Always an overachieving small school, Lyons assistant coach Jeff Boele shares what the Lions do in the strength and conditioning department. Photo by Paul Jaeger.
Special to Colorado Track XC by Jeffrey Boele
My philosophy has evolved over the years as I have continued to learn more - probably true for most of us. One thing that has been influential in my advancement as a distance coach has been coaching the jumpers that last four seasons. On the surface this doesn't make much sense, but by delving into the jumps/sprints, I have come across a wealth of information. This has helped me to better classify activities as well as develop a system that works for sports performance, not just an event group.
So with that intro, I break our strength training down into three generic categories, each having its own sub categories: general strength (maybe this is turning into a catch phrase), regenerative weight lifting, neural stimulus: exercises and weight lifting.
What We Do
1. General strength is a catch all for: body weight circuits, specialized body weight circuits ("core" or spinal stability routines), medicine ball.
WHEN - All year long, on a daily basis
2. Regenerative weight lifting is categorized by lower weight with moderate to high reps (10-12)
WHEN - Cross country: during the General (base) period
Track: during General and Specific period
3a. Neural stimulus exercises such as short MAXIMAL sprints, jump drills and multi throw routines (with a med ball or shot)
WHEN - CC: during the General period
Track: during the General period, and limited during the Specific period for middle distance athletes (1600 and down)
3b. Neural stimulus weightlifting consisting of the Olympics lifts (clean, snatch, jerk and their variations), as well as Static lifts (not a term I came up with) - Squat variations, Dead lift variations, Bench press variations, etc.
WHEN - CC: during the General period
Track: during the General period, and limited during the Specific period for middle distance athletes (1600 and down)
Limitations
We don't have much in the way of limitations as we have a great weight room at Lyons. Even with the weight room, understanding the gains from certain activities has given us a lot more flexibility with strength training.
Purpose
Here is what I am hoping to accomplish with the different activities:
General strength
It's all in the name. If I had to identify a root purpose, I would say to activate as many muscles as possible through a variety of movements.
The 'specialized' routines are exercises that address a smaller area. For us, mainly the muscles that surround the spine. For simplicity, I call these "core" even though to some degree all the general strength activities work to enhance core strength.
Medicine ball routines add a small element of weight in the name of more stabilization, again for the "core."
Regenerative weight lifting
This is essentially an endocrine stimulator. The types of lifts here encompass just about everything for upper, lower and central body. The range can be dumbbell curls to weighted sit ups, leg curls to dips; really a little bit of everything. Exercise in general stimulates the endocrine system and there is a resulting hormonal response. For this type of lifting we do 10-12 reps for 12-24 exercises (I have my circuits set up in groups of 12). The weight ranges from body weight to an amount that causes some fatigue on the last rep or two. This portion of the workout takes 15-25 minutes once the kids know what they are doing. So overall there isn't a huge stress, but enough to get a hormone bump. We want the endocrine system to give us a little bit of help without doing too much damage.
Neuromuscular Stimuli, part A and B
The idea with any activity that is primarily neuromuscular in nature is fiber recruitment. Essentially the muscle doesn't know the difference between sprinting at a MAX effort, jumping or doing a squat. All the muscle knows is that at a certain intensity, it has to call upon a given number of fibers to perform the activity. If an athlete can recruit more muscle fibers for an activity (running), there should be more force production. More force production can mean more speed and/or efficiency. Also potentially the ability to increase speed at a given point in the race - surge, kick, etc. Metabolic considerations come into play with this last one, so it is not a given that someone who is "fast" will be able to kick at the end of a race. But hopefully we're taking care of that with the run training that we're doing.
A sample week during the general phase of cross country might look like this:
Monday - long run, strides, daily cool down (a variety of general strength exercises)
Tuesday - workout, general Strength, med ball
Wednesday - easy run, strides, daily cool down
Thursday - easy run, core
Friday - workout, regenerative weight lifting
Saturday - easy run, daily cool down
Results
I would like to say I can point to a kid and say, "There is a success story." But I don't really have anyone specifically that I can do that with. One criteria that I use in my end-of-the-season evaluation is, what was the injury rate? Last cross country season (my first writing the training) we lost one girl for the season due to injury. In track we had zero (my first season with the distance kids). This current season, we didn't have anyone miss the entire year. Now there was plenty of nursing folks along who had nagging injuries. For just about all those injuries though, we were able to trace it back to a particular incident that was not related to training. Is there a direct correlation to the strength training we do? I don't know, I want to believe there is. At the very least, I know it is not hurting us on a large scale. It did lead to some soreness that exacerbated some preexisting conditions, but we were able to make adjustments for all those folks.
On a little bit of a related tangent, I'm in the process of working out some strength/mobility screenings with a local PT. He helped one of our girls tremendously this season with some chronic pain. I went to her first appointment where he did a screening and he was able to identify some things that I had observed with her form. I just didn't have the know-how to express what I was seeing. We got to talking and my hope is to have as many kids as I can do an initial screening with him. From there we'll get individualized exercises for everyone. At that point, we'll plug those into our daily routines. We'll do general exercises that are the same, but then we'll break apart and everyone will execute their three or four specific drills that attend to their own issues. I think this is a good progression for us and for myself in order to continue learning.