Question?

eamoss

Ok in soccer training yesterday we did 4X400m, 4X200, 4X100 sprints. What is this designed to do? Is it a fast way to get your fitness up or is it just to get us to have good speed?

Also my sides hurts(as do my legs) but I wasnt working them muscles so why does it hurt?

note m = metres

Shrimp

It's for fitness, endurance, speed, the list goes on...

I'm suprised it wouldn't be so obvious to you.

iregk

em ok im not sure where to start with this. firstly you were working those muscles while running. you use more than your legs. while running your back, abs, sides, arms and chest all play a part. Some for stability, balance and others for direct motion. Also your side pain can be due to your breathing etc...

Long sprints can help wtih a number of things but without seeing a long planned training regime by your coach hinders my ideas here. It could be someone who doesn't know what they are doing and just wants to make you run or someone who wants to help bring endurance to your sprints to give you sustained plyometric power.

Transform

Sustained plyo power?????? Make -e- up - e - word?

thirtyfoot

These are types of speed endurance or special endurance, designed to increase your aerobic capacity, and to improve your ability to run as close to maximum speed for longer. The speed of the run and the recovery of the run define what type of speed endurance or what benefit you get. If your team can do 4x400, 4x200, 4x100 "sprints", you are seriously fit, that is top class middle distance running training, what speed did you do the runs (in percentage of effort terms) and what recoveries did you get between runs? Again, depending on your fitness, if this ends up being a slogging session where you are dead on your feet after the first couple of runs, it serves no benefit, as you are running too slow.

This isn't speed work, speed work involves runs of 30-60m or sometimes less.

daveirl

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Transform

More soccer players training like 400m runners.

Soccer teams are so farrrr behind as compared to american sports

eamoss

I have to do it again tomorrow and twice a week for the next 3 weeks. We had a recovery time of like 1:30mins tho im not sure our coach worked it out for us, it was something to do with the first man pass the line and the last man.

Id say we were working 80%-100%

After the 1st two runes of 400m we would start off running fast but by the time we got half way round we would slow down and we would be just jogging across the finish line!

thirtyfoot

eamoss wrote:

After the 1st two runes of 400m we would start off running fast but by the time we got half way round we would slow down and we would be just jogging across the finish line!

If the purpose of your coach is to improve your speed endurance then this session is failing miserably because you are jogging almost half the session. To do 4 x 400m with 90secs recovery at that type of intensity is very, very hard. When interval training was experimented back in the 30's and 40's by the Finns and Hungarians, they would always run the interval at a prescribed time and at a prescribed recovery. If at the end of the recovery, the athletes HR had not returned to 120bpm, the session was adjusted, until each run was completed in the target time and the target recovery. It was tailored for each individual athlete. That was 70 years ago.

Throwing a whole team of varying fitness and physical makeup into such a session makes no sense and could be doing more damage than good to some of the players. Has the coach explained why he is doing it, does he feel the team lacks fitness or has the team been struggling for results recently? Its a common problem in team sports, when you have a bad result the team gets it hard on the training pitch in the next session. When in fact what they may need is some rest or some sharpening up work.

Pherekydes

eamoss wrote:

Ok in soccer training yesterday we did 4X400m, 4X200, 4X100 sprints. What is this designed to do?

Kill you!

Soccer coaches are clueless when it comes to conditioning. When Liverpool were at the height of their pomp back in the 80s, riding roughshod over the whole of Europe they did NO sessions without the ball.

There are three words to remember regarding competitive conditioning:

specificity, specificity, specificity

Even GAA players wouldn't do a session like that.

Froot

Increases your VO2 max afaik, which I think less strenuous cardio would not do.

daveirl

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iregk

Transform wrote:

Sustained plyo power?????? Make -e- up - e - word?

What? last time i checked plyometric was actually a word. I'll double check on google now. Yeah deff still a word.

brianthebard

I imagine transform was referring to the three words you put together. Afaik plyometrics refers to explosive power and as such is the opposite of sustained power.

wiki wrote:

Muscular power is determined by how quickly strength is converted into speed. The ability to convert strength to speed in a very short time allows for athletic movements beyond what raw strength will allow. Thus an athlete who has strong legs and can perform the freeweight squat with extremely heavy weights may get less distance on a standing long jump or height on a vertical leap than a weaker athlete trained in plyometrics. Though the plyometrically-trained athlete has a lower maximal force output and could not squat as much, training allows them to compress the time required to reach their maximum force output and allowing them to develop more power with their contraction.

iregk

Yeah your right brian, plyometrics is explosive, turn, sprint jump etc... However what I was getting at is there are methods of training where by you prolong those bursts. Maybe its going slightly outside plyometrics but hey I needed a word to describe it. Take the 100m sprint for example. Plyometric would focus on the start and initial 10m, after that your getting into sustaining your maximum power output over the other 90m. Now whatever you want to call that I don't know so I simply state it as sustained plyometric power.

Thats what my pe teacher called it years ago and has stuck with me since!

quozl

Froot wrote:

Increases your VO2 max afaik, which I think less strenuous cardio would not do.

Not if they're jogging half of the repeats! Also those distances are quite short for vo2max unless they're pretty unfit. A good vo2max interval is about 2 to 6 minutes with a recovery of about half the work. Even those 400s are going to take less than 2 minutes at pace unless those are some seriously unfit footballers.

They'd get some VO2max benefit if they run them properly but if improvements to vo2max were the aim I think they'd be better off doing slightly longer repeats and at a consistant pace.

Not that I can tell you what the goal of them was, just that I don't think they'd be great vo2 sessions.

thirtyfoot

iregk wrote:

Yeah your right brian, plyometrics is explosive, turn, sprint jump etc... However what I was getting at is there are methods of training where by you prolong those bursts. Maybe its going slightly outside plyometrics but hey I needed a word to describe it. Take the 100m sprint for example. Plyometric would focus on the start and initial 10m, after that your getting into sustaining your maximum power output over the other 90m. Now whatever you want to call that I don't know so I simply state it as sustained plyometric power.

Thats what my pe teacher called it years ago and has stuck with me since!

That would be Speed Endurance, maintaining your top end speed for as long as possible.

Transform

Yes speed endurance is a better word to use and i agree with the comments on soccer players

If anything i hope the new american owners in england bring better training systems with them