Today’s podcast features track and speed coach, Chris Korfist. Chris has been a high school coach in track and football for 3 decades with close to 100 All-State athletes. He is currently the sprints coach at Homewood Flossmoor high school in Chicago, owns the “Slow Guy Speed School”, and has consulted with professional sports teams all over the world, including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and Rugby League. Chris has been a favorite podcast guest on this show and is constantly evolving and innovating his methods.
Sprinting is a simple, yet complex topic, and one that requires a continual analysis of mechanics, exercises and training models. There are many ways to train athletes, and with this in mind, it’s important to understand the “first principles” of any training system. With many first principles taken from the brilliance of the “DB Hammer” training ideals, Chris has steadily evolved his training system, year over year, to the place where it is today.
This past season, Homewood Flossmoor won the Illinois state track championship, and won the 4x100m and 4x200m dashes on their way to the title. Chris’s adjustments to his speed training models worked well, with some athletes chopping off a second or more off of their 200m times from the previous year.
On the podcast today, Chris starts by talking about his mental training approach, and some unique mental training elements of this past year’s team. He then gets into the main changes he utilized this past training year, including reducing the speed endurance component of the work, and replacing it with some potent “AN2” bracket (30-40 second) specialized training for the sprints. Chris also goes into how he would specialize the exercises for sprinters of different archetypes (stompers vs. slicers) and much more.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
2:40 – How the state track meet went for Chris’s team this year, including a 41.03s 4x100m time and a state championship
7:08 – Updates on mental strategies for racing, and building mental highlight tapes for athletes prior to meets
20:49 – Some main changes that Chris made this year in his programming that proved successful in the team’s state championship performance
30:12 – Using the 1080 sprint for slow-speed iso-kinetic hamstring work to improve the injury resilience factor of the muscle group
33:53 – The specificity of the “AN2” (30-40 second) bracket of work for the special exercises that Chris’s athletes were performing
41:15 – “Stompers” vs. “Slicers” and how to train the weakness of each athlete
47:10 – Water bag training and the role of the trunk/core and arms in sprinting
49:33 – Hip flexor training and strength in speed development, and usage of the hip swing exercise
54:19 – How to use primetimes and flexed leg bounds in speed development
1:01:04 – Training frequency throughout the year, and how this was a lower frequency year for Chris’s athletes
1:06:49 – Final thoughts on working strengths vs. weaknesses, and when to stop trying to bring up weaknesses in a training year
Chris Korfist Quotes
“(The highlight/motivational videos for the kids) It’s just this constant feedback that you are all of that”
“This year, instead of goals, I had them focus on telling their story”
“Our self-talk this year became a story: This is where I came from, this is what I did, this is where I’m going; Tying in history and tying in stories to your self talk is really powerful, because as humans we all want a story”
“You figure out what motivates that kid, and then you push that button when you need to”
“I knew if we showed up to practice and did the exact same thing we did before… doing the same thing for a kid that’s coming on for their 3rd year, how much better are we going to get if we just do the same stuff?”
“We were not a great force team (in looking at the 1080 data), we can get out and really go, but we don’t have a lot power coming out of the hole, so we spent the whole first part of the season pulling”
“You put a LILA (Exogen) sleeve on one leg, and swing that sucker for 40 seconds, and don’t move your torso, you’re gassed, that’s a lot of work”
“We did 1×23 second run, and 1×150, and that was the extent of our speed endurance for the entire season… and I had 2 guys that ran under 21.5, and that was a second improvement for one and over a second improvement for the other”
“That was another big change we did, was on our off days (only recently have I become a core person) we would hold for 20,30,40 seconds, and can you breathe and hold those positions”
“We started extending feet stuff out to 2 minutes”
“Indoors, we’d be doing mostly all slice drills. When we went outside, we would do the old DB Hammer box jumps for “stompers, but we did it with resistance so you had rubber bands on over, and we would jump up to a .5” or .25 “mat. And we would do slice drills with my slicers”
“Let’s not strengthen your weakness anymore, let’s strengthen your strength now, because we only have 5-6 more weeks… at this point I have to go with what I made, and go with something they can build off of for the rest of their season”
“My two fastest guys jump 33-34, but they run 21.3-4, but they are slicers and can get more horizontal force and velocity than stompers… a bigger wheel… like roadrunner”
“We had a kid who swung his arms so far to the outside, we thought he was going to get disqualified for hitting people, and I said alright, you will carry this red water bag on your back for every practice that we do, you will never had that water bag off your back… his arms got better, he got faster and ran a 51 second open 400”
“That’s what drills should be, you restrict it down so the only option is what we think, is right”
“Use the 200g (on exogen) for the leg swings, it’s plenty”
“You watch the kids who aren’t as fast, you see the spine all over the place (in those swing leg drills), so we really focus on anchoring that down”
“We’ve developed (primetimes) into a bent knee primetime”
“For my slicers (bent knee primetime) was their drill… with bent knee prime-times, it’s what you can get out of the back end”
“100 yards was too far (for the flexed leg bounds) I got lots of negative feedback after the 100 yard ones”
“We didn’t run our kids a lot early, because I believe there are only so many days in a year that you can actually go hard”
“If you have really good kids, it’s going to take them longer to recover anyways, it’s a higher-octane athlete that needs more time to recover”
“How do I know to switch over (from working weaknesses to strengths)? That’s me surrendering that I can’t make any more changes”
Show Notes
About Chris Korfist
Chris Korfist has been a high school coach in track and football for almost 30 years, with more than 80 All-State athletes. He has also been a strength coach at the college and high school levels, working with many sports. Korfist is currently the sprints coach at Homewood Flossmoor high school in Chicago, and owns a private facility called Slow Guy Speed School that helps develop athletes ranging from World Champion to middle school. He has consulted with professional sports teams all over the world, including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and Rugby League.
Korfist has published research on sprint training and is an advisor for Auckland University of Technology’s SPRINZ. Additionally, he co-owns Track Football Consortium (@TFConsortium), is co-founder of Reflexive Performance Reset, and has discussed training in countless blogs and podcasts.
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