You got that right.
See this:
VS
Please don’t get me wrong. Some of the people who were most influential in my professional development were track coaches. However, it took me too long to realize that they coached people who ran upright almost all the time and never had to stop or to change direction. The old joke in track coaching is that it really comes down to “run fast and lean left.”
hmmm…
What no doubt prompted the initial criticism of “track coaches” at the beginning of the thread was the discussion here about single leg work. Anyone got the link??
Here is an article by Boyle
http://www.michaelboyle.biz/joomla/dmdocuments/choosing_functional_exercises.pdf
Don’t ever clump me in with a Mike Boyle quote.
Yes I debated about Ben’s strength. Sue me.
Even when I was mad I said I believed Charlie was the best coach in the world, and I said it often.
Is Ben the strongest athlete ever? Probably not. Is he the strongest world class sprinter, yes one of the strongest ever. Is he the fastest ever. I don’t know, but you could attempt to make a case for it.
Is Mike Boyle jealous of sprint coaches. Yes, inparticular he is jealous of Charlie Francis.
I had the B’s to say.
(Read and re-read my post on squatting. Still doesn’t change anything).
GUY
Hey BTW whats Mike Boyle’s time in the 55m dash again? OH YEAH ITS 0.0 SECONDS!!! Glad Im listening to a real expert. Good night.
My take on the argument is if I want to learn about sprinting (and related topics) listen to Charlie if I want to look at general s&c stuff listen to others as well.
It is up to you what you want to believe but read and listen to everybody. Toss out what you think is crap.
Interesting discussion. I can sympathize with track coaches though when insecure strength coaches use the “linear speed” argument and the “it only works with track athletes” argument. Being both a track/sprint coach and a University strength coach, I can tell you that these arguments about “track coaches” in general are a knee jerk reaction.
Granted, there are some pretty crappy track coaches out there who don’t know how to coach linear sprinting, let alone concepts related to team sports. However, having worked with football players, basketball players, hockey players, soccer players, etc., good linear sprint coaching can take you a long way in sports. One athlete I worked with on linear sprinting (he ran 100’s and 200’s) was one of the best kick returners in the league after our season together. Believe it or not, there is a lot of linear running in sports. Everyone is not running figure-8’s all over the field with their pants on fire.
I’d take a top sprint coach any day over a weight room guy to help with team speed. Pulling sleds haphazardly can improve any individual who doesn’t have any real training behind them. It’s kind of like the Jumpsoles marketing technique - “Do training with our product and you’ll get better.” When the real reason people are getting better is that they are actually “doing the training.”
My experience with sled work is that we get the best benefit using the sled for postural adjustments (i.e. body lean for acceleration). We use very little weight to achieve this end. In many cases, the weight of the sled is enough (10kg). Obviously, the friction of the surface - track vs. turf - can play a role in how much weight you use.
We recently had a guy come in to test our athletes with some new gadget. It has a sensor on a belt that can sense (using a gyroscope and 3-D dynamometers) ground contact time, stride length, stride frequency, vertical force and horizontal force. I’m not sure how accurate it was, but we did notice some significant results between non-resisted sprints over 30m and sled pulls over 20m in terms of ground contact time, stride frequency and stride length. And, the sled we used was no more than 12-15kg max. (BTW - I’ll do a lengthy post on the gadget and post the excel results for discussion purposes).
So, as Charlie has advised, be very careful of the way you use your sled. Use it sparingly. Leave the plowing of fields to the farm animals, and let the thoroughbreds run.
For the record, I do find much of Boyle’s article misleading. I don’t think he fully understands the implications of using a sled or the concepts of speed training. Sure sports is about acceleration. But implying that speed is not important is misleading. How does he think top sprinters get to top speed??? Are they somehow bypassing the acceleration phase? Reggie Bush ran track. Bob Hayes ran track. And I’m sure most of the NFL’s top athletes ran track in high school, and learned basic sprint mechanics for both acceleration and max speed. Is Boyle somehow implying that this was not a useful stage of development? And, I’m sure many of them did not use sleds to achieve their acceleration and top speed abilities.
Like many strength coaches I come across, they spend more time in their articles trying to justify their methods by belittling others and other methods (i.e. Olympic lifting coaches don’t know how to coach for team sports, sprint coaches can’t help in team sports). Give us your reasons for doing what you do and let them stand alone on their merit. In one of Charlie’s seminars back in 2001, he went over the merits of linear sprint training for team sports (all of which made perfect sense) and he included the concept of foot elasticity for agility as it is developed by sprinting. Why can’t the conditioning community accept the basic, well-grounded answers and go with it. The internet has allowed strength coaches to proliferate their ‘thoughts’ on a daily and weekly basis to the detriment of athlete development and common sense. Results are what we are looking for, not more blog entries and articles.
Interesting gadget. Some marketing guy posted a bit of his training results with it here a few months ago. Thing seems awesome…if only it wasn’t $20,000-$30,000…
Nice Number Two.
Yes, that was the shocker. Once the demo was over, I was expecting that the gizmo would cost $5,000 to $8,000. When he dropped the 20G+ price tag, I was stunned. A little too rich for my blood, but still interesting. Might be worthwhile to pay a small fee for him to come out and test my athletes periodically.
Apparently, there are a good number of assumptions in the software that make me wonder how close the figures are (i.e. ground contact time). The device is about the size of your hand, and fits on belt. My athletes were saying that the belt bounces around quite a bit, so they were a bit skeptical about the data it was recording. The device transmits to a small tablet computer that posts the info in tables and charts quite nicely. So, the interface is very nice – I’m just curious about the accuracy of the data collection device.
Like I said, I’ll post some data soon to get some feedback from you guys.
I’d be interested to get Charlie’s opinion on it. If these guys are in Toronto soon, I’ll get them to demo it for him.
I think Boyle is using the sleds for strength training rather than speed/acceleration training. He calls it acceleration training but when he describes it in the videos it sounds (to me) to be strength type work (sometimes he even makes it sound like conditioning work - he mentioned someone vomitting afterwards i think) rather than true acceleration as a track person would think of accleration…
I believe Kruger is correct.
Dr.Sprint, Charlie asked you 4 pages ago to stop with the insults and you didn’t listen.
Posts like your are the reason forums are made fun of. Fake names and useless posts make you sound like a 15 year old kid.
Imagine (if you actual train athletes) one of your athletes joining this forum only to see his coach acting like you.
Because of posts like your good coaches quit using forums every day and that’s not good for anyone.
I am done with this and i assume everyone else is. If you don’t want to learn and communicate training information, take your insults somewhere else. Grow up.
Looking foward to this. Some of these system can be very accurate IF they are high quality. If anyone has used a Segway you will know how sensitive gyroscopes can be if the engineering is good. Any info on this system would be appreciated - even if the pricing is prohibitive.
Number two, that’s an excellent post. Well done.
A: It doesn’t matter what you call it- it’s the effect it has. Wrapping things under an umbrella of “specificity” doesn’t change the fact that one way (low resistance) helps and one way (high r) doesn’t.
B: If someone is vomiting from alledged acceleration work, you need to go back a re-define “specific”.
C: As No2 pointed out, you can’t separate away the acceleration abilities of sprinters from other athletes and their results are obviously superior.
D: Strength work exists for sprinters as well.
E: I have successfully worked with athletes and teams in multi-direction professional sports beyond track, including the NFL, NHL, NBA, Soccer, and Tennis.
In spite of this, there is an attemp to pretend this isn’t so every time a disagreement on training methods develops.
That’s my experience, take it or leave it.
I have asked Dr S to tone it down and I ask again (more strongly!). He has no need to agree with anyone’s methods- mine included, as you can see, but we all need to focus on training methods without wasting time on personalities.
The argument on training gets lost when the tone goes downhill.
You can get more info if you contact them. Thing isn’t for sale yet. http://informsport.ca/info_request.html
Charlie sorry if I wasnt clear, I was just trying to clarify his use of sleds…
I in no way feel that his use would be optimal for developing acceleration or feel that it is specific or that specificity can even be achieved. I also am aware of your work in multidirectional sports, I vividly recall the story you told in the Sydney seminar of the tennis player who you prepared for agility tests with no specific agility work at all…
Was just trying to say that Boyles use is very different to what some people thought and different to what he may even indicate (ie im not convinced hes using it for “acceleration work” at all) in the articles he writes (when interpretting what he says from the videos)