The question seems to come up quite often: Is Barry a sprint coach?

Was he the sprint coach for Felix? Was he the sprint coach for Olear?

Most of the time it’s a facetious question, complete with a wink or a nod and the thought that I’m just taking the credit for what the real sprint coach did.

The question that must be asked is simple: What defines a sprint coach?

For most, the sprint coach is defined as the one that prepares the sprinter to run at top speed through conditioning, increasing strength, improving form, and running repeats. Along with that comes handholding, psychology, motivation, etc., but that's no different than any other sport.  While all may not be present in the weight room, they generally have some knowledge of what exercises, sets and reps should be used.  That’s what it has been and that’s what it will always be…or maybe not.

Before examining the last paragraph in more detail, let me answer the original questions about Felix and Olear. I did not, and do not, consider myself as the “sprint” coach for either of them—well at least under the definition used earlier.

For those who don’t know about me, I was a throws coach (shot, disc) for most of my coaching career. Strength training was a must for those events so the weight room has always been a very comfortable place for me.

Coaching athletes to run faster is very comfortable for me as well, but the learning curve in the transition from throws to speed was long and difficult. The problem was not learning something new in order to train for speed—it was eliminating what was not useful in training for throws!

Because I did not come from a speed background, the works of Loren Seagrave, Tom Tellez, Michael Yessis, Charlie Francis and others who may have written books (Hart, Smith, Graham etc.) but who at least have snippets of their work online were unknown to me. In other words, I didn’t carry the type of baggage I had in the throws over to the sprints.

The no-baggage benefit has been enormous!  I don’t have to look for loopholes to justify what I’ve done for years when research shows that it is not effective. I can explain why we run repeats at a particular distance in a specific time. I don’t have to justify the reason for giving specific form drills that “train” effect rather than cause to an athlete because I don’t give them specific form drills.

I didn’t need to justify why I select only certain parts of research, such as Ralph Mann’s kinetic study of sprinting, while ignoring other parts of the same study (“The relatively small upper limb muscle moments seem to relegate the arms to the simple role of maintaining balance”) just because it didn’t fit my preconceived ideas… because I didn’t have preconceived ideas!

When I read the research of Sternlight, Bundle, Weyand, Mann, Cavagna, Chang and Kram, Farley and McMahon I needed help in understanding the terms and concepts because they were new to me. Spending time with Ken Jakalski and the very patient Dr. Weyand allowed me to understand much faster than I had anticipated. The terminology was different but the concepts could be explained with simple (yet powerful) analogies.

The real eye-opener was the ASR algorithm. It showed me that there were quantifiable reasons to train rather than assumptions.  There was a much simpler way to train with a lot less stress on the athlete…and lot better results for most.

Am I a sprint coach if I don’t use drills, cues, repeats without rationale, hill runs, stadium runs, arm swing work, methods that defy gravity, consider the CNS nothing more than a signal wire, deny the need for in-air dorsiflexion, parachutes, sleds, tow cords ad infinitum?  

The question remaining is this: Will the paradigm change in training, facilitated by more recent research, redefine the roll of the “sprint coach”?

Or does the term “sprint” coach belong to anyone who does, “…as little as needed, not as much as possible" to make an athlete faster?