Other/Mixed Sprinting program design?

[the hansenator]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for thoughts or tips on using a combination of sprints and hill sprints as a primary form of lower body training.

I've been doing some hill sprints for a while and they've been treating me well. They actually make my back and foot feel better, it's like they work all the right muscles. There's a hill at a nearby park that I use, it takes about 8-10 seconds to reach the top. I've been doing this between 1-3 days per week, depending on my schedule and how I feel. And today I went to the high school for some flat sprints. I found that those are easier on the legs but I was really sucking wind. With my medical history, that's something I should probably do more of.

Since I enjoy sprinting and they seem to be good to me, I was thinking of taking advantage of the warmer months and make it a primary form of lower body conditioning so I'm looking for programming advice - Volume, frequency, can this be done in an A+A type program? Are there supplementary exercises to help with things like injury prevention, mobility, technique? I really know very little regarding this type of programming.

My goals are just to enjoy maintaining general "fitness" in the sense of being healthy and able to do stuff. I'm not training for anything specific, except maybe long, strenuous hiking which is an activity I love and would like to be in shape for when the opportunities arrive. And I might join my brother for a 5k at the end of October, but that's a ways out still.

I have at my disposal: A short hill and a high school soccer field which are a short walk away. There's also a longer hill that's a short drive away and a rather tall set of stairs which is a moderate drive away. I thought maybe a once per week thing of doing the stairs and then going out to eat might be nice if I can get my wife on board.

Anyway, I would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks.

 

[Steve Freides]

@the hansenator, you might look into some 5k training programs and see how hill repeats and speed work are used.

Even if your goal isn't specific, you might find training programs that address specific goals will work for you. But, that said, a 5k is going to be mostly LSD running, and that's what would be your "primary form of lower body training."

Offhand, I'd say if you're going to sprint and/or do hill repeats, you're going to want to take 4-5 times the work time period as your rest time period. Another approach would be sprint/hill, jog back to the beginning, and wait until your heart rate comes down to a predetermined value (or you can breath easily again or some other way of determining this) before doing the next repeat.

-S-

 

[Tarzan]

A few of my friends at a local university have recently been doing a study into ACL tears in footballers and netballers in our area as they seemed to be succumbing to ACL tears a lot more than they should.

One of the common things they find is what a lot of others around the world have observed over the last twenty years or so. It's very easy to design a program to get someone moving fast, but if they have to stop and change direction fast and they haven't trained for it all sorts of things can go wrong.

A few recommendations have come out of the study and the main one is to include deceleration from day one. The first few sessions are dedicated to a single plane of movement and then after the athlete can consistently apply what they've learned they start including more complicated movements where they stop and change direction before re acceleration.

I just thought I'd mention this because hill sprinting is commonly completely devoid of any loaded deceleration, so it's a form of unbalanced training in some respects. It works the prime movers exceptionally well but does almost nothing for the stabilisers.

If I was starting a sprinting program one or two minutes each session of deceleration training would be almost as important to me as the actual sprint training.

Some of the more basic techniques are in the vid below.

 

[the hansenator]

Deceleration techniques, that never occurred to me. I'll have to re-watch that video and start practicing.

LSD running has always been really hard for me and it seems to be harder on the body than hill sprints are. I do try to jog towards my sprint location. I use it as a warm up and try to stay relaxed and pace myself and all that but I only make it a few blocks before I'm winded. I hope to ease into it over the summer but it's never been an enjoyable experience for me.

The way I've been doing it is to sprint the distance then walk back to the start and wait for my breathing to normalize before going again, repeating until it feels like enough. So far I've been content with that but I wanted to try to learn more.