How Do You Train Athletes at Maximum Speed?

Today’s show welcomes back track coach Randy Huntington, a track coach who has spent his recent years as the national track and field coach for the Chinese Athletics association.  Randy has coached numerous Olympians, gold medalists, and world record holders in his time as a track coach, and one of his recent successes was training Su Bingtian, Asian record holder in the 100m dash.  Bingtian, en-route to his 9.84 second run, covered 60m in 6.29 seconds and 40 yards in 4.08 seconds as per NFL combine timing. The past shows with Randy have been loaded with the wisdom of an elite coach and have been very popular.  For this episode, Randy took listener questions, and gives his answers on a variety of topics.  Some particular trends for this show included his specific speed training workouts and intensities, his thoughts on traditional strength and hypertrophy methods for speed and power, coaching relaxation and sprint technique, as well as Randy’s thoughts on the ever-debated Nordic hamstring exercise (and hamstring injury prevention training in general).  This and much more is covered on this tremendous Q&A episode. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. 4:11 – The importance of intuition in coaching and performance 7:33 – How understanding the response of animals can help coaches gain better intuition with training human athletes 11:27 – How to “rig” a seated calf machine to attempt to replicate the Keiser seated calf machine 15:23 – Randy’s thoughts on strength development for speed 22:49 – Randy’s favorite top speed and acceleration sessions 28:25 – How does Randy teach relaxation in sprinting, and his thoughts on mini-hurdles/wickets 31:03 – Why Randy doesn’t have his athletes train flying sprints at their maximal speed 37:02 – Considerations in how Randy uses “time of task” sprints, versus simply sprinting a distance for time 42:35 – A recap of how Randy uses water and general strength based recovery methods 45:17 – More thoughts on how and why Randy doesn’t train his flying sprints at maximal velocity each week 48:09 – How Randy’s training has evolved over his years as a coach 52:46 – Teaching acceleration mechanics to young athletes who don’t have much physical strength yet 54:56 – What key data points does Randy use to assess his athletic process 1:00:00 – Randy’s thoughts on overspeed “wind-shield” training such as used by Marcell Jacobs 1:06:39 – How Randy alters strength training when sprinters are in-season 1:07:51 – How Randy would train an athlete who is naturally weak, and if he plays to an athlete’s strengths, or works primarily to bring up weaknesses 1:11:38 – Randy’s thoughts on hamstring injury prevention and Nordic hamstrings “I try not to do too hard of strength training, until people can execute the technical (speed) component I want them to, unless that technical component needs strength to happen.  I don’t look at strength training as a way to create anything, because I first want them to be able to get them to move through the (skill) positions that are necessary, and then we add strength on top of that” “We still interpret power as force only… mostly because we haven’t had very effective ways to test it” “My basic pattern is heavy sled, 50% of bodyweight or higher, then 1080, using 15-20% of bodyweight, then unloaded” “We mostly use 6” mini-hurdles” “I rarely go above 95% (of max speed) (in flying sprints in training)” “I use (time of task) sprints specifically for testing” “I only test the 30m fly (max) at most every 6 weeks, and usually every 2 months” “Flying 30 is my big (“data oriented”) test” “I don’t look at the weight of the clean,