5 Keys to Phenomenal Off-Season Training for Track & Field

  “Track season is made in the off-season!”

We’ve all heard this one before, but exactly how do you create the best off-season training program for track (or other) athletes?

Tons of max strength?

Lots of running and long practices?

Ab crunches that you wait until it hurts to start counting?

Motivational speeches?

Let’s make it simple, and talk about what off-season training should be, and what it shouldn’t entail.

What off-season training for track and field (sprints, jumps, throws) should be:

• Maximize specific work capacity under mimimal emotional stress
• Increase the ability of the athlete to recover between specific event performances
• Perfect movement and technique from a cueing and specific strengthening approach
• Increase functional muscle mass, and strength of the muscle tendon complex
• Improve the basic functional indicators of event performance from a “same but different” approach
• Attack and resolve liabilities towards maximal performance
• Building discipline, character, team cohesion and accountability
• Understanding athlete’s responses to various training frequency and intensity setups for use later in the spring
• Prepare, yet preserve the mind of the athlete for the most important competition in their specific event

What shouldn’t be the goal of off-season training? 

• Maximizing pain tolerance
• Building an aerobic base
• Regular maximal strength training
• Digging a huge performance hole that you’ll get out of later
• Redundancy
• Long practices
• Boredom
• Tons of abs and related core work

So what are some things that I am particularly passionate about when it comes to the development of track athletes in the off-season?  In a nutshell, they are as follows:

1. Knowing how to cycle the training stimulus and environment
2. Finding as many ways as possible to make training emotionally easier to increase the amount of specific speed and power work that is done
3. Making sure that you are building the total athlete
4. Perfect the art of “Same but different” in terms of specific power and event performance
5. Optimizing technical skill and technique over specific event results and speed 

Let’s kick off the off-season buildup with #1, becoming a master of the training environment. 

Off-Season Training Principle #1: Change and Cycle the Environment 

Track is a long season.  High schoolers that are doing it right (playing many sports) have it easy.  They have soccer, basketball, volleyball, football, wrestling, or cross country that is a sport that is different than competing on the 8-lane field of play they see in the spring.

Professional athletes go to training camps in various locations for this exact reason before to the start of their own seasons.  They don’t want to spend all year pounding out reps on the exact same track locale.   Changing the location is easy on the mind, body and spirit.  Granted, some of us can’t jet off to a training camp in the Mediterranean in October, but there are plenty of other options and keys to mixing things up.   Three ways to mix things up are as follows

1. Get off the track, and on the grass

The easiest, and best way to approach off-season training, at least a good portion of it, is simply to get off of the track for a while.  Many of the best sprinters in the world spend a good deal of their off-season training on the grass.  Not only does this help with the obvious (shin issues), but it helps to recover the psychological and physiological ability of the athlete to adapt to work on the track when that comes around in full swing again.   It also helps to get in a higher volume of work for many athletes with foot and shin issues.

2. Do the nature thing

Along with getting off the track, try to find a scenic locale to accomplish this.  A forest trail, a grassy hill, or my personal favorite, the beach (if you are so lucky) are all awesome places to train and breathe some fresh air in the process.  Beach workouts are even better, because the athletes have some instant access to some hydrotherapy following the training session.  Training in scenic environments was a big deal for many eastern-bloc athletes, and it should be for you as well.

3. Play a sport

Nature aside, one of the best ways to change the environment of training, broaden the functional base of the athlete, and do it in a way that registers very little emotional stress is to play speed based sports.  Soccer, volleyball, basketball, racquetball, ultimate Frisbee, and non-contact football, and the like, are a wonderful way to keep that high-velocity, spice of life, movement flowing.

The off-season actually isn’t the only place that this type of work is helpful.  Although injury is a risk in-season (this can be averted by choosing fairly safe sport play, such as racquetball).  Some form of general training should be omni-present in track and field performance.

As much as track coaches flip out when they know their athletes are playing intramural sports, a little sport play in season can be a good thing… until your star sprinter sprains their ankle driving the lane of course.   In my junior year of college, where I set 4” high jump and 4’ triple jump PR’s, I was playing some easy intermural volleyball during the season once a week, and loved it (although my coach may not have seen it the same way).  I feel it was an important part of my total development, and was also a wonderful mental break.  Even in looking at Eastern bloc training schemes, you’ll see training means such as “30 minutes of basketball” woven into the in-season routine.

Playing sports also eases the psychological strain of training.   Racing down a teammate to grab a loose ball doesn’t register in the conscious mind the same way that racing against the clock does.  It doesn’t drain willpower to be powerful when you are jumping as high as possible to block a shot or sprint down a touchdown catch.  Validation in general is a lower willpower drain than training for the sake of numbers. 

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Off-Season Training Principle #2: Make it Fun 

Training hard to win, is in itself, very enjoyable (to most athletes).  Despite this, repetitive, hard training can become monotonous and register a conscious, or subconscious emotional toll.  Coaches shouldn’t look to constantly change the training stimulus, but rather, infuse elements of fun and competition into current training schemes.

Obviously, playing sports is a great way to make off-season training fun, but there does need to be a technical component for the development of track athletes, particularly those of a higher level.

When it comes to technical ability, making things a competition in a different form of what athletes will see in the winter and spring months can be a wonderful idea.

An easy way to do this is to occasionally see how many repetitions an athlete can complete of a particular skill (with decent intensity/technical demand) in a time frame of 30” to 2 minutes.  This is a great way to finish a standard practice, as you get both a nice wide CNS breadth “finisher” stimulus, and the athletes will also finish the practice with a smile on their face (hopefully).  Good examples would be things like:

• How many times an athlete can high jump 6 feet in 1 minute.
• How many javelins can you throw inside a 3 meter ring, set out at 40 meters within 1 minute?
• Have a 60m dash that athletes have to run straight leg bound, or “primetime” style. Have a 60m dash race with a small sled.  Send sprinters out on “routes” to catch footballs as part of the warmup
• Do sprint repeats on a course of somewhat difficult terrain
• Have a quick dart throwing, or putting competition between 200m interval sprints to test focus under fatigue
• Have a slam-dunk contest
• See how many bounds it takes for athletes to cover 40m.

Getting the whole team involved in test results is a great way to use the power of the human spirit to make training better.  I don’t think any coach I’ve met does this better than Tony Holler.   His “gauntlet 40”, and “gauntlet mile” are awesome ways to get the whole team involved in important training efforts.   Recording and publishing athletes results makes each test day more fun and meaningful.

Coaches line up to experience a “Gauntlet 40” at the 2015 Speed-Activation Consortium

You can also try the Soviet “jumps decathlon” used for high jumpers.  Events are as follows:

1.10 jumps on left leg
2.10 jumps on right leg
3. Standing triple jump
4. 5 step approach triple jump
5. Standing long jump
6. Shot put 16 lb two hands forward throw
7. Shot put 16 lb two hands backward throw
8. Shot put 9lb two hands forward throw
9. Shot put 9lb two hands backward throw
10.Regular shot put 16lb or 9lb
Each event had 3 attempts, and the decathlon discus table was used to score the competition.

If nothing else, and your track athletes are the type that would get into it, finish practice with a dance contest.  Winners watch the losers do pushups.

 

 

Now, obviously the whole purpose of the off-season isn’t to try and make every single practice revolve around the fun factor, but fun should strategically be used to help take the edge off of the regular, hard work that builds champions.  It should also be used to help the spirit of the athlete and the team.  Even the most driven athlete needs a dose of fun every now and then.  

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Off-Season Training Principle #3 Build the Total Athlete 

In the off-season, it is important to ensure you are building the total athlete, and not just building in the groove of one specific event.  Many athletes set PR’s a few weeks after the season ends, where they are just doing general training or pickup basketball.  General training is a huge compliment while the specific motor pathways rest and recovery from the training process.

The first order of business is to work on the five biomotor qualities: speed, strength, stamina, mobility and coordination.  The area that most off-season training falls short is building mobility and coordination.   Speed is also an area that also isn’t embraced to its full potential.

Speed in the truest sense is multi-directional.  Athletes should be fast both forwards and backwards.  They should also have some ability to move laterally, as this draws on the lateral chain, which is a stabilizer in linear movement.  Athletes with weak glute-medius, and a tight groin will be slower and get hurt in repeated linear work.  The fastest athletes forwards are usually the fastest athletes backwards.  Athletes can only accelerate what they can safely decelerate.  All these principles dictate how fast an athlete can move on the track.

With this in mind, do backwards jumps and sprints.  Do work with fast decelerations.  Run a few “suicide sprints”, where athletes must change directions very quickly.  Use a more multi-lateral approach to speed as part of the warmup process in traditional sprint workouts.

On top of this, there are a few basic movement skills that every athlete should have in their arsenal.  Regardless of event, athletes should be able to sprint, jump and throw.  Outside of this, they should also have some basic coordination over hurdles, and also have some rudimentary gymnastic ability.  Being able to swing from monkey bars, crawl under a low hurdle, pick up heavy objects, press weight over ones head, and balance on one leg are some primal human skills that should be maintained in some form to achieve high performance.

In building the total athlete in the earliest of training months, keep in mind human movements such as:

• Crawls
• Rolls
• Hanging, climbing, and overhead traversing
• Decelerating and lateral movement power
• Hurdling (obviously, this being for athletes where hurdling isn’t a primary event)
• A variety of throwing movements
• Swimming (being able to coordinate opposing arms and legs with the trunk suspended

 

 

The total athlete goes beyond just the physical as well.  There is a mental strategy behind training.  Athletes should spend the off-season working on basic mental strategies that the competitive phase will thrive off of.

The off-season is a great time to learn to handle training and life stress on a psychological level.  Practicing psychological aspects of practice, such as breathing, visualization, and meditation pay fantastic dividends throughout the competitive season.    

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Off-Season Training Principle #4 “Same but Different” is the Spice of Life 

One of the biggest takeaways I had from the landmark book “Easy Strength” by Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline, was the idea of “same but different”.    The same but different principle means that in the off-season training periods, athletes should pick similar training means that they can work intensely in, but that are different enough from their main even that they don’t over-work the same movements they just performed for the last 8-9 months.  The “same but different” principle allows mental and physical rest for an athlete preparing for the next competitive venture.

This type of work shows up in resisted, assisted, and complicated versions of track events.

Lightened and heavy training is simple enough, it has been around ever since track was invented.  Complicated training is also a viable idea in the early training periods.

Doing sprints and specific drill work with the hands overhead or held straight out in front of the body are a nice way to offer a complicated run stimulus that helps the trunk and spine adapt differently.  Holding light medicine balls in a similar manner can be useful in lower speed sprint and jump activities.

There is a famous school of sprint training that pretty much does nothing but hurdle hops, bounding, depth jumps, and lifting for two months in the fall, and finds themselves very successful later on.

Part of the “same but different” ideal is the “Ends to Middle” approach to training, where athletes will train opposing components of their event, moving closer to the actual event itself as the season draws near.  Examples of this would be:

• Initially focusing on short acceleration and long special endurance for sprinters, increasing acceleration distance, and reducing special endurance distance as the competitive season nears.  The same can be true for hurdlers, initially working on only 1-2 hurdles for most of the off-season, and using special endurance sprints with 400 hurdle settings for SE work.
• Focusing on light implements for throws, alongside hypertrophy work in the early season. As the season moves forward, barbell volume decreases, but intensity increases, and implement weight gets closer to competition standard.
• For jumps, focusing on short approach jumps, and elastic jump and bounding endurance work. As the season nears, the approaches grown longer, and the jump endurance work grows shorter.

On this approach, it is fine to have endurance work in the mix for power events, so long as that endurance end is technically sound.

Be aware of the need for corrective strength work on the short end of things.  For example, if an athlete can’t hit a particular position in acceleration, check the strength of the tibialis and peronei.  If an athlete struggles with knee lift in top end sprinting, check the strength and tightness of muscles surrounding the pelvis.  Simply cueing athletes to do things “right” has serious shortcomings.

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Off-Season Training Principle #5  Know the “Art” of Having a Plan 

Most of us would consider planning and periodization a science, but I consider it just as much an art form.  Anyone can write out a few months work of training ahead of time based on some “science”, and think that they did the best job that they could in finding the optimal route for the off-season training.

The thing is, that unless the training can take shape around the response of the athlete on a regular basis, all an athlete may be able to claim out of the off-season work is that “they did a lot of training”.   

The goal of off-season training is all the things listed in principles 1-4, but above all, it is to improve over the course of the training weeks and months.  You can’t blindfold yourself to how training is unfolding and hope for the best down the road.

As much as many would like to think, off-season training is not a linear venture, slowly increasing the volume and/or intensity each week until the competitive season draws near.  Nobody adapts to that type of mentality past a particular point.

Training needs to have strategic ups and downs over time.  The human body, and life in general, is cyclical in nature.  We respond to alternations of specific and general work, the ratio of which is unique to a bell-curve of athletic response.   Some athletes can grind out similar work for long periods of time, while others need a more undulating plan.  You can’t adjust training for every single athlete; to do that would be foolish, but you can steer the program towards the general adaptivity of the team, and then use a day such as Friday or Saturday for some individual needs in either the power or density/fitness department.

To make the off-season program a bit easier to manage, I like to think of programming in terms of having mesocycle “cards”, or templates that can be switched and swapped through the course of training.  Some basic “cards” would look something like this:

In early off-season training, the ratio of a workout like Card 1 to a Card 2 workout could be high for beginners or out of shape athletes, and low for more advanced athletes, or those who are in good physical shape coming in.

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Early Off-Season Training Card 1: Low CNS

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Hill Work	Tempo/ General Fitness	Game	Hill Work	Tempo	General Fitness or Off-Day

Early Off-Season Training Card 2: Higher CNS

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Dense- Acceleration Throws End. Plyos	Intensive Tempo	Game	Acceleration Throws Plyos	General Fitness/  Off Day	Hill Work

In the main off-season program, also known as “SPP”, athletes must hone in on improving their speed and power in all relevant functional event indicators, such as standing triple jump, 30m dash, overhead backwards shot throw, 10 bounds for distance, flying 10m sprint, and more.  In the main program, fatigue management is king, and this is where a smart approach to loading and cycling is even more of the essence.

Main Off-Season Training Card 1:  Moderate CNS (moderate risk, moderate reward)

This can be made a low CNS by removing or replacing the Saturday workout.  The Saturday workout can also be alternated every other week with a game, trail run, or emotionally easy activity. 

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Event Skill Acceleration Plyo Throw Lift	Tempo	Event Skill Max V Dense Plyo Light Lift	Intensive Tempo	OFF	Coordination Heavy Plyo

Main Off-Season Training Card 2: Moderate CNS (emotionally easier week)

This is a nice training setup to contrast with more routine training weeks.  An easy cycle for most athletes would be to run Card 1 for 2 weeks, Card 2 for a week, and then perform a deload week.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Event Skill Throw Game Lift	Tempo	Event Skill Max V Dense Plyo Light Lift	Long Game	Acceleration Heavy Plyo    -OR- Test Plyo Heavy Lift	Light team trail or beach run

Main Off-Season Training Card 3: High CNS (high risk, high reward, frequent need for deloading/transition to Card 1 or 2)

One of the most rewarding training cycles available, this type of work can usually be run for 2-3 weeks before a deload or emotionally easier week must be incorporated.  Athletes can typically handle 2-4 x 2-3 week cycles of this higher intensity training work before a lower intensity Card needs to be incorporated.  Friday’s workout can also be moved to Saturday for those who have the time.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Game Coordination Heavy Lift	Acceleration Event Skill Plyo	General Fitness OR Off	Game Extensive- Coordination Medium Lift	Max V Event Skill Heavy Plyo	Light Tempo or trail run

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Conclusion 

There are many ways to assemble your off-season training regime for track and field.   Training is much more than finding “the best training program”, and then having your athlete’s perform it for 12-18 weeks.  It is about getting them to be able to perform the maximal amount of work that will have a positive transfer to their event performance, with the best possible technique, and do it in a way that builds the team and leaves a smile on athlete’s faces.

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“Speed Strength, is without doubt a game changer. There are limiting factors and key differences in every athlete. Whether fibre 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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