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In Australia we have just had Said Aouita appointed as our National Coach. So I have been spending some quality time with him discussing training methods and his philosophy , along with many of our open minded coaches.
The key area of his philosophy is to do enough quality volume to develop high levels of stamina. He also believes in having very easy days and high quality days. There is also a very easy week every 4th week. Integrated into the program are three weight training sessions a week and a high volume of hill repetitions.
Said believes that training really fast to develop speed presents a great danger of injury for MD athletes. He also believes that doing high volumes of lower qulaity training causes injuries as well. The other thing that people often do with younger athletes is to target every competition in the year and in not wanting to do high volumes with young athletes they do low volumes of anaerobic training all year. This effectively causes athletes to have no periodization and minimal overall development. There is only so far that an athlete can develop their anaerobic system.
A number of athletes so far on the program (since about September) already look much stronger when they run and are appearing to have more of the type of speed that people want at the end of races. One top level male 800 athlete has recently run 1:49 in early races and this has come off the training that people would normally do in the first 4 months of the training year. This athlete would usually needed to have done many weeks of fast race prep training at 400m paces to be in 1:49 shape and then during race season his times would usually drop to 1:47.
Said believes that great gains in speed can be developed by doing a good volume of hills in the base phase eg 5 x 10 x 100m and also varied emphasis weight training 3 times a week. In other phases the athletes do a great variety of plyometrics. This is an area that Said believes is even more important than weight training. The key to developing athletes who can be safe training with plyometrics is to have developing athletes doing a variety of lower intensity plyo activities and as adult athletes they will be much more able to fully implement training in this area to great effect with safety.
My squad in past have done a large amount of variety with plyometrics. It is an area I have rarely seen any problems especially with young athletes. We also do hills with bounding up hill a common activity which has helped all my squad including MD aths and sprinter/jumpers.
The ideal of endurance of bounciness - would be a great thing to be able to develop. MD aths need speed that is sustained from minatenance of a powerful stride not speed that comes from a sustained fast cadence. It would be great to be able to have both but most athletes can improve the power and more importantly the sustainable power of their stride by a large amount. However, this is not something that comes from doing 100 miles a week at slow paces with the athletes butts 6 inches closer to the ground.
My e-book Maintaining Form outlines more details about training possibilities.
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