This week’s guest is Jonas Dodoo head coach and founder of Speed Works, a high level training facility in the UK. Jonas has been mentored by some of the top track and field coaches in the profession, such as Dan Pfaff and Stu McMillan, and works with some of the fastest track athletes in the nation, as well as rugby players.
Jonas has trained some really elite sprinters, such as Chijindu Ujah who has gone 9.96 for 100m, and has an incredible depth of training knowledge when it comes to building speed in track and team sports. Some of the things that Jonas taught me on the show will stick with me, not only in my work with track athletes, but even in my aquatic and ball-sport S&C work as well (such as skill stabilization, and year to year iterations). The implications for training speed are often universal.
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Key Points:
- Assessing and training track vs. field sport athletes for speed
- Jonas’ 3 speed attractors he is looking for in developing speed in any athlete
- General thoughts on periodization and planning in speed development
- Ideas on “submaximal” speed work in practice, and the differences between racing and training
- Coaching athletes who are stronger vs. those who are more elastic for speed
- How Jonas implements the use of speed dribbles as a form of “tempo” training for speed
- Creative year to year training variations in working with speed athletes
- Ideas on skill stabilization for the competitive training phase
- Jonas’ philosophy on work in the weight room for speed seeking athletes
- Some specific exercises that Jonas likes for building fast athletes
“When you’re looking at acceleration and max velocity for track sprinters vs. field event athletes, the attractors are the same (projection of the hip, limb exchange,)
“Other weeks I’ll come in and the coach will say, this player hasn’t run faster than 95% of his max for 10 days, or 2 weeks (via GPS). So that day, my job is to make him run fast, and on those days, they’ll run PB’s, or close to it”
“Teaching speed is teaching good movement”
“Large volumes of resisted running from 40-50 meters, I don’t mind doing that at all”
“Running to 40 meters in trainers, versus an athlete in spikes, versus an athlete using timing gates, versus an athlete in blocks running next to another athlete, they’re all different stimuli. Not all speed is alike.”
(Regarding speed) “The mid-zone (intensive tempo zone) is great for teaching”
“I’ve gone away from focus on pushers and pullers (types of sprint athletes), it’s important to see it, but when you look at it in running, you start to see a different thing. When you look at JB’s research, you start to see people are better at force vs. better at velocity”
“A base of what? My mentality is a base of good habits”
“The warmups are drills, activation and elements of speed, key bits you will do before you run, that to me is the most important thing to make sure I vary each year, because after that, it’s generally the same thing, we are acceleration, doing some sort of speed, intensive tempo, or speed endurance work, we are doing the fruit of the event so regularly”
“Sometimes I move in terms of theme. This is a 4 year cycle, last year was speed, we were getting ready to race, the year before was an endurance year”
“It’s almost like there’s compound interest… the fitter you get, the stronger you are, the stronger you are, the faster you are, the faster you are, the more speed reserve you have, and this repeats over and over and over… and I think that happens on a 6 week basis as well as a 6 year basis, whatever happens on a macro happens on a micro”
“If I push my athletes towards what I want, they get hurt; that’s what I’ve learned over the past 6 years. If I let them have what they need, and figure out how much I can push them towards what I want, then they perform”
“Getting people ready is making sure that physically and mentally they are prepared, and you as a coach get out of the way”
“The power of silence, and the power of talking when you should, not just when you want to, is the most effective thing for coaches”
“When I need to be specific, what do I use, more heavy plyometrics, shock methods out on the track, or in the gym (weightroom)? If I have a delicate athlete, I’ll do it in the gym”
About Jonas Dodoo
Jonas Tawiah-Dodoo is the head coach and founder of Speed Works, was a part of the UK Athletics Apprentice Coach program in the 4 year lead up to the London 2012 Olympics, working with world-renowned coaches Dan Pfaff and Stuart McMillan. His experience in sport is not limited to athletics, as he has worked with rugby for several years.
Since graduating from the Apprentice Coach program, Jonas Tawiah-Dodoo has been working closely with a number of talented young sprinters, with his most recent prodigy Chijindu Ujah (9.96 for 100m and 6.53 for 60m). Ujah, the 2013 European Junior 100m champion, is the youngest Briton to break the 10-second barrier Holy Grail.
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