we had to forge ahead. More information was presented including discussions of strenght and power training, periodization and others. Oh yeah, someone asked Charlie about chiropractic and he mentioned that he would often pop his athletes. So he used me as a guinea pig and popped me nicely.
We finally wrapped around noon, everybody got pics and folks headed out.
Charlie and I
(Note: That’s Dan John glowing radioactively in the background)
Overall comments on the seminar
Although I was familiar with a lot of Francis’ work (through his books and forum), it was still informative to see him present it live with the ability to ask clarifying questions which I did for most of the weekend. If there’s any drawback it’s that the presentation could be a bit more organized (he tends to jump topic to topic a lot). I also think he’s been doing this so long that he often forgets that the folks listening to him aren’t on the same page.
Basically, Charlie is so far ahead of everyone that he forgets that a lot of people don’t even have the fundamentals. I saw a lot of confused faces when he was talking and some of my questions were as much to clarify for them as for myself.
Charlie has endless stories and this actually led to a lot of tangents from the main information of the seminar. While they were entertaining, they did detract from the seminar overall because a 20-30 minute tangent would come in-between the first and second half of an informational point.
The presentation in terms of the slides and graphics was absolutely excellent and Derek Hansen (who didn’t contribute massively to the overall presentation except to clarify points and do some of the hands on stuff with the athletes) still had some excellent information to present. He seems to have every piece of sprint video footage known to god and man on his computer and many were shown to help illustrate the technical bits that Charlie was discussing. As I mentioned above, he had some good heart rate variability (HRV) to show as they tracked an athlete through a taper. This is what convinced me to finally break down and get a watch that can do HRV for the next season.
Despite some of the small negatives (no presentation would ever be perfect), I wouldn’t have missed this seminar for the world. I consider it a once in a lifetime opportunity to hear a man who literally changed the face of sprint training (while many will say that his ideas are currently ‘nothing new’, just keep in mind that he was training his guys the way everyone else is now 30 years ago) and developed one of the fastest men of all time. Consider that it took nearly 20 years for Johnson’s 100m record to be broken (Johnson ran 9.79, the current record is 9.74); had he actually run through to the tape, he might have set a record that was never broken.
Anyhow, the opportunity to go to this seminar was amazing. Mike and Kim up at CorPerformance did things up right and getting to see Francis speak and explain his theories and training methods first hand was incredible. My coach and I even bought his Taper DVD to glean some new ideas for the next season, I already had GPP essentials but also highly recommend it.
If you want more information on Charlie Francis, the man or his methods, surf over to his site and his store. Or join his forum, Charlie posts regularly and you can ask the man himself question about speed, strength or power training. All of his products are available as e-downloads including Speed Trap and the Charlie Francis Training System. For those of you who think that the only worthwhile training information is stuff that’s brand new, looking at what a master coach was doing 30 years ago to produce one of the greatest athletes of all time might just educate you beyond what you might think possible.
Lyle McDonald
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