Our guest for today’s show is Randy Huntington. Randy is a track and field coach, who has spent his recent years as the national track and field coach for the Chinese athletics association and has over 45 years of coaching experience. Huntington is rated as a USATF Master Coach in the jumps, has been the coach for many world-class athletes over the years, including eight Olympians and seven World Championship Team members. Mike Powell and Willie Banks set world records in the long jump and triple jump, respectively, while under his tutelage.
More recently, Randy has had tremendous success coaching in Asia, a capstone of which has been Su Bingtian, who recently set the Asian 100m dash record of 9.83 seconds at age 31. En route to his 100m record, Su broke the world record in the 60m (as a split time) with a 6.29, which converts to around a 4.07s 40 yard dash.
When a teenager, or relatively untrained individual takes a few tenths off of their 40 yard dash, or drops a half second in the 100m dash over several years time, this is a normal and natural occurrence, and isn’t something that really demands digging far into. On the other hand, when an already elite athlete, who is at, or slightly past their “prime” years, moves into their 30s and smashes sprint records, this is something that is truly worth putting a close eye on.
On the show today, Randy Huntington speaks on some of the training elements that helped sprinter, Su Bingtian achieve his recent results. Randy goes into his views on special strength training for speed, particularly on the level of the lower leg, and speaks on the use of banded and wearable resistance in speed training, as well as some nuts and bolts on resisted and sled sprint work. On the back end of the show, Randy gets into training the elastic and fascial systems of an athlete, and how to optimize an athlete’s elastic response to training in plyometrics and beyond.
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Timestamps and Main Points
5:02 – What’s been happening with Randy in his last 4 years of coaching, particularly with Su Bingtian and his success
12:24 – Some of the big training elements that helped Su Bingtian get down to 9.83/6.29 from 10.0/6.50 in his time working with Randy
18:37 – Using banded and wearable resistance methods for improving speed and “bridging” the gap between the weight room and the track
25:58 – Randy’s advice for using sleds/heavy sleds in training
32:59 – The “train your frame” system and the importance of body proportions and structure on optimal sporting events for athletes
37:01 – How Randy uses sleds for contrast training, as well as concepts on wave-loading and how many sets in a row to utilize
40:25 – The importance of elastic energy in athletic performance, and how under-estimated the elastic contribution to performance is, as well as how important dynamic elastic ability is for running endurance
50:44 – The nature of the advanced spikes and track surface used in the Tokyo Olympic games, and its impact on athletes
55:04 – Randy’s take on optimizing the elastic and fascial systems of an athlete, as well as a chat on ground contact times in plyometrics
– How improved foot strength played into Su’s improvement in the 100m dash, as well as in various portions of the race, as well as how Randy trained Su’s foot strength
1:08:26 – The role of harmonics and resonance between one’s foot/body and the running surface, especially in the course of a 100m dash race
– How to increase the eccentric rate of development in standard exercises, such as a partner pushing a partner down into an exercise
– Randy’s take on jumping off of an angled surface, versus a flat surface in jumping, or in jumping machines
“(In 2016) I took (Su) over to the Kaiser seated calf, and tested him, his power output was 735 watts, which was weaker than my weakest female triple jumper… so our first goal was to get that soleus strength as high as we could get it… now he is in the 26-2700 watt range”
“Even though (Su) was a quick starter, he wasn’t a fast starter”
“Elasticity wise, (Su) couldn’t rebound off the ground… so we got him into low amplitude single leg rebounding and slowly brought it up”
“I see 3 things that are my best teaching tools, the 1080 (sprint) and the sled… then the exogen, and then the activator belt (a belt with tubing attached to limbs)… those are the 3 most important integration tools, integrating the weight room to what you are doing on the track”
“When we do drills, we’ll do activator belt, exogen, off”
“You can’t underestimate the need for the psoas the other hip flexors to be really powerful and strong”
“If you are going to use external loading, you had better be prepared to rest a while”
“A heavy sled to me is a sled with close to your bodyweight, then we went half the bodyweight, then we would quarter the bodyweight”
“Even that first step (in a sprint) becomes elastic in nature, pretty quickly”
“In the jumpers, we are seeing close to a 1 to 1 ratio between femur and tibia… the RSI indexes are reflective of the anthropometric indexes of the athletes”
“I do things in 3’s… occasionally I do them in 4’s if I want to push the nervous system to take it”
“When you start talking about (elasticity/power) in isolation, or discreetly, you can get yourself in trouble because the body is a system”
“That’s the whole goal is to figure out how to get the athlete to access that elastic ability”
“To train (elastic/fascial) we go back to low amplitude”
“I started wearing earth shoes in 1977 and my vertical jump was gone, because the Earth Shoes had a negative heel, I just kept stretching slowly, my Achilles and I lost the elasticity in my calf”
“I don’t know if there’s one exercise you can pick, but high hurdle hops may be close to it, as a great way to destroy anybody’s elasticity and their ability to create good ground contact times”
“(Regarding ground contact times) you have to measure it, to see at what height athletes achieve their best ground contact times, because then you can go a little above it, or a litte below it”
“I don’t use the word “jump” very much with jump training, I use “bounce” training”
“Soleus is usually the most undeveloped muscle in the lower extremity”
“The key to the 100m is, you have to wait for the track to give something back, and at that point, that’s when you feel and go…. you gotta race enough to feel max velocity”
“The Keiser seated calf is one of the most under-rated training machines ever made”
“You must get your foot adjusted (by a therapist) if you are a jumper, sprinter, thrower, distance runner… it’s like having a race-car”
About Randy Huntington
Randy Huntington is currently the national track and field coach for the Chinese athletics association and has over 45 years of coaching experience. Huntington is rated as a USATF Master Coach in the jumps – one of only five in the U.S. He has been the coach for many world-class athletes over the years, including eight Olympians and seven World Championship Team members. Mike Powell and Willie Banks set world records in the long jump and triple jump, respectively, while under his tutelage. Six of his athletes have been in the U.S. all-time top ten in their respective events.
Huntington coached Powell to the Olympic Games in 1988, 1992 and 1996, where Powell won a pair of silver medals in the long jump. On Aug. 30, 1991 in Tokyo, Powell broke Bob Beamon’s 23-year-old long jump record that was expected to never be broken, leaping 29-4 1/2 (8.95m) – a record that still stands. Willie Banks, who Huntington coached to the 1988 Olympics, broke the world triple jump record with a mark of 58-11 1/2 (17.97m), June 16, 1985 in Indianapolis, and under Huntington’s coaching twice jumped over 18 meters, which is the longest in American history.
Huntington has also coached Olympians Joe Greene (long jump bronze medal in 1992), Sheila Hudson (American indoor and outdoor record-holder in the triple jump), Al Joyner, Darren Plab, Tony Nai and Sharon Couch. At least one of his athletes has competed in every summer Olympic Games since 1984. Powell, Greene, Hudson, Couch and Nai were all World Championship team members that he coached, along with Kathy Rounds and Kenta Bell.
Huntington has also worked with professional athletes in other sports, notably football. He has worked as a conditioning and/or speed consultant for several teams including Indianapolis, St. Louis, Miami, Denver, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, and has worked with numerous individual players including Trace Armstrong, Terry Kirby, Henry Ellard and Ed McCaffrey. He has also worked with college football programs at Florida, Oklahoma and Notre Dame including training for the NFL combine, working with athletes such as Kyle Turley and Grant Wistrom.
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