Sometimes we get so busy that we overlook what's happening around us.

Then something comes along that reminds us that the effort we put into the things we love was worthwhile.

The email below was one of those "somethings" for me:

Hello Coach Ross- 

 I am just writing to request cancelling my ASR subscription. As my collegiate track career comes to a close, I will be taking an indefinite time away from training. I don't want to take up too much of your time with a long winded story, but I do want to let you know the profound impact your ASR and dead lift protocol has had on my athletics career. I've struggled with sub-standard (even dangerous) coaches my entire career, including the D-I level. When I discovered your website and coaching methods and the community behind you I was a very disheartened and burnt out athlete. 

 I was able to integrate your philosophies and a great deal of your training techniques on my own time, and within a few months I went from being frustrated, burnt out and 1 day away from quitting to being the top sprinter on my team, setting multiple PR's and most importantly, contributing on a significant level to the team's successes.

Though I am for now moving on to other pursuits, know that whenever I think of my time spent in Track and Field I will think of you and all the coaches that make up your community at bearpowered.com. I have already recommended ASR to many athletes and will continue to do so with full confidence that they will see the same successes that I have. Again, thanks for a wonderful product and experience; I will never forget it. 

--Fred Wertz 

The thanks belongs to you Fred!

Ken Jakalski has thought a great deal about the mechanics of speed throughout his thirty-seven years coaching career, but it wasn’t until two paralympians, then World Sprint Champion Tony Volpentest and future World Sprint Champion Marlon Shirley competed on his high school track in Lisle, Illinois back in 1997 that his thinking really began in earnest. 

How could an athlete with no lower arms and no feet run a time faster than 97% of every able bodied high school athlete Jakalski ever coached? 

Conventional insights at the time would say that athletes push back against the ground in order to go forward horizontally.  But if this were indeed the case, how was it possible for a sprinter, limited to carbon graphite keel bars that bolted to lower leg prosthesis, to push back against the ground?

And what about all the insights on the swinging arms contributing to faster speeds?  Volpentest had to rest his stumps on padded paint cans just to start a race.  Why wasn’t his arms impacting on his speed if, as many believed, correct arm action was essential to successful sprinting?

It was his pursuit of answers to these questions that led Jakalski to the human locomotion labs at Harvard and Rice University.  And the answers he received have made all the difference in the way he has approached training over the past ten years.

Jakalski’s process of learning by questioning is at the heart of The Book of Zoom, a compilation of answers to key questions coaches have asked him over the past several years, coaches who, like him, wanted a scientific understanding of the means by which athletes can achieve faster speeds.

In the words of SMU’s Dr. Peter Weyand, “While many of his peers found comfort and assurance in slickly packaged training products, Olympic testimonials and the performance gurus of the day, Ken has never stopped asking hard questions or striving for more effective techniques.”

In more than 40 years of coaching, I've never met an individual more dedicated to learning his chosen task: Educating those who have a sincere desire to learn how to run fast; faster than they've ever run before!

I have often heard the following comments relative to what I currently do in terms of strength training for the high school athletes I coach:

“Much research shows significant correlation between the power clean and VJ, lower leg power, short sprint performance.”

“You have failed to establish a correlation between deadlift load and sprinting.”

Here’s the reality: At no time have we ever said that the Deadlift is the key to increases in speed.  We are careful to understand that correlation, especially the ones we find considering the unorthodox nature of our approach, does not equal causation.

What we have noted, and this was the thrust to Underground Secrets, is that the Deadlift protocol may be one way for the coach to implement gains in strength more tied to what research since 2000 has indicated about ground forces. And where is that research telling us?  The only way we can travel at faster velocities is through the way in which we affect ground force production. Sprinters will always benefit from being able to express more force more quickly when they hit the ground. More muscle mass enables sprinters to run faster as a result of the application of higher ground forces.  But as Barry has pointed out in Underground Secrets, this relationship must take into account that additional mass creates additional resistance which the athlete has to overcome.

One of the reasons I scrapped the different strength training programs I had involved my athletes in since 1975 was based on the following concern:

In every athlete who does any kind of program, HIT, Oly Lifts, etc.,  coaches observe that athletes run faster, and therefore assume that the protocol contributed to those increases in speed.

This leads to the following questions:

Question 1:  Was it just the strength training protocol that resulted in the improvements?

Question 2: For the protocol to be “effective,” must it involve other protocols or ancillary lifts to achieve the desired effect?

Question 3: Must the protocol be periodized in some way.  If so, is one periodization model more effective than any other?

Question 4: Is a particular strength protocol more effective than others?

Here’s my problem with this connection between strength and speed, at least as many believe:

Strength occurs in correlation with improvements in speed

Therefore, strength training causes improvements in speed

What many of us in the strength and speed world do, and I’m just as guilty in this regard as anyone else, it to draw a premature conclusion about causality after observing only a correlation between two or more factors.  This specious reasoning, often referred to as a logical fallacy really needs to take into account several possibilities:

Strength training may cause speed improvement

Speed improvement may cause strength improvement

Some other factors may be causing improvements in strength and speed

There may be some combination of these factors that is leading to improvements in either speed or strength.

If the last possibility seems most plausible, then why not apply Occam’s Razor?

Why not reduce the assumptions by choosing among the host of strength program-- all of which seem “equivalent” relative to results claims--the simplest model? This makes training much easier, and avoids the problems of redundancy and uncertainty.

Ken Jakalski

Welcome to our newest member of the Bearpowered Hall Of Fame!

Erin, a freshman, is another promising member of coach Lawrence Webster's legendary phenoms.

With a lift of 2x bodyweight this early in Erin's career, watch for some eye-poping times over the next few years!

I have to admit that I've not spent any significant time reading the works of Lauren Seagrave.
However, I recently found a PDF version of his Speed Dynamics Video Series.

To be fair, what I read was a summary outline of the content of the videos listed.
That being said, the first "Mission Statement” was about the importance of reduction of ground time or air time by .01 seconds at every stride.

The Mission Statement followed with a chart showing the benefits obtained at 40 yards (?), 100m and 1600m.

The chart showed that at 20 strides of the 40-yard run, a .01 reduction in either ground or airtime would produce a .20 second improvement in running time.
At 100m, the improvement was .50 seconds.
 
The benefits:  Improved efficiency; quickended(?) neuromuscular response; heightened awareness and increased general and specific strength and power capacities.

All of that just by reducing either ground time or air time!

One of the charts had some of the nifty standard cues to help:
"Toe Up"
"Heel Up"
"Knee Up"
"Step over the opposite knee"

Ok, all of this sounds great, but...

How does one reduce airtime?
 
Why do faster runners have longer airtime? What are they doing wrong?
Faster runners do have shorter contact times as a result of high rates of force delivery (no one knows for certain why faster runners have higher rates of force delivery than slower runners) but how can slower runners simply get off the ground as fast as swifter runners?

Heightened awareness? The fastest runners have ground contact times at or under 0.08 seconds. Force delivery occurs in half that time. That does not leave much time to be aware of either what you are doing or what you are seeing.

Moving on to the nifty standard cues, why would it matter if the toe was up or down at ground contact if ground reaction force is greater than 2x bodyweight? Is it possible to keep the toe down under that amount of force anyway?

The other clues do sound important.
What do they actually do in the air that will help the runner on the ground?

Finally, according to research, "If the mechanical energy to reposition limbs is provided largely passively through elastic recoil and energy transfers between body segments rather than actively by power generated within muscles, minimum swing time would be affected minimally by muscle fiber speeds." Weyand, et al JAP 2000

Clearly, the drills mentioned above, "Toe Up","Heel Up","Knee Up", and "Step over the opposite knee" requires power generated within the muscles to effect them.
If that is the case, what is the point?

Frankly, these drills appear fabrications of what one sees rather than what actually occurs at high speed.
That being the case and apologies to Mr. Seagrave, but I will continue to rely on legitimate research rather than guessing.