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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: Well one of the things that we try to do is really try to identify
what’s important for success in the sprints. So we do tests and we
do analysis and we do historical analysis looking at other sprinters
that have been very good.
I’ve been fortunate to have been involved for a long time for about
16-17 years with USA Track and Field women’s sprint
development with Tony Veney and Bert Lyles and Danny
Williams and worked junior elite camp for Tony Wells and people
like that.
The other two mentors that I’ve had have been very big.
Obviously Dan Pfaff and Boo Schexnayder and they have a similar
type of philosophy with regarding neuromuscular speed and power
development. So that’s where things come from. That’s where we
start at.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: Dan’s absolutely correct and it’s something that he’s helped me
with mentally over the years. In terms of prioritizing it means that
it’s something that we’re concerned with, maybe even obsessed
with that we really put it first and foremost in our plans. That’s
something from the very first day of training that we do and it’s
something that we’re concerned about from the very first day of
training of developing those qualities.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewer: Now would there be any differences in that philosophy if you were
developing say a 60 meter or 100 meter specialist versus a 400
meter runner or 400 meter hurdler?
Interviewee: Not really because you’ve gotta be real fast if you’re gonna be a
great 400 runner or a great 400 hurdler. You can be good with just
average speeds and average power, but if you wanna be great, elite
at whatever level, then you’ve gotta have good speed and power
qualities. So even for those events that’s something that we’d be
put a serious investment into.
Interviewer: How much time do you spend on the track or the speed component
compared to jumping and hopping types of movements versus
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: We do all those things together in the same day I guess I would
say. Not necessarily at the same time, but for example, our day
one will include serious acceleration runs, 10s, 20s and 30s, maybe
3 to 5 sets, usually 4 sets. Then after that we’ll do some jumping
activities, some long jump, some triple jump type stuff. Then we’ll
go in the weight room and lift and do lifting movements and squat
movements and bench press movements.
Then sometimes after that we’ll come out and we’ll do throwing
activity. So that’s a big speed power day. Another day in the
week we might do resisted runs where we’re doing hills or sleds or
that type of stuff. Then we might do some different jumps, some
different jumping activities or if we don’t do jumping activities
that day we might do a different series of multi-throw activities.
Then we’ll go in and lift.
Now there’s certain times of the year where we’re really heavy
into maximum strength or we’re really heavy into elastic strength
or we’re really heavy into speed development or really heavy into
acceleration development or sometimes even speed endurance. All
those different components of speed and power, but we’re always
touching on some of those components several times a week
throughout the year.
Interviewee: Generally early in the year we’re going to develop – we’re not
gonna do a real heavy absolute strength type work early in the year
because they’re not ready for it yet. The athletes aren’t ready.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
I’ve had girls jump really far; 43, 44 and 45 feet where we never
really did real advanced bounding, the stuff you see on the DVDs.
We did simple bounding and things like that and they were fine.
They got better and they improved, but they just weren’t there yet
and there was no need.
Interviewer: You talk about athletes being ready. Now, I work at the
developmental levels, the high school level. That’s my bias in
asking these questions to you, but I know how poorly things are
done at the developmental level, especially in terms of developing
speed and power qualities.
Do you find, even with the caliber of athletes that you have coming
into your program, that, when they come in, they don’t have the
neuromuscular training age, for lack of a better term, or the
coordinative skills or kinesthetic awareness it to handle that type of
training and how do you address that from your philosophy, just in
terms of prioritizing neuromuscular development, but also the
individualization that’s required for each athlete?
Interviewee: Yeah; I think some of the individualizing takes care of itself. Like
the people who aren’t as big and strong and powerful necessarily.
They go into the weight room and they use less weight. So that
individualizes how much volume we’ll use. A lot of times I’ll
write things in ranges.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
You don’t get locked into having everyone do the exact same
things. Or you can write acceleration development A and
acceleration development B. Maybe one is 10s, 20s and 30s.
Maybe one is 20s, 30s and 40s or something like that.
If you get real big gaps in the talent level of your group. You
could do something like that or one could go on the blocks and one
could go on the grass. It really just depends on your situation, but I
think that the principles apply to whether they’re developmental or
elite.
Interviewer: I like that. That makes a lot of sense. I think that’s good
particularly those that do have that wide range of ability in their
group.
We talk about this neuromuscular work and many people still have
this belief that it takes a long period of time to recover from this
work. How often – let’s say you’re working in a seven day micro-
cycle type of schedule. How often can you do neuromuscular
work, the acceleration work or the jump work in the course of that
particular microcycle depending on the time of year, et cetera?
Interviewee: Most of the year, even during competition, we can do some type of
speed and power work at least twice a week. That’s almost any
situation. People are a little bit beat up. People leave a little bit
injured. People that are real tired from the competitions. We can
always do some type of speed and power work at least twice a
week, but generally speaking we do some type of speed and power
work three days a week.
So, I would say three days a week is doable for a big segment of
the population. In special situations, special cycles maybe you can
get four days a week, but that’s starting to push it, but it can be
done. Just like if you want to train really hard, then you’ve got
recover really hard. So it can be done.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
When you get into competition season you might not be able to do
it two days a week because of meets and things like that, but that’s
different. Then you get down to two days a week and if you have
several competitions in a week, then your competition ends up
becoming your speed and power training in a sense because of the
high neuromuscular demands of competition.
Interviewer: You talk about doing those types of things two, three, maybe even
four times a week depending on the theme that you’re working in
and how many kids you have, et cetera. Talk about things that you
consider important besides neuromuscular training?
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Interviewer, Interviewee
So if you have your sprinters and your hurdlers and your jumpers
do activities that are lower intensity, but still the challenging
coordination and the challenging balance and the challenging
proprioception and all those things, then it’s a much bigger benefit
than going out and doing a 2-mile run or going and sprinting for 30
minutes necessarily.
Interviewer: Interesting.
Interviewer: How important would you say that these factors are? I’m thinking
about coordination. To me coordination is one of the greatest
limiting factors and you can talk about coordination of speed,
coordination of strength, coordination of all types of different
things.
Interviewee: Every day, every single day in almost every activity. It’s
absolutely crucial for us. So from the warm-up to the cool down
coordination matters. Movement patterns matter. We have a
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Interviewer, Interviewee
whole series of sprint drills that we look at to help the athlete, well
not only be coordinated, but to look at what’s their fitness, are they
ready to train; things like that.
What are the things that you look for when you’re looking at
individual athletes, but also when you’re looking at your group as a
whole, whether it’s your hurdlers or your sprinters or your 400
meter, 400 meter hurdlers? I’m talking more from like an
assessment or a movement screen standpoint. What are the things
that you’re looking for when you are watching your athletes and
you’re looking at how their readiness for particular elements of
training?
Interviewee: Some of the things that we look for are we really try to look at
posture and what’s the athlete’s posture like. Are there deviations
in good posture? What’s the symmetry like and range of motion.
So is the same thing happening on the left side as on the right side?
Does the foot come off the track the same way? Is one side as
elastic? Are their arms and legs moving through the same range of
motion on both sides? Those types of things.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: I think that the better athletes that you have that it becomes more
important because for maybe the 12.5 girl, her being off 1 percent
or 2 percent or even 3 percent might not be that big of a deal. She
probably can run down the track and be okay, but when you’ve got
an elite person that 3 percent is a big deal and you might be setting
up an injury situation. I’m not saying that the less developed
athletes they can’t get injured ‘cause they obviously do, but I’m
saying those little differences are more magnified the better you
are.
Interviewer: Right.
Interviewee: So that’s the difference. Everybody wants their car to run well, but
if I ride my Honda Civic and it’s off a little bit, no big deal. I’m
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Interviewer, Interviewee
just not as efficient. I gotta put more gas in, but those guys in Indy
if they’re off 2 or 3 percent, they’re crashing into the wall and they
don’t get paid that day.
Interviewer: That’s a great analogy. Now are there differences between male
and female athletes? I say this both for the developmental level,
looking at, say, the 12.5 HS girl. For most developmental coaches
you’re hoping to get the 12.5 girls, but talk in terms of the 12.5 girl
and the 11.5 boy versus the 11.5 girl and the 10.5 boy or even
faster than that.
Interviewee: I think there’s some differences between genders, but not so much
that you’ve gotta go into a whole other field of study. I think that
women sometimes can do more elastic work and men can do more
absolute strength work at different times of the year. I think that
the hormonal output is obviously different between men and
women because they’re just setup differently.
For the different levels like elite, sub-elite, super elite or whatever,
then the differences just become – things become more fine. Little
mistakes magnify more for the elite athletes I think.
Interviewer: When you talk about these evaluations, is that something you’re
doing when you’re at practice? Are you watching your group
warm-up or go through a particular circuit or whatever the
particular thing you’re doing that day is, are you looking at the
group and making group assessments or are you taking each of
these kids individually and putting them through their own
movement screen where you’re going to work on the individual
strengths and weaknesses of that particular athlete?
Interviewee: Right now my group is small, but I’ve had larger groups, relatively
larger, 20-25 kids. I don’t write workout, warm-up evaluation
stuff for each athlete. We write one thing or two things or
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Or you might notice see, this kid, he doesn’t quite look right. You
talk to them and see are they feeling okay or sometimes when you
see aberrant behavior and aberrant movements it’s because
something’s wrong or sometimes because they’re not
concentrating. So sometimes you talk to them and say, “Hey, you
feeling okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay. Let’s make sure we do this.
Make sure you got your hips up and make sure you’re doing this.”
Then it gets better and okay, there’s no injury issue. They just
weren’t concentrating.
So it’s not just always the physical part that shows up when you’re
doing these screens or these evaluations. It’s just they got mental
and they’ve got life things going on, too.
Having said that, like I’ve got Movement by Gray Cook. It’s a
really good book, but it’s not necessarily what I use and that’s not
a knock on Gray. We just design our warm-ups so that there are
enough things to evaluate with regard to those things I talked about
earlier; posture, range of motion, symmetry, elasticity that we can
try to look for those things or the lack of them in the warm-up
activities that we choose.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewee: Yeah; some of the things that we look at – I’ll go over a couple
areas. We look at the foot and the lower leg. So obviously let’s
just say from the knee down there’s a lot of things that can happen
and a lot of areas that have a big impact on your ability to do speed
and power work, on your ability to sprint.
Looking at the talus and the calcaneus so going towards the bottom
of the foot at the end and then sometimes those shift. So if the
talus and the calcaneus shift it creates problems. So sometimes if
kids slow down incorrectly, they’ll get a talus-calcaneus shift. If
they’re blocking when they sprint, like they’re sticking their foot
out they can get that to happen.
So if those or the cuboid stuck, then you get ankle issues and foot
issues and that can shoot up. When those get locked up and you
get back pain, hip pain. So those areas right there can be a
problem.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
The shin splint area or the shin splint issue that everyone goes
through at some point in their career and sometimes you have
years where you feel like your whole group has it. Looking at the
peroneals, the peroneal muscles.
What I found is kids that have shin splints issues, when they eat
more fruits and vegetables, when they get Omega-3 fatty acids in
their diet, when they drink a decent amount of water some of that
stuff starts to fix itself because the body’s healing, the body’s in a
nutritionally non-deficient state.
Looking at the tibialis anterior. That’s an area when you have shin
splint issues that’s tended to be inflamed or it tends to get cinched
down. So working that area as well can make a big difference.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
So it’s not a matter of the kid being lazy or not trying or not
running fast enough. It’s a matter of they’re not physically in a
state where they’re ready to do true speed and power or true
sprinting. So you might have to go a plan B or get them to the
medical people or have them do some homework at home, whether
it’s the foam roller or the tennis ball or a combination of those
things, which is probably best.
That’s one example of looking at some of the lower leg and that’s
a real surface evaluation or real surface overview of some of the
issues that can go on on the lower leg, but something to understand
because the foot’s where you make contact with the ground.
That’s where all the force is applied. So if that lower leg is giving
you issues, then it’s gonna be very hard to sprint, hurdle and jump.
Interviewee: Yeah. I think the better your training is going the closer you are to
great performance, the closer you are to injury. I think that’s –
Because when you’re close to great performance you’re on the
edge. Well when you’re on the edge any little thing can make
things go awry. So sometimes it can happen. Not because you had
bad training design. Sometimes you got great training design and
you just went one day too far. You had bad luck or the kid didn’t
sleep well that day, that night before. I’ve seen some crazy things
happen at the worst time and it’s not necessarily the coach’s fault
or really the athlete’s fault. It’s just you reached a limit or you
were near the limit, but if you don’t ever get near the limit you’re
not gonna have ultimate performance.
There’s a time and place for everything and yeah, you’ve gotta
rest. Rest is a crucial part of performance and a crucial part of elite
performance, but you can’t just rest. You’ve gotta get ready to go
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as well, but that’s part of the art. Anybody tell you they figured it
all out, they’re lying to you. No one’s figured it all out yet. It’s an
art and it’s a science and they’re both very important.
Another area that we tend to have issues with, every coach that’s
coached a sprinter has kids with hamstring problems. So when
they go to the training room the kids are told ice and stim and
stretch. That rarely works.
Everyone gets hamstring injuries and the kids take eight weeks to
come back or they’re out for the season. I’ve been fortunate
enough to be involved either with good therapists or good coaches
or I’ve done good research and you have good resources to rely
upon in terms of people that when I’ve had some injury situations
happen at inopportune times to get on the phone and call and say
hey, this is what’s going on, this is what I see, this is what I feel.
What do you think I should do?
A lot of times with hamstring issues, if you look at the psoas and
the iliacus or sometimes it’s called the ilio-psoas, it’s very tied into
hamstring issues and because of the design of the way it attaches
on the femur and the way it attaches on the spine. So if the psoas
is not happy, if it’s trigger points, if it’s not releasing correctly,
then you can bet the hamstring issues are a day away.
Interviewer: That’s a great point, Kebba. Can you give us maybe just one
example of the type of activity or movement that you would do if
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you have an athlete who’s having this type of problem that you
would do to address that? Even a very general example.
Interviewee: One thing I’m gonna look at is I’m gonna look at the psoas, the
piriformis, the abductors and see if they’re working correctly. If
they’re not those are the first areas that go when kids complain of
hamstring issues.
So doing those things and looking at those things will give you
some idea as to how bad it might be or where the culprit might be.
What’s the posture when they do those exercises? What’s the
reflexivity when they do those exercises? Can they lift? What’s
their lifting like? Can they really open up the hip type of stuff. So
those are things you might consider.
Then there’s also just muscle testing type stuff. It’s not to say that
– trying to think what the word is – it’s not to say that muscle
testing on the table necessarily is going to be completely predictive
of what they can do on the track because sometimes they can test
great on the table and then they still can’t sprint.
Sometimes you do a muscle test and some of the stuff from Thiel,
like Touch for Health type work. That stuff is very, very helpful,
but just because they can pass those tests doesn’t mean they’re
ready to sprint all out yet. There might be a bridge to okay, we’re
on the path towards wellness, on the path towards health, but that
stuff is very instrumental; stuff that we use a lot.
So there are a lot of good therapists, like Thiel and people like
Leon Chaitow’s stuff is very, very influential and very helpful and
the Travell and Simmons book. Their work on anatomy and
trigger point therapy is absolutely crucial and has been great in
terms of helping me understand the anatomy and helping me
understand the change and looking at Thomas Myers’ anatomy
trains work.
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Interviewer, Interviewee
Interviewer: No; that does make sense. It’s interesting. You have to shift your
perspective a little bit or go beyond maybe what the common view
on things is.
So, let me shift gears here a little bit or maybe leap forward. At
the end of the day it seems to me everything that we’re doing from
day 1 from warm-up to cool down from recovery day to speed and
everything in between really is gearing us toward a championship
season and getting us prepared so that athletes can be at their best,
at their healthiest during championship season.
Interviewer: Can I cut you off there real quick because you just said something
I don’t want to forget. What do you say to people who always
want to know your secret peaking workouts?
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But are they healthy and are they confident? Well if they’re
healthy and confident and then that’s huge. So on top of that you
need to have to back up to the fundamentals, like can they execute
various movements under pressure? So a lot of times what
happens is it’s not that the workouts weren’t good. It’s that the
athlete doesn’t have the psychological composure to handle
pressure. Some of that is from training.
I’m a huge Star Wars fan. One of the things that when Luke
Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back, he has this big failure at the
cave in Dagoba. When he’s getting ready to leave Dagoba and go
fight Darth Vader, Yoda said to him, “Remember your failure at
the cave.”
Interviewer: That’s good stuff. Talk about how you create a pressure
atmosphere where you can imitate meet pressure? How do you put
that pressure on the athlete in practice in such a way that they can
directly apply what they learned from it from a success and even
better, a failure standpoint to a championship meet and that final or
whatever it is, that last jump, et cetera?
Interviewee: I think one of the things you have to be demanding. I think you
can’t be afraid as a coach to be demanding. That doesn’t mean you
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Interviewer, Interviewee
If you look at the best universities and the best high schools in the
country, they have demanding professors and teachers. They ask a
lot of their students. They don’t cut corners and even the students
who may have a lot of potential but may be are lazy, they don’t cut
them any slack.
I don’t mean necessarily they gotta run a certain time, but when
they warm-up are they focused. When they do their sprint
exercises are they focused. When they’re doing their block starts
are they focused on the things they need to do to be excellent on
that day on that week in that year.
I’m demanding about how we exit the blocks, about how we come
to set. They might seem like small things to somebody else, but
I’ve seen so many kids blow races by not coming to set correctly.
Interviewee: So that’s how you exert pressure. Then the next level is doing
acceleration work with three really good people together. So
you’ve got your 4 by 1 relay practicing block starts together.
Well can they perform the activities correctly? Can they accelerate
correctly with two other good kids around them? Say you’re doing
12 block starts that day. Can they do nine of them at least a B
level or is like they get two really good ones and the rest of them
are all scattered, with a scatter gram if you had to plot those or
grade those.
So a lot of times what happens is maybe the kids who are real
talented but young can maybe only do a few really good efforts
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and then maybe by the time they get to be juniors or seniors or they
get to elite status their ability to stay focused over a whole workout
from warm-up to cool down is much better than when they were
younger.
I’ve had kids that were all good and did the track workout great,
but then the multi-jumps such and the lifting sucks –
Interviewee: Kids will go around the track and they might not like doing track
stuff, but they like the weight room. So they’ll be really focused in
the weight room or they’ll be really focused on the bench press,
but they’ll let their Olympics be sloppy.
Interviewer: That’s a really great point. Let me ask you a question, Kebba.
Again, I’m a developmental coach. I don’t work with the type of
athletes that you work with. The athletes you have on your team
are like once in every ten year type of kids for me, but I always say
to people that I really feel like what I really excel at is not the sets
and the reps and how many multi-jumps to do on this day, but it’s
the psychological component.
I get kids to buy in. I can get kids to believe they can achieve
things or run times or compete at levels that they didn’t think they
could do at the beginning of the season when we first got together.
You talked about this a few minutes ago, about maybe feeling
confident could be 75 percent or more.
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They were in shape. One of the girls ran 27 250 and 16.6 150,
which is fine, but she’d never go 23. She worked her butt off. She
was a very, very hard worker, a very talented female, but because
she didn’t have the belief in herself, she couldn’t express those
qualities when it came to competition.
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Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. I like that. I hope people reading this
right now really take that into consideration.
Interviewee: I would say from the anatomy and therapy standpoint, one of the
books that I would suggest, I would suggested Anatomy Training
by Thomas Myers to most people.
Cressey and Robinson wrote Assess and Correct. They did a DVD
series on that, which is very, very good to learn how to assess
certain movements and assess certain body areas to see and how to
correct those areas, too, when there’s dysfunction.
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So I think there’s a big rush to read the new stuff, read the new
stuff and look at the new stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s
classic that’s still very, very helpful.
If you use these resources and listen to coaches like Tom Tellez
and Dan Pfaff from the TrackandFieldLegends program, you’ll get
some outstanding results. So I recommend going to Track and
Field Legends dot com and taking a look at that program or, at the
least, put your email address in, if you haven’t already, because I’ll
be sending you information like this as time goes on. So do that
and you’re on your way to superior performances.
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