How many world records in the sprints, jumps or throws have been set by an athlete who never touched a weight? The era of “weights will make you slow” is pretty much dead and gone.
On the other hand; I’ve seen plenty of athletes who have shot their track seasons in the foot by too much obsession with the weight room. There are also plenty of track coaches who can teach great skills on the track, but don’t give barbell work anywhere close to the technical or planning consideration that it deserves in relation to their track progressions.
Outside of this, many coaches and athletes love lifting, but can’t give the reasons why lifting is helping them go faster, higher or further, other than “being strong will help”, or “all good athletes lift”. Knowing the exact reasons why strength work helps track athletes, and how to properly infuse it into each weekly and monthly workload will go a long way in producing a better final result.
Don’t just lift to be strong, lift to make your speed and power workouts better. This is the reason I have written this article, the first 5 of 10 concepts to make lifting sessions more potent and effective for track and field athletes. (This isn’t so much on exercise selection as the guiding principles that control what you do and when) We’ll kick it all off with the debated topic of specific lifting.
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Don’t get hung up on “sport-specific” lifting.
The specialized “circus lifts” we sometimes see high level athletes (and even more often, low level athletes) performing tend to look cool, but honestly, they don’t hold a candle to the specificity of sprinting and it’s resisted/assisted variations, plyometrics, depth jumps, and multi-throws/puds that offer the required joint velocities and force sequencing to offer the greatest compliment to actual event areas.
As hard as barbells try, they cannot come all that close to the physics of the sprints and jumps. Moving a bar 1.4m/s is cool, but when athletes are traveling around 10 m/s in their respective events, we realize that lifting might have a different way of complimenting the track than just “being strong”. Also, the chicken definitely came before the egg when we might see a high-level athlete doing a “circus lift”. Chances are that they end up doing these lifts because they have just gotten bored with doing the same other lifts for years, and want to learn something new; potential training transfer (or lack thereof) aside.
When track athletes are in the weight room, it is to make their speed and power work on the track shine! Know that strength training does 3 main things for a track and field athlete (4, if you are a thrower):
- Enhanced coordination (being fast is a coordinated muscular effort)
- Potentiation of speed work (yes, Ben Johnson squatted the week of the Olympic finals)
- Overshoot/taper assistance (increase your type IIx pool when it counts)
- (Bonus: hypertrophy for throwers, athletes who want to look better on the award stand)
I do one (and only one!) “circus lift” for sprinters, and that is the Oscillatory Isometric RFESS, which I got from the old Innosport crew. It does actually work, and I have noticed a good correlation in adept sprinters with it, as it teaches some nice unilateral contraction/relaxation properties in key sprint muscules.
In light of these benefits, just make sure that your “special work” isn’t stealing adaptation away from your track work, and if it is, make sure you have it planned out when you want that to happen. (Obviously, if you are going that route, early in training cycles, when specific speed volume is lower, and early SPP periods is a decent place for this, not when you are planning to peak. A mistake of some coaches is to try to get “super-specific” with strength around peak time, which isn’t helpful from a perspective of letting the body zero in on the skill needed to win. At this point, using more general lifts to potentiate performance is a smarter move.)
I do think that more special strength for throwers (as compared to sprinters) is a good idea, because athletes run and jump from age 2 onwards, and get many thousands of repetitions in a very similar motor pool their whole lives, while throwers typically don’t start throwing until later in life, and the motor pool that they draw from is a bit different than what is found in most team sports. Throwers need those extra, non-throwing reps to give their CNS a bigger motor pool to withdraw from, where sprinters and jumpers have basically been doing something in the neighborhood of their event their whole lives.
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Don’t go “P90X” on exercise variation throughout the year.
Try and keep a similar lifting schedule in terms of primary lifts for the whole year. Rotate lifts occasionally, but don’t be re-ordering them every single cycle. Lifting is more of a backbone for track athletes and should be a point of familiarity. The sets/reps, and intensities, and modes (max effort, power, repetitive effort), as well as slight exercise variations (i.e. Parallel squat to 2/3 depth squat) should definitely change, and do so somewhat regularly to prevent accommodation and psychological burnout (run the same program for 6 weeks, and you’ll find yourself there), but don’t be switching to new exercises constantly to “ward off adaptation”. This concept is how so many great powerlifters approach their training, and for track, lifting is just complimentary, so you can certainly adapt the same philosophy.
Track athletes and coaches should be more concerned with their variation and training effect progressions on the track then getting fancy in the weight room, and this is typically the case. Many times it is the strength coach, who is not coaching the speed, power and event work that might take the volume and complexity of programming overboard (and I can’t blame them, as they don’t get much self-actualization by programming extremely simple exercises, sets and reps. They want to put their stamp on the program, the same as any other coach on staff.)
Clearly keeping athletes from burning out in the weight room is hugely important, and as long as you aren’t treating it like Westside Barbell, you shouldn’t be having too much of a problem keeping things pretty consistent. This will also help reduce the total variables in the training program and make things easier to track, record and assess. My best advice is to match your cycle loading pattern on the track to your lifts. Often this is a basic descending, or hybrid descending step load pattern that compliments track needs and cycle design.
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Athletes have limited adaptation resources to spend. Spend it on what counts first.
Remember that the “battery” for athletic adaptation is only so large, and there are not infinite resources to spend on both the weight room and the track. Athletes need to “spend” their energy on what is most important, which is the specific speed and power that they gain in track practice. As mentioned in point one, you don’t want the weight room robbing adaptation from the track and giving it to un-necessary hypertrophy of the slower stability muscles that standard powerlifts require.
Spending unnecessary time and energy in the weight room is like getting a paycheck, and then spending it on a long-weekend vacation without thinking of how much you’ll need to pay your rent, car payment and get food. The essentials always come first in terms of time and energy. Don’t forget either, that given a fast and slow stressor on an athlete, their body will usually adapt in favor of the slower stessor, not the faster one. Apparently, endurance qualities in our ancestors proved more helpful for survival than being able to win the village 100m dash.
General lifts are awesome from a perspective of firing up the CNS to perform better on the track, as well as improving explosive coordination, but there is a capacity limit on how much volume it takes to accomplish this. (Do them in just enough volume to attain the desired effect!) Once you get past this limit, you are, again, stealing away from your body’s ability to adapt to the total training load. For most athletes, this is somewhere in the 5-15 rep range, although slower-twitch athletes may do better with training that looks more like French Contrast for potentiation purposes; rather than very heavy squats. This is especially useful when designing programming in the window of 48 hours left to a big competition.
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Reverse Transfer of Training: Know it, Love it, Use it.
Know that track work can and does boost weight room numbers. Of the following, what is the better scenario?
- An athlete who used loads of well-implemented speed, throws, and plyos in conjunction with a conservative lifting program to boost their squat to 1.9x bodyweight.
- An athlete who decided that they needed to squat 2x bodyweight to be at a certain level on the track and grunted out a year of high volume powerlifting workouts to get there.
Not all roads that lead to a lift max are the same, and they can carry drastically different effects on athleticism. I’ll take route A over route B in any scenario.
In a great article by Martin Bingisser, he talks about a phase of training where he performed no lifts over 60% of one-rep max for three months (but lots of heavy hammer throws), followed by a six-week prep phase of primarily kettlebell work, and again, no heavy lifting. At the end of this 5-month push of no heavy lifting, he still grabbed a small snatch PR his second week back to heavier barbell work. The high volume of heavy hammer throws had a similar motor pattern to his Olympic work, but with a much higher rate of force development, and thus helped to push up his lift.
The same thing happens to many athletes at the end of the 10,000 kettlebell swing workout (in regards to their deadlift or clean). Jumping and plyos also have a positive transfer to athletes ½ squat (and even full squats) and fast sprinting has a positive transfer to cleans.
Heck, even powerlifters realize this and infuse jumping into their training to push up their explosiveness in their squatting. Since a track athlete’s “job” is speed, they should take this concept to a much higher level.
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Don’t blow your “lifting account” in the short term. Your career will thank you.
Only shoot for a 5-10% boost in basic barbell strength each year to maximize long term development. By only increasing an athlete’s barbell strength by a small amount each year, you are ensuring that their nervous system is adapting to the demands of their event, not the demands of the weightroom.
I get plenty of freshmen with little or no weightlifting experience, and everyone knows how much a strength coach beams with joy to see their athletes dominating loads of iron, but going at it from a complementary perspective on a year to year basis is a much better idea for the athlete than grinding out maxes regularly.
As nice as it would be to see some athletes I coach reach their genetic potential in various lifts, this would hurt their highest athletic potential in their respective sports. I would much rather see athletes master lifts with good technique and velocity (coordination aid) before they start competing with each other over who can lift more. I also enjoy seeing athletes perfect various pieces of the tri-phasic method, such as an isometric-reactive squat with good velocity, before I’ll get excited about how much they hit for a 1RM in a various lift.
Using heavy lifting for potentiation can be a dream for athletes with high levels of strength and explosiveness, but even this must be done in small volumes. Think less than 10-15 total reps in a workout.
Athletes who did two things in high school: track and weightlifting, will have the most limited performance ceilings of all athletes. (For a good example, look at a guy like Jimmie Pacifico, who threw the shot 70’11” in high school while training hard powerlifting, moving un-worldly barbell numbers, threw 57’ with the 16lb after a few years of college track, and then switched to powerlifting). If I ever find myself coaching high school track, we’ll lift, but mostly for technical perfection, and in low volumes, as I want to set the athletes up to have great college careers on top of their high school days.
These early “track and lifting” specialists move poorly and experience higher burnout rates than athletes who have slowly and carefully infused the volume of lifting into their programming. Blasting strength numbers through the roof can have a positive effect over a conservative/complimentary lifting pattern for a few years, but athletes will pay in the long term from this type of attitude.
At the very least, high school track specialists should try to compete in as many other events as possible, and not specialize in one or two. Young track athletes should absolutely do other sports to complement their track season. A great high school periodization program: Football = Acceleration Development, Basketball = Plyometrics, Track Season = Top End Speed, all with complementary weights. A recipe for future success.
Conclusion:
Stay tuned for the next installment of concepts, including the importance of bar velocity overweight in Olympic lifting, Squatting cues that kill athleticism, and more!
“Speed Strength is, without doubt, a game changer. There are limiting factors and key differences in every athlete. Whether fiber type, ability to use the stretch shortening cycle effectively or even anthropometry. Having the knowledge to use these differences to the benefit of the athlete is a skill that Joel highlights brilliantly in this book.”
-Steffan Jones
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