Over the past 3 months, we have had 5 of
our fall athletes run their mile test in gym class. The same results keep coming up. Athletes are dropping their time by at least one minute or more.
To put this into context, not all of them were in season. Some aren’t getting their usual cardiovascular work from running during practice or games. Some don’t even play sports. So what gives?
In YMCA SPC We don’t do any type of output work that lasts more 30 seconds. Occasionally athletes are doing 1-3x, 250-500 meter row that lasts roughly 1-2 min, but this isn’t often.
How can we be changing a mile time which can run anywhere from 6-12minutes with only 30 seconds of work?
Sprinting and Strength Training
Sprinting On Woodway
SHS Soccer Girls KB Front Squatting 3 Videos
The majority of our conditioning is done with very high-intensity sprints that last on average no more than 10 seconds. We then use a rest period of 1:6 (work to rest). Athletes that sprint on the woodway, Sparc, assault bike or sled will go for 10 seconds and then rest for at least 1 minute. This allows for the body to fully recover and produce power at a maximal intensity again.
Most athletes are seeing less and less of of this type of conditioning. Practice and games rarely get athletes into top speed movements (except for track). This is because the nature of team sports is stop, start, stop and rest. Check out the breakdown of a soccer game. The majority of the game is actually walking.
Physiology Of Football Profile Of The Game
The main takeaway is that if you want to improve human performance in all ranges, maximal strength and power (sprinting) are a must to incorporate. You need maximal strength to improve in order to improve force output. You need power output to improve velocity speed. These two qualities will then bring up all lower level abilities. This is why sprinting has dropped mile times. If an athlete ran a 9 minute mile at an intensity of 75% of their max, by improving his/her higher end capabilities, it now would be something like 65%. So the new 75% might potentially be an 8 minute mile.
Something to think about if you are a coach. Does it now make sense to run athletes at ratios of 1:2 work to rest for long periods of time? Full field suicides or gassers are good examples of these. Athletes might take up to 40 seconds to complete and then have to repeat after a minute of rest or slightly more. An important point is that it doesn’t mean that all other training is useless. We do have certain days where athletes will come in and do some lower level aerobic work because they are beat up from training/playing, have already sprinted the other days, are rehabbing something and/or aren’t competent enough yet to go full tilt.
The goal is to use the right tool at the right time. If you are always using a sledge hammer to put in some nails, chances are high things will get broken. That would be the equivalent to always running as hard as possible for as long as possible. You will break down. The flip side is using a finishing hammer to put in a railroad spike. If I want to increase speed and power running, cross country is not going to help with that.
The cool part is that this works for every age group. We have kids as young as 8 running Woodway sprints and as old as 82 doing Sparc sprints. Both are seeing improvements. One is learning how to produce speed and force at a young age, and the other just got the good news that rather than go to her cardiologist every 6 months she now only has to go once a year!
If you need help figuring out how to incorporate this strategy let me know.
Till next week!
TS Training Systems 