Today’s episode features track and sport performance coach, Jeff Howser. Jeff has been coaching track and field since 1971, and was himself a 6x ACC champion, named as one of the ACC’s top 50 track athletes of all time in 2003. Jeff was a sprints and hurdles coach at Florida, UCLA, NC State, Duke and UNC before his time as a speed and sports performance coach, back at Duke University.
If you caught the classic episode on oscillatory strength training with Sheldon Dunlap you may have heard Sheldon mention Jeff as a source of his oscillatory rep training knowledge. In addition to a number of elite track and field competitors, Jeff also trained the top high school 40-yard dash runner in history, who ran a 4.25 second effort.
In the world of speed training, many folks gravitate towards the “neat, packaged” training methods that are easy to understand and copy, such as sprint skip drills (A-skips, etc.). Unfortunately, these drills don’t transfer to speed in nearly the capacity that we would hope for. As Jeff says “I’ve never seen anyone skip their way to being fast”. True speed is a little more complex, as it involves horizontal velocity and rotation, but is still, simple at its core given the self-organizing ability of the body.
In his decades in track and field, Jeff has seen numerous pendulum shifts in how speed is coached, and has experienced a wide variety of training methods. As Jeff has said, we often go to clinics and seminars to be fed the same information with a different coat of paint. The “dark side” of the moon represents what we haven’t seen in the world of performance, and this episode is an epitome of that.
On today’s show, Jeff goes into how sprint training has changed in the last 50 years, what he does, and doesn’t find helpful in speed development, a variety of sprint and speed training constraints and self-governing drills, oscillatory lifting and power development principles, and much more. This show blends several important elements of biomechanics, strength and program philosophy that are impactful for any coach or athlete.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
3:57 – Jeff’s background and story in track and field, and his transition to university speed and strength coaching
8:29 – What track and field/speed coaching was like in the 1970’s, and how it has progressed since then
16:17 – What is the same, and what is different in training team sport athletes, and track and field athletes, in regards to their sprint technique
23:55 – Mistakes Jeff seeing being made in synchronizing the strength and speed components of a program
26:25 – Discussing the role of oscillation training in power development for the athletic program
33:22 – Running a periodization model on the level of “syncing and linking”, going power first and building strength on top of it
39:56 – Jeff’s thoughts on the “canned” (mach) sprint drills that are very popular in training
43:16 – “Down-the-Line” sprinting, and how this benefits athletes and emulates aspects seen in elite sprinters
50:25 – Why Jeff uses “flat footed” running as a sprint constraint, and how this can help substantially once they go back to “normal” running
51:50 – How and why Jeff started using “groucho” runs, which are similar to “squatty runs”
1:01:33 – Details of Jeff’s training of an athlete who went from 4.45 to a 4.25 40-yard dash and ran the fastest high school clocking of all time
“Back in my day (in the 1970’s) I was actually taught to stay on the ground and push as long as you can, as hard as you can… I had to change my philosophy, I used to coach the way I was coached; when the evidence is there,
