Anyone who has read my article on developing speed endurance intelligently or the interview I did for SprintStrength.com will have learnt that I have formulated much of my coaching philosophy from watching what others have done wrong and also by analysing the weaknesses I feel were present in my own training when I was still an athlete.

I am very passionate about the fact that all athletes are individual and deserve to have their program written for them in an individual way. So passionate about it am I, that over the past week (in which I have been in Portugal with Team Northern Ireland before they fly to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi) I have prepared the training for the first 5 weeks of my groups winter preparation. I currently have 9 athletes in my group, therefore I have prepared 9 periodisations, 9 track programs, around 20 different weights and plyometric sessions, as well as revising the group warm up system (which although is written in the same way for all athletes, the system I have devised allows even the warm up to be individual to each athlete). I have also put in place new testing procedures that will allow the best order of training and best pre comp session for each athlete to be identified (I credit Pole Vault coach, Christian North, with introducing me to this invaluable system). That is a lot of work, and sure it has meant that I have spent less time on the beach, but to me, to take on the responsibility of handling an athlete’s dreams of being a top class athlete, is one that cannot be taken lightly. In my opinion, if you cannot offer this to your athletes do them a favour and hand them on to someone who can.

I also see this lazy approach with personal trainers who are working with regular clients. Common things that really get on my wick are, trainers dishing out the same workout to every client they see in that day or implementing a “workout of the week” (also known as, “’I can’t be arsed to sit down and write 8 effective programs in preparation for tomorrow so I’m going to pretend that this workout is great for everyone.”

On any one day in Team Breakthrough, we see clients as diverse as ladies in their 50’s and 60’s who are looking to ease their back pain and aching joints, to Olympic level bobsledders. When you work in that way (that is to say you do not restrict yourself to a niche), you really have to be on the ball when it comes to program design.

Let’s take some examples of how I try to vary things for maximum results in all clients. I will give example of athletes and regular clients.

Athlete A-Male- 14 years old- Sprinter- Has been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome so the priority here is to make sure this athlete is as proficient as possible in current tasks before we move on to new things therefore phases of training may be longer than in typical athletic programs. This is because there are obvious issues with communication and coordination.

Athlete B- Female-19 years old- Sprinter- Has real problems when it comes to adapting to speed and power work. Through analysing her training results, it was clear that the athlete cannot put more than one week of high intensity work together without training results dipping significantly. Therefore, she will only do 1 week of speed and power at a time this year. She also gains muscle very easily so she will not do any reps over 6 this year.

Athlete C- Male-19 years old- Sprinter- This athlete has achieved a very high level in the junior ranks. Despite the fact he has broken 21 seconds for 200m, (an exceptional performance by a junior) if he were caught in anything more than a slight breeze it would probably blow him off his feet. That is to say, he has the muscle mass of a prepubescent girl. To survive in the senior ranks he will need to gain muscle so he will be using more bodybuilding techniques to up his size.

As you can see, in just 3 examples of athletes I work with, implementing any type of generic program would mean that two of the three would probably not be training in a way that was optimal to themselves.

Now let’s look at a few examples of ways things might be varied for general clients.

Client A- Female- 48 years old- This clients main aim is to lose bodyfat. She has done very little exercise in the past few years and has some health concerns that may prevent her from doing intensities higher than perhaps 6 to 8 reps. I have started this client off on very simple movements, such as step ups, rows and presses. She works hard but they are within her capability.

Client B- Male- 23 years old- This client is an experienced body builder and also hoping to start work as a personal trainer in the next few months (and rightly so he is investing in his education and learning from the trainers at Team Breakthrough). If I started him off as simple as Client A, I suspect if I turned my back for a minute in the gym, he’d hang himself from our heavy duty rope out of total boredom. Therefore, we do hardcore bodybuilding workouts (many of which I learned from studying Charles Poliquin’s work) and I change the workout every week so that he is gaining the maximum information possible in the time he is paying for with myself.

Client C- Female- 25 years old- I would class this individual as my best general client (not that I don’t love them all of course!). She has worked with me since the start of this year. She works hard and has completed a number of advanced workouts over the months. We really try to push the barriers out for her, and push her to the limit, so that she can feel fulfilled after a workout.

Now imagine I trained all these clients with some type of generic program. For arguments sake, let’s say a circuit involving lunges, squats and presses, all with the same weight on the bar, back to back. It is highly likely that client A would get injured, Client B would be bored and Client C would leave unhappy that the session was too easy.

Don’t worry if the profiles above do not fit yours, because we could list perhaps a hundred other profiles that we see on a weekly basis in Team Breakthrough. We’re not saying that it will always be perfect, but we will certainly try to find the program that suits you to a tee. So do yourself a favour, find a trainer who cares about your needs, and doesn’t just load you onto the conveyor belt at the start of your session, take your money at the end and restart that same process with their next client, and the next and the next and the next!

The topic of speed endurance is one that is of great interest to me. Not only because I am searching for the perfect way to train this quality in my athletes, but also because it is an area that I feel limited me in my own ambitions as a sprinter.

In general, UK coaches seem to have the mentality that “more is better”, and that sprinters need to have a large base of aerobic fitness in order to finish 100, 200 and 400 metre races strongly when the season comes about. Sessions including large amounts of 200, 300 and 400 metre runs seem to be commonplace, especially in October and November. I even know of at least 2 groups which contain world class sprinters where they will run 800 metre reps in portions of their yearly cycle.

A few years ago, I observed a set of circumstances that have influenced my own thoughts on speed endurance greatly. A particular athlete, who I know well, was struggling with the last part of his 100 metre races. He started well, was in contention at 60m, and then faded badly. As all athletes who have anything about them will do, he searched for the answer and in this case he decided to move coaches. He was told, “What’s wrong is you lack speed endurance, we need to work on your fitness.” They proceeded to start a training program that included lots of reps at 300, 250 and 150.

This athlete struggled with every session I saw him do, getting shown up by athletes who were vastly inferior to him in terms of talent. When the next season arrived, he expected alot (as I did for him at the time)! He had better endurance now so surely he would not fade at 60m. What actually happened was, he still faded badly and was now not able to get to 60m in the lead. This all lead to his worst season in a long time. What had happened? It didn’t make sense! Clearly his speed and power had been negatively affected, despite the fact he had also trained these qualities in the macrocycle.

This one instance lead me to totally change the way I trained my athletes for speed endurance, which up until that point had been similar to the old school British way of brutal 300 and 200 reps run multiple times. I thought about the term “speed endurance.” Speed........Endurance. Speed endured. The ability to be endure speed. Think about it! How can you train to be fast for an extended distance if the runs themselves are not fast? If you run a 250m rep for instance, is it fast? A time trial, maybe, yes! But do it twice, 3 times, how many are fast? Not many! You are training the wrong quality! Does a sprinter really need this ability to pull out 250 after 250 at 90% effort?

If there’s one thing I’ll take from Charles Poliquin who so far has been a huge influence on my coaching career, it his “Bang for your Buck” mentality. Is the exercise selection, distance selection or intensity really adding anything to the overall performance? Or is it just something we do without question because we always have? I feel these sub maximal sessions are unnecessary and add little to the end result, so guess what, they are no longer in my programs.

My feelings have been backed up by conversations with Dan Pfaff who stated to me that his 100m runners would rarely run more than 150m.

The late Charlie Francis is another well known coach who believed in working his athletes very intensely. Francis acknowledges that all qualities and the ability to train them are underpinned by an athlete’s aerobic capabilities. However, he believed that if an athlete had been trained to be aerobically efficient at a young age that this area needed little attention, perhaps a 4 to 6 week phase that included some of this training at the start of a macrocycle. Any more would negatively affect the important type 2a and 2b fibres. Therefore the majority of the work his athletes did was very fast in nature.

I also recently watched an interesting series of interviews on YouTube with Glen Mills and Usain Bolt. When Mills was asked what he attributed Bolt’s big improvement in 2008 to, he explained that they had analysed his 2007 world championship 200m silver medal race and decided that he was not finishing strongly enough. So the easy answer is obviously they worked on his endurance, plenty of over distance work to make him much stronger and fitter? Wrong! Mills decided that Bolt needed to work on his base speed in order to improve his finish in the 200m. He started training like a 100m runner. Well, the rest is history. He went on to produce what is arguably the best series of performances in an Olympic games. Bolt’s new ability to be super fast had meant he could endure the speeds necessary to finish the 200m in a world record time.

I’m not saying that I think there is no place whatsoever in the training of sprinters for sub maximal runs over 200 or 300 metres. They have some use. I just don’t believe that their high importance is well placed, as seems to be by many coaches who seem to be stuck for ideas when their athletes die with 40m to go.

Below are some examples of speed endurance sessions one of my sprinters rotates during the competition period, they are split into hard, medium and easy;

Session 1 (Hard)- 180m, 180m, 150m (10 mins between runs)

Session 2 (Medium)- 75m x 2 (2 mins recovery) x 2 (8 mins between sets)

Session 3 (Easy)- 150m @ 90% effort x 6 (4 mins recovery) (it is worth noting that this is more of a tempo type session and I would not class this as pure speed endurance, each of these sessions is completes once in every 9 track session cycle).

Also please note that I write all my athletes programmes individually so the speed endurance program for other athletes would look different due to differences in the physical makeup, technique and event requirements.

Olympic Champion Usain Bolt has improved his speed endurance by increasing his base speed.

Donovan Bailey, coached by Dan Pfaff, would not have often exceeded 150m in training