I have always enjoyed Track and Field… as a competitor and coach. I was actually a head Track coach prior to being a head Football coach. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have coached Track and Field at every public school that I have been at. At the collegiate level, although I did not coach Track, I had a keen interest in it. This is a picture of my son and me during a track meet at UCM when I was on the football staff there.
Today I am going to share a workout for 400m runners. Philosophically, I believe that developing a pool of 400m runners can be the keystone for a successful Track and Field program. The best programs that I have coached, we had a strong core group of athletes that could run the 400m.
From that group we typically had some that we ran “up” in the 800m run, and some that we ran “down” in the shorter sprint races. From this group we could also fashion many of our relay teams.
This workout for 400m runners is based on work and research done by many successful Track and Field coaches, but borrows most from Clyde Hart‘s work. Coach Hart was the long time Head Track and Field Coach at Baylor University, which earned the reputation as “Quarter-Mile-U”.
Coach Hart’s 400m workouts contain eight different components:
- Speed Endurance
- Tempo Endurance
- Strength Endurance
- Endurance Running
- Power Speed
- Event Running
- Speed
- Strength
The workout I am sharing (actually an Excel workbook) focuses on the Speed Endurance and Tempo Endurance components of Coach Hart’s 400m workout plan. To download the workbook, click on this link : 400m Workout Workbook, or the picture below
In a Speed Endurance workout, the runner incurs a high oxygen debt, and a lactic acid buildup. The emphasis is on quality, not quantity; with almost full recovery between runs. Distances of these training runs can vary from 100m to 600m, with the total distance run during a workout being about 1000m.
A Tempo Endurance workout is aerobic, which will help the 400m runners increase their oxygen uptake, which helps shorten recovery time. In addition, these workouts help the runner learn rhythm (tempo) and also help train the body to increase production of phosphate… a primary energy source. The pace of these workouts is slower, with a shorter rest period, and more emphasis on quantity.
What I have tried to do with this workbook is to take these concepts from coach Hart and put them into an editable workout workbook. There is a tab for Speed Endurance workouts and a tab for Tempo Endurance workouts. Each workout is based on the runners 400m time, with the target times to hit based on calculations from this time.
I tried to make the workbook flexible, so that a coach would have a variety of workouts, with target times all based on the athletes 400m time:
- Tempo Endurance workouts with Intervals of 100m, 200m, 300m, and 400m and intensities between 80% and 95%.
- Speed Endurance workouts with Intervals of 100m, 200m, 300m, and 400m and intensities between 90% and 100%.
For example, in this Tempo Endurance workout, the athlete would run 5-8 (you would decide on the amount) 200m intervals, with a target time of 30 seconds (based on a 400m time of 54) with about a 2 minute recovery time.
The calculations for the target times are not exact… the formula calculates what their estimated 100m, 200m, or 300m time would be (based on their 400m time) and figures the percentage for their target time from that. That being said, I always liked giving my athletes specific times to hit, rather than just say “run this at about 80% effort.”
The worksheets are editable… you can plug whatever 400m times you want to derive the workout from (in the 400 Time row) and the worksheet will calculate the corresponding workout. This short tutorial describes some of the features of the 400m sprint workout workbook. Click on the image below to start… if you click on HD in the upper right hand corner as it is playing, the quality is much better.
If you have any questions or comments about the 400m Workout Workbook, just shoot me an email… I will answer!
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Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com