Overspeed

G'day boys

Early on in this blog Checking line posted a link to an article about specificity of training and 'over-speed' work. I expect most of you blokes have had a read of this, it was a great article. I've been attempting to work on the specificity principle with the running that i've been doing (top speed, sprint endurance, 25 - 100m efforts mainly) and i've been thinking about the over-speed concept a bit. I understand the idea to be that if you can work your system (running ability in our case) harder or faster than you are going to need it in a competition situation you will gain benefits when you have to compete due the adaptations your body will make.

Difficult to do for our sport as our speed is as fast as we can run and how do you go about training at over that speed. Well tonight I got onto it, I ran down hill boys! Get that into ya.

So I have a street close to my home which has a saddle shape to it. High at one end, 70m of down hill at maybe 25-30 degrees (thats a guess - pretty steep though), then a brief flat bit 3-4m followed by a 25m rise back up before it flattens out again. Saddle shape with 1 side being twice as high as the other.

After about 25mins of running drill plyos i got onto 10 modified hill sprints. I started at the lower of the 2 high sides, ran down the 25m as fast as I could and then pushed up the opposite 70m to the top of the rise. It was a pretty tough little hit. The great thing was that over the last 4 or 5 steps of the down hill, the 2-3 steps of the bottom and 3-5 steps of the incline my legs and feet were having to go faster than they would normally have to in order to keep up with my body which was rocking down through this gully shape - over-speed.

On all of the runs I found myself right up on my toes in full sprint mode going down a hill - high knees, high heal recovery under the body and snappy fast put down and rake action with my toes. I was going full on as a fast as I could to stay upright. It felt really fast and the first section of the uphill was equally fast.

The 2 main positives that i see from this situation are:
- I was training my running system, motor unit recruitment firing patterns, reflexes and other neuromuscular systems to work at a faster speed that they have in the past.
- I was running really fast and working extremely hard while running by myself without a team mate to push me or a trainer to crack the whip.

It was massive.

I'm a little disappointed I've only discovered the saddle of speed this late, however I reckon i'll get on it a few more times before we head over in 3 weeks. I reckon its worth a try boys. I think the down hill bit shouldn't be much more that 20-30m at the start as I don't know if i could have kept up the speed to say upright over a longer distance at this stage. It is also great to have an uphill to blast out of it with.


Looking forward to hearing how you guys are all going. Lets get that average up to 9 sessions this week, its a great short term goal to be chasing. Lets run for each other this week boys, I need you guys to be reading and writing on here so i know that i'm running for more than just myself.
It keeps me going when i'm hurting and only part way through my sessions.

See you soon

Mike