7 Takeaways from both coaching and training in 2021

2021 obviously presented a plethora of challenges for coaches and athletes everywhere. However, as this is only my second year of coaching an athletics squad, to this date, I don’t know coaching without COVID floating around as a considerable factor. Even if COVID presented its issues for the improvements of my athletes, I’m proud to say that many of them came out of the Sydney lockdown experience moving better and set up well to perform over the coming months in the Australian domestic season. As the New Year begins in its early stages, I’m also proud of my own development and the outlook of my coaching career. Over the last 12 months:

• I’ve started a company (Track Speed Development) in partnership with Dr. Michael Psarakis and this has seen a new level of professionalism (along with a move to Bankstown Athletics Club) brought to the training environment.

• Worked with Louis Dennison closely which has been a blast. Louis’ (and MIke’s) knowledge has empowered me greatly and it has been awesome seeing Louis’ development as a coach throughout the year.

• Begun coaching a series of elite athletes, some of whom have represented Australia in senior teams. As a part of this, the coaching team has developed a 400m group and coaching and learning about the 400m has been way more fun than I first thought it’d be (I didn’t think anything could touch the hurdles or 100m, but I’m really getting around the longer sprints right now).

• Helped prepare an NRL athlete for his preseason which saw very rapid technical improvements over the course of 6 weeks. I’d love to have a pre-season squad next year of NRL/AFL/Field sports who’d like to work together to get fast over the course of 10-12 weeks.

• Featured on 2 podcasts (Hyperperformance Podcast and The Athlete’s Platform) which were both super fun.

• Hosted 2 online webinars (Simplifying Sprinting and Understanding Acceleration which can be found on Track Speed Development’s Youtube). Many of the guests of these webinars are people who I look up to in the industry and I had a lot of fun hosting these.

• I began working as a High School Teacher. This was in both a casual and full-time capacity. I learned as much about coaching while teaching English than I have while coaching athletics.

• Personal growth moving out with my partner and becoming more financially independent.

There have been some other significant moments in my coaching development as well, but the above feels like a bit of a self-circle-jerk already so I’ll leave it there. I want to keep putting myself in positions going forward which demand growth and learning. In the short term, I’d like to write a book to sell online which can act as a guide for practitioners to help develop a coaching eye and construct effective, simple sprint programming.

Below are some of my largest reflections from this year from both training myself and coaching others. There’s a good chance I look back on these ideas and reflections cringing from their insignificance, but it’s where I’m at right now and I hope you can take away something from it.

Do what you can do

As obvious as this may sound, far too many mistakes that I’ve made for both myself and others is due decision making being dictated by ideas of what ‘should’ be done. Sprinters should do this, jumpers should do that, hurdlers should do this. Most of these sentiments are drawn from successful coaching methods and widely applied to everyone in a given training environment. This year, I’ve gone further away from looking at successful sprint programs and continued to find more and more respect for coaches who I’d deem problem solvers. Stories of the coaching of Greg Rutherford or the renaissance of Trayvon Brommel are the stories which inspire me and are the stories which I think are more of a real reflection of working with athletes in their mid-20s (which is mostly who I work with). I want to continue to become a better problem solver alongside the coaches whom I work with. More and more often in the process of solving problems, issues have arisen in situations where we are trying to shoehorn something which we think should be done, rather than respecting the individual in front of us and doing what we can do. Do issues arise when running long? Run shorter, and develop capacity elsewhere. Do issues arise when spikes are worn multiple times a week? Train in flats more. Does heavy strength training beat you up? Do it with less density. Often a discussion of this nature is discussed through the binaries of methods and principles, yet in the world of track and field, these two elements are assumed knowledge and literally irrelevant compared to the skill of virus identification. Discussion of methods and principles seem like child's play when the task is to revive or ignite a career beyond the years of adolescence. Whatever the compromise required may be, the ideal training program for a compromised athlete is not going to look ideal to the eyes of an outsider or to the eyes of a rigid-minded coach and this is something that you can’t be insecure about as a coach.

Increase movement options

If you follow me on instagram, you’d probably think most of my training is just spent in lunge hold positions or doing side bends on a flywheel. It really isn’t, most of it is spent just doing normal, typical sprint training type stuff. In saying that, however, a large focus for myself this year was increasing my movement options and I think this has led to a big improvement in my athleticism. After years of heavy powerlifting type training and from a few traumatic injuries playing football, my movement options became pretty limited. I looked more like Jujimufu than I did any competent sprinter. I was stuck in a big anterior pelvic tilt, I had no hip IR, no spinal movement whatsoever, no hip extension, etc. and despite being quite strong, I wasn’t able to put myself in good positions during running due to the limitations of my movement options. Yes, being strong and powerful is important, but be mindful of the negative effects of any form of exercise and understand how it may have an effect on your performance (pretty much, is an excessive amount of strength training messing with your running technique?).

Acceleration is king

Years ago, if you were to ask me what the most important factor in winning a 100m race is, I’d say it’s maximum velocity. Within that answer, I always viewed maximum velocity in isolation and this was a mistake on my part. It has taken me too long to realise that maximum velocity is quite literally the end product of acceleration. As such, acceleration has become a real focus for both my own and my athlete’s development. It is cool to see how a focus on the technical model found in the early stages of acceleration has a significant impact on the technical model of the athlete’s maximum velocity. Furthermore, maximum velocity needs to be contextual to the environment of athletics. In field sports, accelerations begin while moving and in upright positions and as such, I could see merit to training ‘flying’ sprints. However, for track athletes, I do not think training maximum velocity in isolation is ideal. Instead, teach the athlete to overcome inertia, to have each stride contribute to an increase in velocity and to allow the find maximum velocity in the context of a race. Furthermore, I do not think that there’s better ‘power’ training than acceleration (particularly resisted). Become a beast, do heaps of acceleration.

These ideas may be found in a case study in the Simplifying Sprinting presentation and technical discussion of acceleration may be found in the Understanding Acceleration presentation.

Machines and isolation

2021 was the year I started to think gym machines were cool. Personally, my greatest limiting factor as an athlete stemming all the way back to 2011 when I hurdled has been chronic adductor issues. It’s ridiculous that it has taken 10 years to directly load this muscle and the best way to do this has been using a machine. If your greatest limiting factor is something is a muscle group, perhaps just hop on a machine and try max it out. I would’ve thought that all the squats, lunges and copenhagens would’ve given me adductors of titanium, yet when I first hopped on my local SnapFitness’ adductor machine, the second notch in the weight stack left me absolutely shaking. As someone who prides himself on strength, this was eye-opening. I’ve been praying at the squeeze machine for months now and my hips have never felt better.

Good technique drives adaptations

This reflection came in response to researching further into tendon stiffness by looking at a paper headed by Angus Ross. I wrote a more in depth reflection on this earlier in the year so you can look at one of my blogs to find out more. The main takeaway from Ross’ paper was that tendon stiffness is not purely physiological, instead relies heavily on the athlete’s coordination (both intramuscular and within the context of the sporting skill). To contextualise this, the way I view it is that if you may be able to improve the stiffness of a tendon through strength and plyometric interventions, however, that stiffness cannot be expressed if the athlete is not able to have the appropriate timing of muscular contractions or if the athlete cannot position themselves in time/space well enough to express stiffness. “You cannot be strong in a weak position” is something which I’ve heard Randy Huntington express. The way I visualise Randy’s words of wisdom would be to visualise a sprinter landing their foot far in front of the centre of mass while sprinting. No matter how strong or powerful an athlete is, the positioning of this stride will determine it to be weak and slow. If you were to take the same athlete and have them position their foot in a different position and coming from a different angle, that ‘weak and slow’ athlete is not ‘strong and powerful’; yet they’re the same athlete. To take this idea further and to stay on the topic of tendon stiffness, if you were looking to improve the stiffness of the achilles and to improve the co-contractions around the knee and ankle which would see an improvement in the expression of force, it is mostly going to be determined by the athlete’s ability to put themselves in positions to express force repetitively and rapidly for many months in a row. You can look at sprinting as a brilliant method for driving physiological adaptations; which is something which is often overlooked and would lead to an over reliance on the gym for physiological adaptations. If you can put yourself in good positions of acceleration for many reps; over many sessions; over many months; you will become more powerful. Likewise, if you want to get stronger, you will need to continuously improve your technique for the main lifts in the gym. The only way to progressively expose an athlete to greater forces and greater velocities (which is a pretty great way to drive adaptation) is to continuously develop technique. Therefore, to continuously develop a more impressive athletic profile, the limitation will most likely be one of a technical nature.

Becoming a firebender

The best thing I’ve written this year was an article comparing the elements of the universe of Avatar the Last Airbender and sprinting archetypes. Essentially:

• Airbending: Tendinous, max velocity, rapid athlete

• Waterbending: Smooth, speed endurance, metabolically gifted athlete.

• Fire: Explosive, acceleration, concentric athlete.

• Earth: Strong, probably not a sprinter athlete.

Since I’ve started lifting weights in 2013, I think I’ve been an earthbender. That is, until 2021, in which I’ve slowly become more of a firebender. Perhaps, I’m a special kind of lavabender akin to Bolin. In short, I’ve become more powerful than I am strong. Here is a short list of things which have assisted in this development.

• Medicine ball throwing is undoubtedly the most convenient and easy power training. 15-30 throws before or after a sprint may take 10 minutes. Just crank them out and overtime, get good at throwing lighter and lighter balls (if you were once an earthbender like myself).

• Strength training requires less dosage and less density than you believe. I’ve gone from strength training two or three times a week to once, if that.

• Get away from a mass base paradigm if you are looking to develop power. Acquire some form of VBT device to outline wattage totals. A goal early in my offseason was to hit the Su Bingtian 120kg Hang Clean at 2m/s. This had me slinging hang cleans at at least 2.2m/s for months on end. Comically, my tendo unit required an anchor which I did not know and I wouldn’t increase the weight of my hang clean until I could hit 12/12 hang cleans in a session >2.2m/s. I was stuck on 80kg for 8 weeks when my max hang clean was over 130kg previously. This was a blessing in disguise as I spent so many weeks motivated to try and progress in weight that I was moving that 80kg >2.4m/s sometimes. Anyways, try measuring power more than mass.

• Try to have strength interventions which do not limit your movement options. If the means to get stronger is to just create stronger leverage, for example, going from a front squat to a low bar back squat to just move more mass, perhaps this increase in mechanical load is not worth the squeeze for the sacrifice of movement options required for sprinting. On that note, don’t be afraid to juice machines (leg press, hack squat, smith machine options, whatever).

• Accelerate (resisted, unresisted, hills) often. Overcoming inertia is the best power training (as discussed above).

• Improve technique to expose yourself to faster and higher forces (as discussed above).

• Take pride in firebending. Having this as a driving force is probably the most important factor. Create simple measurements of an increase in power, such as medball throwing distance; CMJ; 10m time and max oly lift wattage. Their improvement may not come as quickly and as easy as growing a squat, but continue to motivate to boost the crap out of those metrics.

Psychological development

This is probably my biggest curiosity going forward. How can I have a greater impact on the psychological development of my athletes? I think the development of psychology begins with the athlete reflecting as to why they are where they are. If you haven’t had success, what have the reasons been? If you haven’t had success to this point, what impact has your psychology had on this? I always took pride in my psychology towards training, yet I never had success. I tried very hard; was incredibly consistent; always did extras; always tried hard yet honestly, I still sucked. I had/still have negative psychological processes towards training. In the past, I would always do too much without understanding the negative consequences or realising how much I could actually adapt to. I would ignore the symptoms my body presents. I would prioritise and expend energy on the development of things which truly did not have a beneficial effect on the improvement of performance. I did not take days off when I should’ve taken days off. I did not respect my injury history as a potential limiting factor in my future success. Ultimately, when I experienced a setback, I did not reflect on what could be done better going forward and this led to a cycle. Nothing was changing and injury or stagnation was imminent. I think I’m getting better, and coaching has opened my eyes as I see some of these processes on a daily basis. As a coach, I want to do a better job to help change these processes in athletes and to demand change. I just don’t know how to do this well, tastefully or constructively in some circumstances and something I'd like to learn more about moving forward.

Hope you get something out of this read and good luck to everyone competing in 2022. Please keep an eye out for an upcoming product early this year and if you have learned something off the Metamorphosistrackproject or through a Track Speed Development seminar, please support us when these products are released.

Me and Mike + Me and Louis