Doing a Proper Warm-Up

One thing's for sure, without warming up properly you will never be able to perform to your maximum during competition.  I don't say that because it is a "coachly" thing to say.  One of the tenets of my coaching programs is that I don't offer my athletes to do anything I haven't physically done myself before.  Between warm-up, cool-downs, and workouts, everything I have them do is what I've already done to myself as the human guinea pig.

I wasn't always so clever.  When I was a sprint coach my routine was pretty dull and a little too influenced by my distance background.  My favorite sprint coach of the time was Clyde Hart because I could identify with his training style which was high volume for sprinters (coincidentally I'm not even sure my 800 runners now do as much volume as some of his 400 runners did).  I had my guys do a lap or two easy then some static stretching and drills.  Either way, when I look back, it was bad.  Then again it was my first coaching foray and I was a certainly unaware of the full dynamics of training.  Anyway, after a season which only saw one runner break 23 seconds for 200 meters (yeah, it was that bad) I decided I needed to go out and learn more about the sport.

Well during my current coaching stint at John Curtis I began to implement a more dynamic warmup.  I had basically been brainwashed by Jay Johnson of Nike.  I figured I had nothing to lose; I was coaching a team varsity team with the average age of 12 so it wasn't like I was going to be setting world records in the fall anyway.  So for a few weeks I would go out after practice and experiment with different exercises and then attempt a workout and see how I would fare.  And I learned something pretty crazy.

So here I was, doing these warm up drills, basically getting in a workout before I even began the workout, feeling pretty tired when I toed the line, yet something miraculous happened.  I would run faster than I had for the same workouts a few weeks before, even feeling less than optimal at the start.  Thinking I might be insane, I asked Micah Simoneaux to try it as well and he offered the same results.  So I slowly started to get my team on board and teach them the warm up.  I took some stuff out, added some stuff in, etc., till I felt I had come to a good medium on what was necessary.  And at first it took such a long time that our hour long summer practices were solely doing warm-up drills!  It took a lot of refining.

The warm-up is an essential part of the training program.

Well by now I'm sure you are wondering what I had done that worked so well.  So a quick overview is this: a few minutes of easy jogging followed by a set of dynamic drills that focus on loosening the hamstrings and hip flexors, and then some strides. The jogging start is pretty standard and gets blood flow to the lower body after a long day of sitting in class.  I realized the magic was in the dynamic portion of the warm-up.  Runners develop very tight hip flexors and hamstrings and think back to the injuries your runners have had in the past and I can almost guarantee that these two muscles were either directly or partially responsible.  Make sure to loosen them up well!  And finally a couple strides were in order to prepare to run well in the workout.  And that's basically it.  Our warm-up went from an hour (okay so it only took that long because I was teaching proper form) to now it's around 15 minutes for the total deal.

As a coach, you need to think outside the box, or sometimes well within it, to maximize the performance of your team.  Either way, you need to be THINKING!  Most coaches develop a training plan or steal one out of a magazine and then shut it down mentally.  Challenge yourself to learn something new each year and then watch your team flourish.

Should We Always Trust the Science?

I love putting science into the training I do with my athletes.  We know what works and what doesn't based off of years of laboratory testing, studies, and research.  A coach who blindly follows a training program without knowing the science is the same as closing your eyes while riding a bike.  Sure, you will get somewhere, but the end result probably won't be that noteworthy (for the good reasons!).

That being said, show me a coach who has been around kids even just a couple of years and I will show you a person who understands that the human body doesn't perform the way science always says it will.   Psychological factors should be considered in training because an athlete doesn't always have the same level of desire to execute workouts in the manner it is prescribed.  This obviously has to be worked out by the coach, and hopefully that athlete will come around, but we all understand it is an issue at least occasionally.  If an athlete looks to be "hurting" in a workout on a day they should be fine, you need to understand something else may be going on there, and forcing the issue to continue isn't always the best choice.

The big one on my mind right now, though, is stretching.  Now of course, by today's standard you have tons of different techniques such as static, dynamic, active isolated stretching, etc.  If you wanted to right now, you could go on Google and find research that both supports and rejects all types of stretching.  Nothing is exactly clear cut once you start looking into the studies, so what do you do?  Well, I've done simple trial and error, not only with myself but with my athletes, and I know what helps me and them feel prepared to run well in a workout, or what helps us feel more recovered after a run.  Sometimes it is a static stretch, sometimes a dynamic.  You get the picture.  Use the science as a guide, because it is usually founded in some good research, but you can't trust everything because not all studies even work with athletes.  What is good for a sedentary population may have no effect on an athlete.  Be mindful of what you do, but use your intuition where the lines of science are grey.