I wanted to get an opinion from some of the masterminds on here about the impact of the various warmups on various energy systems. If done everyday, How would a mile warmup (with 1 lap easy, 1 lap hard, 1 easy, 1 hard) in addition to various ground drills and Sprint drills, impact performance in the hi/low system as opposed to only an 800m warmup? I know coaches who swear by this mile warmup for the not only 200-800m runners buT for the short sprints, jumps and multi events as well. My main concern as a decathlete is that this will take away from maximum speed development. However I am a bit overweight (currently built more like a football player than a trackster) and need some great aerobic and anaerobic conditioning for the 400m and 1500m, more specifically the 1000m for my first indoor hep in early December. Any advice?
Warm up should prepare/ get you ready for the event/ workout and it should be progressive (build up to your activity)
You should ask yourself questions why you doing what you are doing.
You should feel how much is enough for you.
Someone said that at the end of the warm up you should feel like nicely and slowly cooked roasted chicken, just perfect, lol, ready to go.
The one lap easy/hard sounds more like a workout to me than actual warm up.
There is no much of prep work for 1500m in decathlon, the prep comes out of tempo work. 400 out of speed reserve.
Few thoughts.
Some of people I coach they don’t like jog at the beginning of the warm up, they do strides, others go for jog. I don’t argue with them about it, they need to be ready/ feel ready for the workout. That’s it.
If I were to characterize what I’ve witnessed from watching Merlene Ottey , Marian Jones, Tim Montgomery , Bruny Surin, Colin Jackson, Jackie Joyner, Carl Lewis, Milt Ottey, Frankie Fredrick, Ben Johnson, Angella Taylor ( Issajenko), Angella Bailey, Leroy Burrel, Dennis Mitchell, Lynford Christie, Mark McKoy, Pricilla Lopes, Ronaldo Skeets Nehemiah I’d say their warm ups have been relaxed, easy, smooth, somewhat continuous showing little effort or strain. It’s doubtful that each of these athletes had identical warm ups. It’s likely the patterns were similar and evolved throughout their career.
All aspects of sports preparation that are intelligently constructed ensure that one work backwards from the target and secure smooth transitions from point A to point B and so on; regardless if we are discussing successive: training blocks, training weeks, training days, or the beginning to the end of a single session.
The warm up to the beginning part of the main part of the workout is no different.
We must work backwards from the workout when constructing the warm up and ensure that the end of the warm up bares a very close similarity to the first part of the main workout.
In this way, the nature of the beginning of the workout must be clearly understood from the standpoint of biomotor, biodynamic, and bioenergetic structure.
As a decathlete you have the additional need to perform more specific warmups over the course of each day/session as the contents of each of your training days are more diversified than any other T&F athlete.
The training year, training block, training session, sets of work, and warm up, like a good story, all have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
While nearly any warm up will have some impact on general fitness you’ll want to ensure that your preparation for the 400m and multi-lap events is specific to the demands of those events; which requires much more than some easy or easy/hard laps during the warm up.