Aaron King (00:02):

I'm Aaron King with coach Bob King and today's topic. We are talking about a very challenging position for track and field. That is if you are someone that's either coaching or you're an athlete, that's running the hundred meter, 200 meters and or 40 a hundred meter, 400 meter. Really just an if it's all combined, those are all very different animals from one to two. It's not that different from two to four, it's a little different, but from one to four, it's totally fine

Coach Bob King (00:31):

It's the Pacific ocean. It's an impossible gap, right?

Aaron King (00:36):

So we're going to really, this topic is a, one of the questions we got from Kristin on our, app. So again, if you guys have questions or comments about your training, any sport for speed, agility, conditioning, anything, leave it below or creative, create a free account at the most outfit, and message with us there. Everything we talk about today is going to be linked below to a workout that actually reflects all this. And we got coach Bob King in his natural habitat with a whiteboard. We're just going to get into it. I don't know how you want to prioritize the wood event.

Coach Bob King (01:10):

I'm going to start. That's going to be easy if you're in it doesn't matter on the combination if you're a coach-athlete, either one and the 100, 200, 400, they inter interchange, whether you think they do or not. And let me give you the example if as I did as a high school coach for 20 years in track and field, and is a high school coach that you might be now, or at any level, what's the last event, the four by four, you are looking for suspects. You are, you're going to round them up. And so if you're a hundred-meter guy, you might be the last man or woman standing to run that third leg of the four by four. So the 400 meters is going to be in your world. Now planning for that is hard, easy. And let me explain how we do it.

Coach Bob King (01:55):

I always start blank. I don't care if this is my 2000 workout, I'm going to have a blank piece of paper or a whiteboard, so I can do a scribble erase, scribbly race. And what I also like to do, write it up, leave it on my desk overnight. I come back the next day I look at it and I go, whoever wrote this, didn't have a clue what they were doing, or this was genius. I'll go accordingly. If it's genius, I think it is. I'll use it. If it's not good, start over the number one thing that dominates all material information goes on. Anything, the app or the whiteboard or training themes, we live and die by training themes. And that will guide you and help these 100, 200, 400 dilemmas to kind of level out. So I'm going to put up an example of a day. We will ride them up in four-week blocks so I can kind of systematize and everything's connected. So I can't write a week and come back and say, what did I do last week? So I'll put up on my whiteboard or my paper for weeks. And as soon as I can, the next four to get eight weeks complete and not be random with my training design. All right, let's look at let's say very simply

Speaker 3 (03:06):

This is here's week one. Okay

Coach Bob King (03:09):

And with that, we have to go with day one. And if I say themes, then it's going to look like this. I'm going to give the themes real quick on this side. And then over here, I'm going to write the workout. So we're going to go zero to 10 on day one.

Coach Bob King (03:29):

Simple for track and field, that's going to start. As short, explosive takeoffs, we have the program that's going to reflect that is so important for a hundred. I think for the 200 if you're starting a little sloppy in the 400, you have room to recover, not in the 100, so zero to 10 has to be in there. But if you're, if you're an okay, 400-meter person, a good start may be the difference to help you catch up when you get an attack that curve. All right. So we go there on day two.

Coach Bob King (04:04):

We're going to come back. We have to condition. And so the conditioning, another crucial point, the conditioning has to reflect the 400 the 100, 200 meters. People can definitely benefit from that. But if you're going to call in a hundred-meter person to do that four by four final leg, then they need to have experience doing that. So the 400 gets preference on the conditioning day. One, which we do the heavy early in the week and taper toward the end of the week. If this is offseason, we're going to reflect the flow of an in-season week. It'll be more reps and heavier volume, but we're going to reflect an end season approach. Okay? We get to day three, zero to 30.

Coach Bob King (04:52):

Be sure you understand that these are themes that designate, what are we going to use as tools that day? What are kind of the distances we're going to use that day, but you're not limited to running 10 yards. You're not limited to running 30 yards, what you're going to do. And if you're out of the country, you can put meters on there. If it helps you we'll put meters, you're running zero to 30. Meaning once you take off, we're now into sprint strides. Sprint strides are like weight room reps. She gets stronger by doing reps and adding weight to the bar. You get faster by doing good quality strides and speed strides, sprint strides to get faster. So that's going to be reflected in the drills and distances. We run. The four we've been hinted. Pretty good.

Coach Bob King (05:35):

Going to come back with here. I'm just going to use the initial active recovery. So that's basically, I like to just go out and we're going to do a one-mile jog. Okay. Just, you know, no time just finished, but that's also a good day to come back and work starts, starts fit. I think starts to work up here and starts work down here. Cause it's a handoff to put them together. They're short bursts and you can call it off anytime you want. You're not going to start till the, till it gets dark. You're going to get the starts, get a half a dozen up to 10 Starks, call it a day. So this is a good teaching opportunity, a teaching day. And then on day five to reflect that the end season where he might be, if you're an off-season you're done for the weekend, right.

Coach Bob King (06:19):

But if you're in season, you're tapering, but you also have the meet coming up and just keep this in mind. And when you count stressors of training, the track meet is a hundred percent effort. So it's a full-blown workout exertion. Even if you don't make finals, you only run a couple of events. It's full effort. So you need to account for that. So this comes back to being conditioning and not quite as heavy, kind of a quality thing. Track and field coaches are, are big on quality versus quantity. So what we won't end up doing is heavy-duty here and then more, a quality kind of thing. And we have what we call speed ladders, which I'll put up here right now. So if I, if I take and say now, what does all this look like in practice? So here's a closeup of day one every day.

Coach Bob King (07:07):

I'm going to use our initials. Cause if you use our training app, you go in and find the templates and you just hit that template, and boom, it's your, your stuff is there. And we have initials die. Woo. Our dynamic warmup. So if you hit the template in the app, it's going to, it's going to populate with all the moves, the dynamic warmup. You're not looking for all these separate what I want to do here. What I want to do there. You've got it on zero to 10 days. I'll write it out. It's also in the app. We have what we call a speed lead up. You'll see speed, lose speed, lead up. Those are drills that reflect running mechanics, but they're also a little faster than the warmups. So we have an acceleration. So the dynamic warmup contained slower movements, speed, speed, lead up.

Coach Bob King (07:56):

We're now starting to run out a little bit more, more limb movement and swing. And then we'll go in and use some of our tools like in this case I like to use our 10 hurdles basic program and that's just to fire the feet you want impulse, you want tat tat tat tap. So this is just an extended warmup. And so what we ended up doing is doing the hurdle workout combined with some speed breaks. And so we're starting to just ramp up our training at the end, when you, we say conditioning or whatever you want to call it, but we're going to do a split ladder to kind of finish off the workout, to reflect all of this. And so with a track and field, I think every event, well, let me back up track and field across the board is about speed.

Coach Bob King (08:48):

Okay? Everybody figures that in a hundred meters, you can't take off and go very far in the long jump. You don't have speed. If you do not have speed, the ring, you cannot throw the implement. The shot disc is a hammer, whatever it is you do if you don't have speed in the ring, it's not going anywhere. So our speed ladders reflect what we're doing that day. And for me, our speed ladder, we have two of them. We have a short speed ladder and along, and the way I label those, the short speed ladders are a hundred meters and down. And the length was, as you might guess, obviously go up over a hundred meters. So on a zero to 10 day it might be a good day just to do the repeats of the speed ladder 40, 60, 80. You get to take off, but you get to accelerate and keep this in mind.

Coach Bob King (09:35):

If you run fast, you have a conditioning element. If you recover and run fast again, you have a speed element. So the speed ladders are designed to accomplish what we're trying to achieve on the theme. So at zero to 30, I mean zero to 10, we can run 40, 60, 80 walks back, recover, and go back and go fast again. Nice little package. When we get out to zero to 30 and the conditioning, the speed ladders get longer because, on conditioning, we just got to push it. Cause everybody I grew up or learn my coaching from the aspect that you have a way to break down the hundred, 400 meters into different distances. And so the common theme was in the last hundred meters is guts. So we had to do that with these types of cases

Aaron King (10:23):

On that, on that speed ladder. It looks like you got a short that you wrote next to the long, but so what's an example of a long, so that would actually 40, 60, 80 would actually be a short speed ladder. Yeah,

Coach Bob King (10:32):

 I just was giving an example. So if I wanted to come out on the long one, like here my, one of my favorites is 8,101 20. Okay. And we're still, we're not in a, we're not in a pure conditioning mode, cause that will go here. We will run. Like if you're at a 400-meter person, we may run you know, speed ladders, go both ways, a step-downs and build up. And so my personal favorites are the step-downs. And the reason I tag the step-downs is my favorite on the speed ladder is that we're still operating on a speed thing. And so we're shortening the distance. So if we're doing a 400-meter step-down, it might be 600, 500, 400, 500, 400, 300, and so forth. Those are significant distances when you're running fast anything over 30, 35 seconds changes the chemistry.

Coach Bob King (11:24):

So we're doing this. And in the app, you may have a template. You do have a template with a speed ladder of about four or five short versions. And depending on what you wanna accomplish that day, we even have a short 10, 15, 20, 25. And because it's track and field, the template will tell you to do three. Well, you may decide that you know, my athletes, I've got, I've got some quality athletes, so I'm going to just change the reps. I'm going to do five of those. And you have a pretty nice little package, all this stuff, all these drills reflect this idea, this theme of zero to 10, and that's the beauty of the templates and the way the app. Now go back to the very beginning where I say, I start with a whiteboard and a blank sheet of paper. And what I ended up doing is writing it and thinking about it and looking at my options and stuff. The cool thing about the app is after I'd spend time thinking and planning and plotting, this takes me about 90 seconds to enter into the app, review it, edit posts. So if I want my athletes and coaches to have it off, it goes, all right. So

Aaron King (12:31):

This is week one. We're talking, this was kind of an example of like day one for, for the whole, the whole program. Where would you fit in a handoff and the end of this?

Coach Bob King (12:41):

Well, and that's why themes are so beautiful because a coach says, where do I add handoffs? It's going to be right here. Or it could be at the active recovery because, you know, you're, we all come into the handoffs in the shorter distance, the guy or girl is not coming off a hundred meters. They're coming in from maybe 15, 20 meters. So it's a short run. So those two would go right here because you're not doing, we all know that if you do a lot of handoffs and you get any, any hint of fatigue, your timing's off and you're wasting your time. So what we want to do is put the short stuff where it looks like it goes, it can even go here. But when you asked me that first thing I'm going to say is zero to 10 in active recovery, because we're taking our time with it

Aaron King (13:28):

From here from just purely training, writing the program, you got your weeks, your themes, your days, where, what does kind of the ebb and flow of the intensity. I don't want to, maybe, maybe it's just traditional periodization, but where do you look for that?

Coach Bob King (13:42):

It is, it is periodization, but I think in track and field, I'm going to look at this volume. And that goes into the idea that coaches talk about quality and quantity and volume is quantity. And I lean towards quality because of, I learned just in my coaching growing up one of the Olympic coaches back in the day gave a lecture and talked about an athlete who had been sick, but had trained and was, was a fast kid. And so just didn't train the week of the Olympic trials was coming in for 1600 meter trials. And next thing you know between being sick and in bed just dove across the finish at the trials to finish in third, to make the spot on the Olympic team, to which he said to the audience, do we want to be fit or fast because she wasn't very fit, but she was really fast.

Aaron King (14:42):

Yeah. All right. So is there anything before we wrap it up, I mean, we had, that was a lot of great content. So before we wrap it up, is there anything that you want to hit on that maybe we didn't get just here talking again, you know, I touched on the handoffs any good, a hundred-meter runners going to probably be running the four by one as well. So that's why we work on handoffs, et cetera. But

Coach Bob King (15:02):

If you're an F, if you're an athlete, a high school athlete, or a high school coach, we all know that those athletes are interchangeable speed first, you can get them in shape. And I just think that speed is, is the first thing, because if they can run all day, but can't catch anybody or outrun anybody, it doesn't matter. So the conditioning is built in because when we do stuff it's unwritten, but it's all high speed. We don't have any paced activities. And so the high-speed stuff will condition you, but you want to be fast first. That's why they put a clock on it.

Aaron King (15:37):

Right? And so again, this workout that we started to write right in front of you will be available. The links will be below and I'll include some of the other ones, like the one by 10 hurdles and things like that, some of the different training programs. So we'll see what we have. I mean, I'm going to, we're going to continue to ride them. So as they're available, I'll just keep pacing them below. So check the links below. And I mean, we got just about every single event you can.

Coach Bob King (15:59):

Yeah. They're all in there. The throwers, we had throwers hurdles, long-short hurdles. We're only going out to 3,200 meters right now, not into three K four and 10 K just yet, because we do that. I have trained I've written workouts and trained successfully different marathoners. The last one I trained in was doing a qualifying for Boston and, and qualify, which was huge for her. Great for me because we've done it more than once.

Aaron King (16:25):

All right. Awesome. Well, I am Erin King's coach Bob King. You can find coach Bob King on Instagram and Twitter @CoachBobKing, simply put, and I am @DeepSnap, Instagram, Twitter. If you have any questions, comments, again, leave them below, get on the app, create a free account, KingSportsTraining.com and we'll have the links below. It's all free to sign up. We send out the newsletter every week with the workouts. If you have questions, let us know. We might just answer it here on the show, a modern, old school training until next time. I'm Aaron King's coach Bob King. We'll see you later.