Spar Sprints Conference 2005 – Loughborough University
The Spar Sprints Conference – UK Athletics Annual Conference for sprint coaches – was held today at Loughborough University and attended by over 100 coaches. Here is a brief review of the proceedings.
Dave Colins – “Working towards excellence”
Dave Colins got the conference rolling with his vision for the future of UK Athletics. I had never heard Dave talk before and he came across as witty and practical. His presentation was based around what he called the “5 rings” for performance:
- Technical + Tactical
- Movement Skills
- Physical Conditioning
- Psychological – Behavioural Skills
- Lifestyle & Support
The technical and tactical ring is the one traditionally done by the coach. He explained that we need to put together a general model (understanding) of what it takes to be a good sprinter so that coaches can engage in open dialogue about aspects related to technical development and all talk the same language. His emphasis was on getting coaches talking and educated in similar jargon so they can explain their ideas to each other.
Movement skills – he talked about drill work and how he had been to other countries and seen the precision with which drills were performed by their young athletes. He emphasised that even our top internationals cannot perform the basic drills correctly and that we need to ensure that the young athletes all have a common basic skills set so when they progress up the ranks we don’t have to go back and teach them these skills from scratch. Looking at this from a “core stability” point of view he explained that these problem underlay many injuries and all other physical abilities above and beyond sprinting.
Physical conditioning – he stressed the importance of developing good conditioning programmes for athletes so they can tolerate the level of work they need to perform. His words were “are they strong and fit enough to train” (in the first place). He also said we should be looking at football (soccer) as they all play a lot of games from an early age and perhaps we aren’t training our young athletes hard enough. This last point I found a little concerning based on my experience of the attocities being performed in at Professional soccer clubs – but at least he thinks strength and conditioning is a key aspect that needs to be addressed from an early age. The problem is now getting people access to good strength coaches.
The psychological ring was interesting. Basically he said this was perhaps the most important aspect because “why would he invest in a talented athlete that is an idol git!”. Coming from a psychology background I guess his perspective is a little biased but we all agree that good athletes need to be well motivated.
Lifestyle and Support – This was interesting. He talked about working with parents to improve support networks for athletes and also talked about athlete rewards and figuring out how athletes reward themselves so the coach knows how to motivate them.
His main take home point for the coaches was that on their own coaches can’t do all these things so they need help and what he want to do is provide a way for them to get this. He was very convincing. I liked his style. I hope he delivers.
Paula Dunn – Retaining and Developing Young Female Sprinters
Paula’s first point was about the problem with early specialisation in athletics and how it often leads to injuries and athletes not getting the broad base they need. She emphasised that strength and conditioning was key here and that general movement skills should be emphasised. She also talked about the problems with early achievers not making it to senior ranks and how talent identification was very hard at an early age.
Here next section was about the challenges UKA faced with supporting coaches with promising young athletes and how to encourage these athletes to continue in the sport. This lead onto the suggestion that UKA need to do the following things:
Quality coaching
Mentoring for inexperienced coaches
Sharing information and good practice
She emphasised how coaches in her area were trying to get together and share knowledge and gave lots of examples of how she was trying to get people to work together.
I liked the fact that UKA are now trying to get coaches to share ideas more. It was a major theme at the conference and I think it is a good thing for the sport in the UK.
Nick Dakin – Running and Technical Conditioning for the 400m Hurdles
Nick coaches Chris Rawlinson among others and presented his ideas about how to prepare an athlete for the 400m hurdles. He talked about each area of conditioning: hurdling conditioning, running conditioning strength/power conditioning and how he approached each.
His first major point was that hurlders need to hurdle from early in the season and need to do specific hurdling conditioning – which he achived through hurdle drills that are not taxing on the body while working on lactic tolerance training over the winter months.
On the running front he said that 400m hurdlers need to be good at the flat race. His philosophy to achieve this was “excellent lactic tolerance capacity with excellent extended lactic power capacity to run good 500-600m times and good top speed endurance for quick 200-300m capacity”.
He then talked about producing a conditioning base via fartleck training over the winter months followed by lactic tollerence training done by track sessions with a total volume of around 1500-2200m with 3 min rep breaks. As the athlete progressed this became 1200-1800m volume with 4-6min breaks.
Lactic power training is built via split 400s, 300s with short recovereies and long hurdle work outs (runs to hurdles 7-8).
Speed work was addressed via fast drills for neural recruitment, sled work and specific weight training exercises (jump squats, cleans etc). Runs of 100-150 were rolled in from March onwards as was acceleration work to hurdle 1.
He finished by touching on S&C but didn’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say he uses a periodised approach but did not explain it.
His closing slide read “know what you are looking to condition – know the event, know the athlete, know the session!”.
Marques Church – Conditioning for sprinting
Marques was a S&C expert. He ran through all the things he would look to do with an athlete. He started by explaining the idea of a functional assessment and talked about core stability. He then moved on to talk about strength and power work. He explained how weights affected the CNS and how you need to be careful of doing co-ordination drills to close to strength work. This was great! I hopes some people were listening to this section. I only wish he had spelled it out more thoroughly.
Then he moved onto how to develop power and talked about resisted work as well as overspeed work. Overall a very good introduction and someone who obviously know his stuff and could also communicate it effectively.
Colin Bovel – Sprint Hurdles a personal perspective
Colin talked about how he prepared people for the sprint hurdles. His presentation was quite detailed and he outlined his personal philosophy behind preparing an athlete and showed video of his athletes at the end.
He explained how he started off with a lot of lactic tolerance work and kept this in throughout the year right up until the competition period. His periodization of the hurdle heights and distances basically started with tempo runs over full height hurdles during the winter months before switching to fast runs over lower hurdles and then finally to fast runs over high hurdles just before competition. He emphasised the importance of head to head work with athletes competing against each other and how this prepared them for competition.
From a weight training perspective he used the classic periodization of strength to power over the entire season bringing in plyometrics right before competition.
His presentation was fairly hard to follow because it was quite technical. If I had the notes I think I could provide you with more information but unfortunately I do not.
Colin Jackson – Key note speech.
Colin started off with a story of what he used to think about as a young athlete which lead into a short 9 minute video he made for the BBC about what it takes to be a good athlete – featuring commentary form lots of different athletes from different sports. This was broken down into a number of sections and following the video Colin provided examples from his career to address each of these areas.
His speech was amazingly well presented. He must have practice for hours and I was impressed. He is a good ambassador for sport in the UK.
Round Table Discussion
The event closed with a question and answer featuring Colin Jackson, Colin Bovel, Nick Dakin and Mike McFarland. There were several interesting questions brought up from the crowd. One point that I found interesting was that Mike McFarland thought that the UK hurdlers needed more speed work and needed to be able to run better flat times. There was the usual questions about the poaching of athletes – which has been a major issue in athletics weekly over the past months – and some people in the audience had some pretty harsh views about it. The discussion almost got out of hand here.
Conclusion
I actually really enjoyed this conference. Mike McFarland who chaired most of it was fantastic. He seems to have a speed orientated view of sprinting (which makes a change) and I really enjoyed listening to everything that he said. Dave Colins was also interesting to listen to as was Marques Church. The one really great thing that came out of the conference is that Mike really tried to push the idea of getting coaches talking and comunicating. His line was “Britain is no longer Great” and we need to all work together to get it back on track. The communication issue is something I have spoken about before on this forum it is great that UK Athletics are finally doing something about it. With 2012 not too far away I think we might finally be starting to do something productive!
Please note, because I could only take these notes by hand some of the content may not be entirely accurate so if anyone else was there and wants to fill in the gaps I would encourage them to do so.
Cheers,
TC