The Fieldhouse Blues
Sometimes you think you have it made. Our school has a 160m indoor fieldhouse. While the care and health of the fieldhouse is sometimes in question, we still have a track. However, to deal with the multiple sports that use it, we start practice at 5:45 AM three days a week to avoid conflicts with other sports. We had our groove down. We did RPR for the first 10 minutes, 5 of which are breathing. We do 15 minutes of running drills, ranging from toe pops, booms and various hip drills. We followed the weekly progressions so the drills always become more challenging every week. Mondays are fly 10 days. Wednesday’s are acceleration days with the 1080 or run rocket. Fridays are force day or a meet. We don’t do speed endurance yet because the gymnastics team has a spring floor in the corner of the fieldhouse and makes the second curve…challenging. We rolled through the first 5 weeks with great improvements. Excited to continue, I broke out the spring fieldhouse schedule to plan our final push to indoor conference. And then, I wasn’t excited. At all. You see, all of the spring sports, you know the ones, baseball, softball, badminton, boys and girls lacrosse and girls soccer now need the fieldhouse as well. The AD’s mentality is that it all needs to be equal and our 5:45 slot is now open season to all other sports. We still have some time during the week to train but it is sometimes late at night or on days we have meets (go figure). And when we have it, there are 300 athletes on the 6 lane track. It is not a great scenario for having equipment out as some athletes have little respect for the well-being and position of a laser time. As blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa asks, “So, What Would I Do?”
I had to work the problem. I made some assessments about where we are as a team and built a program around what we needed improve based on the space that we have: a stairwell, a couple of racks in the weight room, a Smith machine in the Fitness Center. We have had steady improvements throughout January and February but still needed work on lateral chain strength, hamstring strength and foot work. I have a young group, mostly all sophomores and their needs don’t really surprise me. We have Friday meets for the next couple of weeks, which gives me 2 days a week to focus on.
Monday- the focus was on hips and hamstrings
Hamstring work
Single leg cleans to a box-Frans Bosch stuff
Jerk Jumps to a box
Hamstring catches– I stole these from Alex Natera ( would love to get him out for a TFC). We didn’t jump into this. We have done holds since Jan.
Hamstring flutter kicks on a band- Cal Dietz found that this exercise has the highest hamstring recruitment using Athos pants (https://www.liveathos.com/)
Hips
Waterbag step throughs to a box
Waterbag booms to a 2 inch box
Wednesday- Focus was on knee extension and ankle stiffness
Speed ¼ squats BW– most high school athletes can’t extend their body quickly, free of weight on their back. So we do ¼ squats for speed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1OiHvzJ7cs
Knee extension up the stairs- now leaving the ground
Knee stiff drops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k82XjVeDlQU
Ankle stiffness drops
Ankle stiffness booms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eYMuX_xLQg
Double taps- working on explosiveness without muscle slack
We will see how it works when we show up at our meets. If you would like to learn more about the feet and ankle circuits, come to TFC-7 and I will do a whole presentation and progression on how to develop “bouncing ankles” as well as exercises that to help speed development.
Chris Korfist
Twitter: @korfist
Twitter: @TFConsortium
SlowGuySpeedSchool.com
ReflexivePerformance.com
TrackFootballConsortium.com
Videos for sale: Videos
