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Mills on Bolt
Last year, there was a great interview from Glen Mills, infamously known as Usain Bolt’s coach.
There were some great take home messages, so I’ll provide a snippet of the key questions below.
NSA: In Usain Bolt you are training the most successful sprinter for years. How have you evaluated his technique?
MILLS: Usain is an extremely gifted athlete. When I started working with him, one of the things that stood out like a sore thumb was his poor mechanics. He was running behind the centre of balance. This resulted in a negative force against his forward drive and it was affecting other areas. For example, his body position put pressure on his lower back and there was a continual shift of his hip girdle and a pull on his hamstring. He was continually having hamstring problems and my assessment was that one of the things that contributed to it was his poor mechanics. Our first task was to get him to run with his upper body core in line with his centre of mass or a forward lean of somewhere around 5-10°. We set about doing drills then we took videos of his workouts and broke them down on the screen in slow motion to show him exactly what he was doing. I would draw diagrams and show him the position that we are working to achieve. Part of his poor mechanics was because he was not able hold the sprint position during maximum velocity running, so we had to do an intense programme to develop his core strength. In Beijing he showed a mastery of the technique that we had been working on, but the transformation took two years. Athletes tend to reverse to their old habits when put under pressure or when running at maximum velocity. Like helping an actor learning a part, coaches have to continuously react and replay and redo the drills, getting the athlete to run over and over in order to break habits, both psychologically and physically, and get into the right running technique.
NSA: What type of strength training do you see as important for the 100m and 200m?
MILLS: Strength is one of the hallmarks in sprinting and therefore it must be developed. However, I believe that there are two types of strength: the static and the dynamic strength. I think athletes tend to depend too much on the static strength and that dynamic strength is one of the greatest areas of deficiency in most runners. They are all bulked up and big and powerful from the weight room, but they neglect the dynamic strength, that is the strength developed in resistance training, plyometrics and so on. We find with our sprinters that we get far better result when we almost have a fifty - fifty split between static and dynamic strength training.
NSA: How do you manage to keep the balance between speed endurance and pure speed work, so that the athlete is fresh and explosive?
MILLS: Speed endurance and pure speed have to work hand in hand. People tend to separate them and do speed endurance as a single component and then do explosive speed training as a single component. A lot of time we hear sprinters say that they have not started speed work yet, which means that they have been doing speed endurance work. My philosophy is that the two should run concurrently and that coaches should try to develop a balance. To keep the athlete fresh and explosive, the load has to be slightly reduced as you go to high velocity and high quality performance in training, the work that is done in the last part of the competitive period leading up to the major completion. A greater degree of rest is required for recovery and explosive training must be greatly reduced to maybe once or twice per week and a recovery should not be less than 36 hours, 48 hours would be even better. A lot of coaches feel that if you reduce the workload too much in terms of training time the athlete will lose something, but that is not my experience.
As always, here are the best articles for December 2009 on SpeedEndurance.com
Enjoy,
Jimson Lee
SpeedEndurance.com
Last year, there was a great interview from Glen Mills, infamously known as Usain Bolt’s coach.
There were some great take home messages, so I’ll provide a snippet of the key questions below.
NSA: In Usain Bolt you are training the most successful sprinter for years. How have you evaluated his technique?
MILLS: Usain is an extremely gifted athlete. When I started working with him, one of the things that stood out like a sore thumb was his poor mechanics. He was running behind the centre of balance. This resulted in a negative force against his forward drive and it was affecting other areas. For example, his body position put pressure on his lower back and there was a continual shift of his hip girdle and a pull on his hamstring. He was continually having hamstring problems and my assessment was that one of the things that contributed to it was his poor mechanics. Our first task was to get him to run with his upper body core in line with his centre of mass or a forward lean of somewhere around 5-10°. We set about doing drills then we took videos of his workouts and broke them down on the screen in slow motion to show him exactly what he was doing. I would draw diagrams and show him the position that we are working to achieve. Part of his poor mechanics was because he was not able hold the sprint position during maximum velocity running, so we had to do an intense programme to develop his core strength. In Beijing he showed a mastery of the technique that we had been working on, but the transformation took two years. Athletes tend to reverse to their old habits when put under pressure or when running at maximum velocity. Like helping an actor learning a part, coaches have to continuously react and replay and redo the drills, getting the athlete to run over and over in order to break habits, both psychologically and physically, and get into the right running technique.
NSA: What type of strength training do you see as important for the 100m and 200m?
MILLS: Strength is one of the hallmarks in sprinting and therefore it must be developed. However, I believe that there are two types of strength: the static and the dynamic strength. I think athletes tend to depend too much on the static strength and that dynamic strength is one of the greatest areas of deficiency in most runners. They are all bulked up and big and powerful from the weight room, but they neglect the dynamic strength, that is the strength developed in resistance training, plyometrics and so on. We find with our sprinters that we get far better result when we almost have a fifty - fifty split between static and dynamic strength training.
NSA: How do you manage to keep the balance between speed endurance and pure speed work, so that the athlete is fresh and explosive?
MILLS: Speed endurance and pure speed have to work hand in hand. People tend to separate them and do speed endurance as a single component and then do explosive speed training as a single component. A lot of time we hear sprinters say that they have not started speed work yet, which means that they have been doing speed endurance work. My philosophy is that the two should run concurrently and that coaches should try to develop a balance. To keep the athlete fresh and explosive, the load has to be slightly reduced as you go to high velocity and high quality performance in training, the work that is done in the last part of the competitive period leading up to the major completion. A greater degree of rest is required for recovery and explosive training must be greatly reduced to maybe once or twice per week and a recovery should not be less than 36 hours, 48 hours would be even better. A lot of coaches feel that if you reduce the workload too much in terms of training time the athlete will lose something, but that is not my experience.
As always, here are the best articles for December 2009 on SpeedEndurance.com
Enjoy,
Jimson Lee
SpeedEndurance.com
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