Volume vs. Speed
by Steve McGill
One of the age-old arguments when it comes to coaching sprinters and hurdlers has to do with how much emphasis should be placed on volume vs. how much emphasis should be placed on speed. To oversimplify a bit, most old-school coaches emphasize volume, whereas younger coaches tend to place a greater emphasis on speed. I probably fall somewhere in the middle, although these days I definitely have been emphasizing speed, whereas in my early days of coaching I emphasized volume a whole lot more, because that was the way that I had been coached. Over the years, I guess, I came to realize that doing all that volume didn’t make a whole lot of sense, for a few reasons. In regards to hurdle workouts, however, I still like a lot of volume in the fall. But even there, the quantity has to come with quality, as I discuss in another article in this issue.
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My first major coaching influence was Jean Poquette – Renaldo Nehemiah’s high school coach. When I read the “Hurdles” section of Ken Doherty’s Track & Field Omnibook while a sophomore in college, I honed in on the article about Nehemiah’s high school training. There, I learned that Poquette, who basically trained all of his athletes like distance runners, had Nehemiah do workouts that would be considered insane for a 110m high hurdler. One of them, I recall, involved doing 3 sets of 3×600, with a 200m jog between reps. Holy Jesus. Also, of course, there was the famous back-and-forth workout, in which Nehemiah cleared 100 hurdles per set (five hurdles up, five hurdle back, ten times without stopping, five-stepping in between), and completed four sets for a total of 400 hurdles. That’s more hurdles in one workout than most hurdlers clear in a season.
Poquette’s logic, obviously, was that a strong hurdler is a fast hurdler. A hurdler who doesn’t get tired in a race will be able to hold his speed longer than any of his competitors. And in the case of Nehemiah, as Poquette explained, he was naturally fast. So he didn’t need to train for speed; the speed would come out when the gun went off and his competitive nature took over. It worked. Nehemiah was the only hurdler in the history of the hand-time days to run 12.9 in high school, and he went on to become the first hurdler in history to run sub-13 over the 42’s. In addition, there was that famous Penn Relays performance when he was running for the University of Maryland and he walked down the whole field in the 4×400 to bring his team back from the dead to victory. That’s not something your average 110 meter man would be able to do.
On the other side of the spectrum, let me take you back to the late 1990s, early 2000s, when the clubs I coached for trained on the track at North Carolina State University, which is also where the professional group, Sprint Capitol, trained. Often, I observed the workouts of sprinters like Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Chandra Sturrup, Justin Gatlin, Sean Crawford, and hurdlers Terry Reese and Duane Ross. And they had plenty of other athletes who were world class athletes competing for world championships and Olympic championships. And I’ll tell you, in the six or seven years that I saw them out there training, I never saw a single one of them run farther than 80 meters in a training rep. They would put the cones down and work on their drive phase, and sometimes continue on to the middle phase of the race. I would watch them sometimes and think back to old articles I’d read about Carl Lewis and Calvin Smith back in the 1980s doing 12×200 and workouts like that, and I’d think to myself, these guys never do that kind of stuff.
So, the Sprint Capitol logic, as espoused by coach Trevor Graham, was that speed and power, along with technical mastery of the block start and drive phase and sprinting mechanics, are what lead to success. I’m assuming that they used weight training as a means of ensuring they could hold their speed through the latter stages of a race. And there can be no doubt that their methods worked. How much the success of Jones, Montgomery, and Gatlin was aided by performance-enhancing drugs is a debate for another day. But I can definitely say, based on what I saw, that there was a clear methodology to what they were doing, and that it seemed clearly to be based on the philosophy that speed, power, and refined mechanics are more important than the speed-endurance gained from doing volume-based workouts.
When I first started coaching back in the mid-90s, my methods modeled those of Poquette, although in a much more modified capacity, as I too had been coached throughout high school and college by coaches who put a lot of volume on us through the fall, winter, and early spring before we began to taper down for the big meets in late spring. The problem that was bothering me in those early years was that my athletes always seem to reach a plateau about mid-way through the spring season and then weren’t able to drop time after that. Then one day I remembered a conversation I had had years ago with a distance teammate of mine during my freshman year of college. The distance crew had just finished a workout where they had completed 20×400 (do one, jog one), hitting them all at 72 seconds. To me, it was an amazing workout, one that I couldn’t even fathom being able to do. But, as I noted to my friend, some of the distance guys seemed to be stuck at that 72 pace even in races. “That’s an issue with some distance guys,” he said to me. “They get so locked into a rhythm that when it’s time to shift gears, or to let their adrenaline take over, they don’t know how to. They only know one pace.”
As I thought back on that conversation years later, I realized that I was doing the same thing to my sprinters and hurdlers with all the repeat 400s, etc. They were getting in shape, but they weren’t getting fast. They couldn’t find another gear when it came to shift to another gear.
I also realized something else: the volume workouts weren’t mimicking the kind of pain that the athlete feels in a race. It’s a different kind of fatigue. Someone with more knowledge about physiology and the body’s energy systems could explain it much better than I can, but the basic idea is that the pain you feel late in a 100m dash or on the final curve of a 4×4 leg – the body locking up and rigor mortis setting in – that kind of pain is not the kind of pain you feel when doing a high-volume series of repeats. So, in essence, I wasn’t preparing my athletes for competition by putting all that volume on them. And I was probably sucking all the bounce out of their legs in the process.
Nowadays, I’ll never have my athletes do more than 6×200, or 4×300, in a workout, even in the off-season. Let’s keep the reps high-quality, and let’s look to improve on our times every week. So if we did 6×200 last week in 29 seconds, let’s look to do them this week in 28.5. Once we get down to 26, we’ll take off a rep and add more rest. Once we get down to 25 we’ll take off another rep and add more rest. So, we’re doing basically the same workout every Monday, let’s say, but the focus is always on getting faster while maintaining proper sprinting mechanics. While I’ll never have my athletes train like the Sprint Capitol athletes – because they’re not professionals and they’re not specializing in the 100m dash – I do feel that speed should be emphasized in training, even before the competitive season.
The last time I coached for a school – about five years ago – I had a kid who ran the 110 hurdles, 300 hurdles in the school season, and 400 hurdles in summer track. In training for the 400 hurdles, I’d have him do 2×400, clearing the first three hurdles and continuing to the finish line, with the target time being the same as his race target time, which was 54.5. Meanwhile, the sprint coach had the quarter-milers doing broken 1,000s, which consisted of a mix of 200s, 100s, and 400s, adding up to 1,000 meters of running. The quarter-milers were telling my guy that he had it easy, but meanwhile my guy was locking up big-time by the end of his second rep. When it came time to compete, he knew what that locking-up feeling felt like, so he didn’t back down from it when it occurred in the race. He dropped a lot of time that season and qualified for Outdoor Nationals, and the most 400s we ever did in practice was three.
So, to each his own, I guess. But if you’re asking me, my advice would be to train speed from the beginning of the season, and keep increasing the speed as the season goes on.
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