Today’s podcast guest is Cody Bidlow. Cody is a sprint coach, athlete, writer, and founder of ATHLETE.X and SprintingWorkouts.com. He has spent more than 15 years competing in track and field and coaching speed development, working with athletes ranging from youth and high school sprinters to collegiate and professional athletes. Bidlow has served as a head high school track and field coach and has worked with NFL Combine athletes, professional baseball players, and competitive track athletes.
In this show, Cody discusses how his sprint training has evolved toward a simpler, more dynamic, and intuitive approach. He explores the role of tempo running as both aerobic work and a high-volume elastic stimulus, building lower-leg capacity and preparing the body for faster sprinting. Cody also shares thoughts on flexible warm-ups, training around real-life constraints, general-to-specific strength development, resisted and loaded sprinting, and why experimentation and self-awareness can be powerful tools for long-term speed development.
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Topics
0:00 – A Sprinter Starts Jogging
3:25 – Training for Apex
7:04 – Aerobic Work for Power Athletes
9:49 – Training With a Normal Life
15:34 – Meeting Yourself Where You Are
20:52 – Simplifying the Warm-Up
25:28 – Building Training Flexibility
30:01 – Escaping Training Perfection
34:50 – Tempo as a Plyometric
38:05 – Building the Lower Leg
43:06 – Breaking Training Conventions
46:46 – Strength for Sprinting
53:23 – Loading Angular Velocity
58:26 – Building a Broader GPP
1:04:15 – Finding the Right Feeling
1:07:35 – Competition as a Training Stimulus
Cody Bidlow Quotes
“I think there’s just something to be said for being a complete, well-put-together individual if you’re trying to excel at any given physical endeavor.”
“You just have to keep an open mind with this stuff and not be so pigeonholed into, ‘I’m a sprinter, so you know I’m only going to run from here to there.'”
“I’ve just distilled things down a little bit. And I think that’s all a result of living a more normal life rather than being in the gym because I’m coaching there or being at the track because I’m coaching there.”
“I think it’s important that the stimulus or the stress that’s applied to the organism on any given day is appropriate based on their readiness that day, which can fluctuate and may not be in line with the plan that you had.”
“I tend to get the best warm-up. If I simply do the thing, I just scale that intensity up based on how I’m feeling and what I need to be prepared for that day.”
“I think people become mentally fragile when they are locked into needing a specific thing.”
“You just have to be flexible and be willing to like experiment with those things. And it doesn’t always have to be the perfect setup to end up with a good result.”
“You don’t have to be so precise with your training; I feel like it’s kind of what it comes down to. Like there’s a lot of ways that you can, you can get there.”
“If you look at it as a plyometric, that just happens to like make you a little winded and help your aerobic abilities, then I think it can be viewed differently.”
“If you can check multiple boxes at once, like some aerobic fitness and plyometric elastic abilities in one workout, then that’s really valuable.”
“I think our GPP should prepare us not only for like tissues and ranges of motion and directions of movement but also just expand our base of coordination.”
“I just think if all you ever do is straight forward and back, straight up and down stuff, you’re eventually going to miss out on something or get hurt because you’ve just become so narrowly focused with your development.”
“A lot of coaching and a lot of developing as an athlete is learning to find a certain feeling and then being able to, like, call upon that feeling and then do it without thinking about it.”
“All of my personal bests have pretty much come in races that I didn’t win.”
About Cody Bidlow
Cody Bidlow is a sprint coach, athlete, writer, and founder of ATHLETE.X and SprintingWorkouts.com. He has spent more than 15 years competing in track and field and coaching speed development, working with athletes ranging from youth and high school sprinters to collegiate and professional athletes. Bidlow has served as a head high school track and field coach and has worked with NFL Combine athletes, professional baseball players, and competitive track athletes.
A former collegiate sprinter at Grand Canyon University, Bidlow was an All-Conference athlete and has continued competing well into his coaching career. Through ATHLETE.X and SprintingWorkouts.com, he writes and produces educational content on sprint training, strength and power development, biomechanics, and programming, with an emphasis on connecting practical coaching experience with the evolving science of speed development.
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