Or to put it another way, a micro change in one place, let’s say in the blocks at the start of a 100m race, can cause a macro change in another place, let’s say at the end of a 100m race.

It would appear to me that you can’t win your race from your block set-up, shape and clearance alone, but you can lose it.

And it also appears to me that we spend a lot of time refining acceleration and upright running. And of course we should. But if every step and posture in the 100m race is determined by what preceded it, the origin of that sequential reactive step by step process is obviously super important.

So here are my 6 tips for mastering the most difficult and important metre in the 100m race.

1. Master the parts before the practicing the whole.

I don’t know much about house building. But I know this. I wouldn’t start with the roof. I would probably build some good foundations. Then maybe some walls. Before I started with the roof.

You jump into blocks without doing any foundational work and, literally speaking, the roof will fall in.

The first metre involves a number of separate parts that come together. Master the parts before you try and stick the whole sequence together.

So before your first block session of the year be sure to have mastery of these key areas:

• Block and pedal spacings that are individualised around you.
• A consistent, suitable and balanced shape for the ‘on-your-marks’ and ‘set’ positions.
• Timing, direction and repeatability of your exit from the blocks.

Take away: Identify the day of your first block session. See that first block session as an endpoint of your learning progression of the parts. And the start-point of grooving the whole sequence.

2. Teach and refine technique to allow full expression of power

Stand by a race track and watch a group of young developing athletes perform starts from the blocks. You are probably going to see the majority of those young athletes make it easier for themselves by shifting head, shoulders and chest upward to allow an easier exit pathway out of the blocks.

9 times out of 10 you will hear coach say ‘the athlete isn’t strong enough’. The solution always? Hit the weight room. Get stronger.

But here is the thing, most athletes who are reasonably good at 100m running are powerful people. They just aren’t placed in the correct position by their spacing’s and shapes to allow them to express the power they do have.

Every athlete is different. They have different lever lengths. Different joints. Muscle length, tendon sizes. Contraction systems etc etc.

The list goes on. So it would make sense that block spacings, pedals and positions have to be individualised.

Some people use leg lengths. Some people have intricate calculations for front and rear pedals. Choose a method the works for you and spend time refining spacing, pedals and positions.

Personally I like to do nothing more complicated than eyeball things and then use trial and error. It sounds simplistic but I work with an athlete for 5–6 weeks eyeballing their on-marks and set positions. I like the shape to look right. So I work hard with the spacings to get the shape to look right.

Take away: Athletes who run track are usually powerful people. Put them a position to express the power they do have. Don’t blame your athletes for not being strong enough because you can’t place them in the correct position.

3. Become a mono-tasker

The body can’t do two things at once. It can be searching for balance in set and reacting to the gun at the same time. The blocks are not for multi-tasking.

Craft and refine your set position so that your sensory network isn’t checking its surroundings to find balance as well as listening for the gun.

From October to December spend some time in your set positon. Learn to like it there. You should feel comfortable. Like you could hold set with a hurricane around you.

Take away: Do your balance work in the winter so when you sit in the blocks in the spring you are reacting to the gun and not trying to find your balance.

4. Perfect pressure to ensure an elastic exit

We have elastic energy that we can use. Stretch and release. Energy effcient would be an apt description. We have another type of energy we could use. This is muscle contraction. Energy un-efficient you could call it.

If you have to express your energy over the 100m race distance, which energy would you rather use to exit the blocks? The one that costs energy or the one that comes for free?

Saving your energy for the 45–50 forthcoming steps of power production would make logical sense, right?

So access your elastic system as much as possible to fuel your exit from the pocket.

To access this energy, you do have to a little work though. Your job is to press hard into the pedals to stretch your soft tissue like an elastic band. The pedals are there to be pushed into hard — so use them!

And watch for the subtle tension release just prior to the first movement. Sometimes forward. Sometimes down. Don’t stretch the catapult back and then release the tension just before you are going to fire!

Take away: An efficient elastic fuelled exit from the blocks is energy saving, giving you more money to spend up the race track.

5. Exit from the blocks forward with the right type of up.

Picture a jumbo jet at the start of a runway. Primed for take-off. The jumbo knows that if it tries to go up before it goes forward then it won’t take off. The jumbo goes forward and then eventually rises down the runway.

The 100m race is similar. You have to express your shape forward and then climb up in an incremental and patient fashion. Apply and feel pressure on each and every ground contact and let that force exchange on the ground dictate your step by step change in body angle.

So if smoothing and prolonging the upward gradient during the race is important, don’t start your race exiting the blocks steeply up.

Take away: A premature upward movement of your head and shoulders when leaving the blocks kills your race on the start line. Work hard to practice your transition from set with a healthy relationship between forward and up. This ensures a clearance angle that gives you a good chance of delaying your rise deeper into the race.

6. Groove your block exit angle in manageable settings

Block clearance is one of the hardest moves in all of sport. It requires timing as described above, power, co-ordination, reaction, among a whole host of other qualities.

You wouldn’t just walk into your local swimming baths. Climb the ladder to the 15m diving board and perform a back dive with 1 ½ somersaults, with 3 ½ twists. And expect to enter the water with a ruler like posture with minimum water splash. You will most likely belly flop, badly. Water everywhere. Embarrassing yourself completely as you exit the pool with a red mark across your stinging torso, scratching your head wondering why you didn’t nail the final twist properly.

A more sensible strategy might be to start diving from the poolside perfecting your dive from that height. Then the 5m board. Then the 10m. Then eventually the 15m board.

Start from a position that has the lowest possible block exit difficulty, say a falling start on a hill. Learn how to exit the set position forward with the right amount of up. Then move to a more challenging positon, say a 3-point start. Maybe transition to a 1-pedal start. Then finally transition to blocks. Doesn’t haven’t to be that sequence. But it does have to be well thought out progressive learning syllabus.

Take away: Jump too early to a block clearance situation you haven’t prepped for and your body will workaround the problem by choosing an easier block exit strategy. Perfect your skills in manageable environments that allow you to learn how to clear the blocks and win your race from your first step.

Steve Fudge is a professional Sprint Coach for British Athletics. He coaches elite sprinters, mentors sport coaches and provides consultancy services to professional sport people and staff. You can contact Steve on Twitter or on his website.

The post Win your race from the start  appeared first on Fast Running.

Add in athletes with unpredictable stress reactions. Then add emotionally charged agents, parents, support staff who all have vested interests. Then add in logistics and environmental considerations of travel, holding camps and team hotels and federation demands. Media? Yep add in that too.

You get the picture. And we haven’t even got into training details. Speed and endurance needed to be fine-tuned and brought to optimum for that athlete. Along with stride length, stride frequency, strength, power, elasticity.

So you have got a whole bunch of moving parts that you need to bring together. It is like landing a fighter jet on a moving aircraft carrier. In a stormy ocean. In the middle of the night. While getting shot at by the enemy.

You get the idea. So here are my 7 secrets for creating the perfect taper and giving the athletes you coach a chance to become Championships Closers.

1. Focus on reasons to succeed, not create reasons to fail.

Ok you coach. So you are a perfectionist. And over competitive. And probably a little insecure.
All those personality peccadillos mean that as you begin to organise the taper into the major champs your brain will focus on the things you believe are missing.

You obsess and narrow in on the 20% of the race you aren’t happy with. And not the 80% of the race you know is good.

Look you have probably coached hard for 45 weeks. In that time, you will have built up general fitness, then specific fitness. You will have crafted race-specific skill sets. You will have increased physical capacities.

So why the hell are you letting your competitive anxieties draw you towards the reasons to fail, rather than reasons to win? Be confident in the portfolio of work you have built up consistently over 9 months.

Take away: Trust in your process. Get out on the track and polish up what you do have and don’t dwell on what you don’t have. This is not the time for panic workouts.

2. Use your taper to subtract not to add.

Tapering by definition means taking away. Sharpening. Narrowing. But instead of subtracting, many coaches add. Add more work. More information. More pressure. More effort.

A year-long training program is like a long-haul flight. The majority of energy is used to get the thing off the ground and up to flying height. The plane then works hard to get on and stay on the flight path. Then when it gets a certain distance out from its target it starts to coast. It starts to float towards its target. Too much energy at this stage and the target will be missed.

The final descent is what tapering into a champs should be like. It should, of course include technical and race specific work, but this work should be completed effortless.

The effortful work is done in the winter, refined and maintained during the racing season. 20 days out from the major championships lock in the date of the competition. Put on auto-pilot and cruise in towards that target.

Take away: In the taper, subtract rather than add.

3. Taper according to personality types

Henk Kraaijenhof describes a spectrum of athletes from warriors to worriers. These groups are defined by differences in their fight or flight response to stress, governed by hormonal and neurotransmitters factors.

So should we taper this vastly different groups the same? Probably not.

The worriers are the ones that 3 weeks out of competition are checking entry lists and predicting lane draws. They are downloading weather apps for long range forecasts. They are living in their heads, with their foot on the brain accelerator. Calculating. Speculating. Burning up adrenaline. The last thing you want to give these guys is more information to worry about. Your job here is to simplify and de-stimulate.

The warriors? These guys are competitive beasts. The only problem being they don’t really show up unless it is on the big stage. These are the guys that you are going to have to remind that there is World Championships on to get some good workouts out of them. They have probably made social plans so a gentle reminder of the date of the first round will help them. These guys have their foot on the brain brake. They will need stimulated. It might not do any harm to talk about how good their competitors look. It might not do any harm to have a bad workout to scare them. Your job is to create a little fear and get their competitive side going.

Take away: Know what type of stress responder you have in front of you. And taper your information, environment and communication accordingly.

4. Padlock the doors to the excuse factory

Winning Championships medals is hard. The guys that do that are hard physically. And even harder mentally. There are many that aren’t prepared to to face the long lonely road to championship success. And it needs to be lonely. And hard. And we have to create the situation where there are no ways out.

I liken it to placing the athlete in a room with the doors all closed. Outside of the room is an excuse factory. I think I might be injured. I feel sick. Athlete X has a better lane draw than me. Athlete Y is getting preferential treatment from the federation. Blah, blah, blah. You let those things into the room and the championships are over.

The guys who win medals find a way to keep the doors shut. They do not let any excuses into that room.
Here is the problem, some athletes will go trying all the doors and there will be a group of people who will quite happily confirm their worries and open the doors to the excuse factory wide open.

Take Away: Take a look at the people in the inner circle and decide if they are guys that will keep the excuse factory locked up or will open it up.

5. Avoid the temptation to need to have million dollar workouts

Here is a mistake I have made as a coach. Believing that it is important to have great workouts in the taper period. I mean when you look at it logically you have probably completed 40–50 training weeks before the taper. And if you have been consistent completed minimum 2 key workouts each week. So anywhere between 80–100 key workouts have led you to this point.

So you pick 3–4 key workouts going into the meet. And suddenly you place huge importance on the success of these workouts. Never mind the 80 or so key workouts that have preceded, if you are to win a medal you have to nail these last 3–4? Are you kidding me. Does this make any sense?

But that is what we do. Our insecurities and anxieties push us to believe we need PB workouts. It makes us all — coach, athlete, support team — feel good. And excited. But here is what it is also doing — raising adrenaline; hope; expectation; and excitement. Which all costs energy and removes focus away from the process. And onto the result.

Take-Away: Save adrenaline, excitement and emotional energy for the competition. Focus on the process. Save energies for the real fight. No medals are won on the training track.

6. Acknowledge your relationship with adrenaline

If the plane is suddenly nose diving, what do you do, you glance up from the film you are watching and take a look at the flight staff. If they are getting on with their business, preparing drinks and the meal service, then we are all good. No panic. But if they are running for the life vests and battling each other to get to get to the oxygen supply then it is time to panic.

Athletes heading into a major championship will experience moments of turbulence. That’s part of the deal. At the point of turbulence, they will glance up and see how their coach and support team will react. If coach and support crew are carrying on as normal, then it’s all good. All part of the journey. If they are panicking, changing workouts, having heated discussions then maybe something isn’t right? Boom. That momentary reaction to stress has just cost a medal.

Take-Away: As a coach or support team member know what your relationship with adrenaline is like. If you have a bad one, then acknowledge that and keep your visibility to the athletes to times where you can control your stress response.

7. Know when the cake is baked and complete with the appropriate icing

I don’t know much about baking cakes. But I do know this. You can’t unburn a burnt cake. You can put a undercooked cake back in the oven, but there is no undoing a burnt cake.

So a big part of the taper is known when to turn the heat off the athlete and let them cool down.

Once the cake is cooled down you can’t rush and put icing on top of the cake. If there cake is still hot the icing won’t work. So leave enough time before you apply the last few workouts.

Now the icing is different from the cake. It is much smaller than the cake. But it complements the cake and brings the best out of it. The last few workouts are like that icing on the cake. They need to be small, different from the main body of work, but complimentary.

For example, you can add freshness onto fitness. Or layer on top speed onto a lot of endurance. Or vice versa. Or mechanically encourage stride length to complement the stride frequency you have.

Take away: Time the start of the taper at the right point in the training process before the athlete is over cooked. Pick a few highly targeted workouts which bring the best out of the body of work you have developed.

Steve Fudge is a professional Sprint Coach for British Athletics. He coaches elite sprinters, mentors sport coaches and provides consultancy services to professional sport people and staff. You can contact Steve on Twitter or on his website.

The post Coaching Athletes : 7 Secrets To Building The Perfect Taper appeared first on Fast Running.