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Interviewer, Interviewee

Recently, I (Interviewee) was interviewed by Latif Thomas (Interviewer) on the topic of

neuromuscular development, with a focus on the sprint events. The following is a
transcript of that interview. I think it will give you a better insight into how I develop my
sprinters, hurdlers and jumpers. As you’ll see, my philosophy is very much in line with
Coach Tellez and Coach Pfaff. Moving forward, I’ll be sharing more of their training
philosophies, as well as my own. This is a good place to start. Remember, this is a
transcript, not an article, so the grammar isn’t perfect. If you have questions about the
concepts I discuss in this interview, you can send them to:
trackandfieldlegends@gmail.com. I will do my best to respond to as many questions as
possible and share the best ones with everyone. – Kebba Tolbert

Interviewer: Kebba, can you describe your general approach to training

sprinters particularly in regards to neuromuscular development?

Interviewee: Well one of the things that we try to do is really try to identify
what’s important for success in the sprints. So we do tests and we
do analysis and we do historical analysis looking at other sprinters
that have been very good.

I’ve been fortunate to have been involved for a long time for about
16-17 years with USA Track and Field women’s sprint
development with Tony Veney and Bert Lyles and Danny
Williams and worked junior elite camp for Tony Wells and people
like that.

Because of that that’s formed a significant part of my background.

Part of that philosophy is that you have to have certain speed and
power values in order to become an elite sprinter, whether it’s elite
high school, elite college, elite national, elite international. Elite
can be for any level. So that’s one thing that we look at.

So if you can’t hit certain 30 meter fly times or certain overhead

back numbers or certain weight ratio numbers in your lifting it’s
going to be challenging to be an elite female sprinter.

The other two mentors that I’ve had have been very big.
Obviously Dan Pfaff and Boo Schexnayder and they have a similar
type of philosophy with regarding neuromuscular speed and power
development. So that’s where things come from. That’s where we
start at.

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So second from that is that it’s absolutely crucial in what we do is

that we prioritize neuromuscular development. So one of the things
that Boo has talked about over the years and he’s taught this for
years is that nothing that you do should interfere with the
development of speed and power. So there’s other things that we
do, but the primary emphasis, the primary concern is development
of speed and power or the expression of speed and power at certain
times of the year or certain times of the career with certain athletes.

So that’s something that we absolutely keep a focus on, keep a

light on and when we feel like things are falling apart in that area
it’s a concern and we do what we can to try to make sure that that
either can be developed in certain times of year or that it can be
expressed at other times of the year when one of those two things
can happen that we know we’ve gotta take a look at some things.

Interviewer: You talk about prioritizing neuromuscular development. So that

leads me to a quote I remember reading from Dan Pfaff in the
notes for the Track & Field Legends program. “Beware of the
myth of building a base. The better question is a base of what?”

Is that one of those things that we focus on as we get later in the

training phases or is prioritizing neuromuscular development
something that starts the first day at practice as opposed to the
traditional high volume, low intensity stuff?

Interviewee: Dan’s absolutely correct and it’s something that he’s helped me
with mentally over the years. In terms of prioritizing it means that
it’s something that we’re concerned with, maybe even obsessed
with that we really put it first and foremost in our plans. That’s
something from the very first day of training that we do and it’s
something that we’re concerned about from the very first day of
training of developing those qualities.

So I do believe in a base for sprinters and jumpers and hurdlers and

throwers. I believe in a very big base. I think it’s absolutely
crucial. However, it’s a base of speed and power. It’s not an
aerobic base.

There are aerobic components that we look at when we look at

sprinting and hurdling and jumping and throwing in basically all of
the speed power events, but those are almost an afterthought or a
side effect of doing other things, but our main concern is to make
sure that those qualities are being developed, that they’re being
used in a correct fashion and that they can be expressed when we
need them.

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Interviewer: It seems to me it’s a common belief, maybe more at the

developmental level, but certainly at the collegiate level as well,
that we’re supposed to start off high volume, low intensity and
moving toward that higher intensity, lower volume work later in
the season. Could you give me some examples of maybe the types
of things you would do again going back from a neuromuscular
standpoint earlier in the season versus –

Interviewee: Yeah.

Interviewer: No; go ahead.

Interviewee: Yeah; I can. Let me maybe clear up something. The beginning of

the year in comparison to the end of the year is higher volume and
a little bit lower intensity. So it’s like our first day of training is a
serious acceleration day. We do 10s and 20s and 30s real fast. We
do jumping activities and we do lifting activities.

So that’s serious intense neuromuscular work. However, it’s not

quite the same as it is in November. Sometimes because we start
out in the fall we might even do the first day on the grass as an
example. It’s almost always in flats in training shoes. So just that
by itself brings down some of the intensity and makes it safe to do.

Later on wearing spikes on the track and then later on wearing

spikes from the blocks and then later on wearing spikes from the
blocks with two or three people going together. So we have three
or four examples of how you can do the same workout with
different intensities that are appropriate to that time of year.

Interviewer: Now would there be any differences in that philosophy if you were
developing say a 60 meter or 100 meter specialist versus a 400
meter runner or 400 meter hurdler?

Interviewee: Not really because you’ve gotta be real fast if you’re gonna be a
great 400 runner or a great 400 hurdler. You can be good with just
average speeds and average power, but if you wanna be great, elite
at whatever level, then you’ve gotta have good speed and power
qualities. So even for those events that’s something that we’d be
put a serious investment into.

Interviewer: How much time do you spend on the track or the speed component
compared to jumping and hopping types of movements versus

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strength training in the weight room activities or even maybe

multi-throw or multi-jump work.

Interviewee: We do all those things together in the same day I guess I would
say. Not necessarily at the same time, but for example, our day
one will include serious acceleration runs, 10s, 20s and 30s, maybe
3 to 5 sets, usually 4 sets. Then after that we’ll do some jumping
activities, some long jump, some triple jump type stuff. Then we’ll
go in the weight room and lift and do lifting movements and squat
movements and bench press movements.

Then sometimes after that we’ll come out and we’ll do throwing
activity. So that’s a big speed power day. Another day in the
week we might do resisted runs where we’re doing hills or sleds or
that type of stuff. Then we might do some different jumps, some
different jumping activities or if we don’t do jumping activities
that day we might do a different series of multi-throw activities.
Then we’ll go in and lift.

So on our speed power days which we do in the fall and most of

the year about three days a week, the whole theme of the day is
centered around developing some component of speed and power.

Now there’s certain times of the year where we’re really heavy
into maximum strength or we’re really heavy into elastic strength
or we’re really heavy into speed development or really heavy into
acceleration development or sometimes even speed endurance. All
those different components of speed and power, but we’re always
touching on some of those components several times a week
throughout the year.

Interviewer: You talk about developing elastic strength at a particular time of

year. I’m assuming you’re talking how you break things down
thematically based on which qualities you want to develop.

Do you have a specific protocol where you say we develop this

first and this next and this in this order or is that something that’s a
little bit more flexible based on the type of kids you have or their
particular strengths or weaknesses? How do you determine what
you want to focus on thematically, whether it’s thematically for a
microcycle or a mesocycle or an entire training phase?

Interviewee: Generally early in the year we’re going to develop – we’re not
gonna do a real heavy absolute strength type work early in the year
because they’re not ready for it yet. The athletes aren’t ready.

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Generally we’re going to do simpler stuff. So simpler jumps early

in the year because the athlete can handle that from a loading
perspective and from a coordination perspective. So we don’t do
advanced stuff until they’re ready to do advanced work.

So certain plyometrics we’ll do early in the year ‘cause they have a

more stimulatory effect and other times then we’ll get to more
advanced stuff later, but I think a lot of times with those types of
things people see in the videos and the DVDs and the lecture
circuit, these more advanced things that people are doing, think I
want to get to that, but there’s been some years that I’ve had some
really, really good athletes that we never even got to the advanced
stuff because it just didn’t happen. Ya’ know what I mean? The
real advanced stuff.

I’ve had girls jump really far; 43, 44 and 45 feet where we never
really did real advanced bounding, the stuff you see on the DVDs.
We did simple bounding and things like that and they were fine.
They got better and they improved, but they just weren’t there yet
and there was no need.

So, I think that, in talking about sprinting obviously, but I think

that the idea that you’ve gotta do this real advanced stuff to run
real fast or hurdle real fast or throw real far and sometimes it’s just
not the case if the athlete’s not ready for that at that time in their
career or that time of the year.

Interviewer: You talk about athletes being ready. Now, I work at the
developmental levels, the high school level. That’s my bias in
asking these questions to you, but I know how poorly things are
done at the developmental level, especially in terms of developing
speed and power qualities.

Do you find, even with the caliber of athletes that you have coming
into your program, that, when they come in, they don’t have the
neuromuscular training age, for lack of a better term, or the
coordinative skills or kinesthetic awareness it to handle that type of
training and how do you address that from your philosophy, just in
terms of prioritizing neuromuscular development, but also the
individualization that’s required for each athlete?

Interviewee: Yeah; I think some of the individualizing takes care of itself. Like
the people who aren’t as big and strong and powerful necessarily.
They go into the weight room and they use less weight. So that
individualizes how much volume we’ll use. A lot of times I’ll
write things in ranges.

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So I might say 4 to 6 sets or I might say 8 to 10 sets or I might say

we’re gonna go do acceleration from 15 to 40 meters. So the kids
who are not maybe as developed might only go to 30 meters and
the kids who are older and more mature and more skilled might go
out to 40 meters on that day. So that’s one of the things that you
can do is you write things in ranges.

You don’t get locked into having everyone do the exact same
things. Or you can write acceleration development A and
acceleration development B. Maybe one is 10s, 20s and 30s.
Maybe one is 20s, 30s and 40s or something like that.

If you get real big gaps in the talent level of your group. You
could do something like that or one could go on the blocks and one
could go on the grass. It really just depends on your situation, but I
think that the principles apply to whether they’re developmental or
elite.

Interviewer: I like that. That makes a lot of sense. I think that’s good
particularly those that do have that wide range of ability in their
group.

We talk about this neuromuscular work and many people still have
this belief that it takes a long period of time to recover from this
work. How often – let’s say you’re working in a seven day micro-
cycle type of schedule. How often can you do neuromuscular
work, the acceleration work or the jump work in the course of that
particular microcycle depending on the time of year, et cetera?

Interviewee: Most of the year, even during competition, we can do some type of
speed and power work at least twice a week. That’s almost any
situation. People are a little bit beat up. People leave a little bit
injured. People that are real tired from the competitions. We can
always do some type of speed and power work at least twice a
week, but generally speaking we do some type of speed and power
work three days a week.

So, I would say three days a week is doable for a big segment of
the population. In special situations, special cycles maybe you can
get four days a week, but that’s starting to push it, but it can be
done. Just like if you want to train really hard, then you’ve got
recover really hard. So it can be done.

Two days is no doubt that 97.5 percent of the population can do

speed and power training twice a week. No doubt. Most people

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can probably do it three days a week, which is what we do and

we’ve been doing it that way for years.

When you get into competition season you might not be able to do
it two days a week because of meets and things like that, but that’s
different. Then you get down to two days a week and if you have
several competitions in a week, then your competition ends up
becoming your speed and power training in a sense because of the
high neuromuscular demands of competition.

Interviewer: You talk about doing those types of things two, three, maybe even
four times a week depending on the theme that you’re working in
and how many kids you have, et cetera. Talk about things that you
consider important besides neuromuscular training?

Do you do that general training, that classical tempo repeat model?

In my mind I can see, particularly high school coaches and even, I
think, a lot of college coaches, recoiling at the idea of focusing on
this neuromuscular work or not running enough or feel this need to
squeeze that high volume, the repeat 200 program in there.

Interviewee: Yeah; some of it is just – it’s comfortable to do lots of running and

lots of aerobic type work, but the aerobic stuff isn’t going to make
you be faster, stronger more powerful. There’s a place for it and
we have training that is very aerobic.

There’s some interesting research out there about short, very

intense work for doing 50 meter sprints or doing 10 seconds on the
bicycle with short breaks, looking at lactate levels. I know some
people think I gotta get the lactate up, I gotta the tolerant lactate
up. There’s a fair amount of research about doing short, high
intensity stuff, high intensity work that develops aerobic capacity
and it develops lactate capacity, which they’re related a little bit.

So a lot of the stuff that we do is developing those areas. Just not

in the classical sense.

Secondly is people do the running and things like that. We run

intervals with our sprinters and our hurdlers and our jumpers and
our multi's. Just the volume of running that we do is probably half
as much as probably some other programs do or some of the
classical stuff you see in the training literature just because I don’t
think it’s necessary.

Now about the general training, we do lots of general training. We

probably do general training every other day. So for us we have

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neuromuscular training and then we have general training. General

training for us is our circuits. We do lots of med ball circuits, lots
of general strength circuits, ab circuit, callisthenic type stuff. We
do weight room circuits. So all that stuff is medium intensity I
would say or lower. It’s much lower intensity than the speed
power that we do. Then the breaks are fairly short.

So I timed it the other day. We did a general strength circuit. We

did two general strength circuits. We did a hurdler mobility circuit
and it took about 40 minutes. Well, that beats going out for a 40-
minute run or a 30-minute run, but the heart rate was up over 120
almost the whole time.

So if you have your sprinters and your hurdlers and your jumpers
do activities that are lower intensity, but still the challenging
coordination and the challenging balance and the challenging
proprioception and all those things, then it’s a much bigger benefit
than going out and doing a 2-mile run or going and sprinting for 30
minutes necessarily.

So our general workout or our aerobic type of workout, stuff that

people would say oh, that’s the aerobic stuff, it also has the
coordination factor and it also has a proprioception factor and it
has a strength factor in it. So we try to make it multifaceted.

Interviewer: Interesting.

Interviewee: It challenges posture and stabilization and those things.

Interviewer: How important would you say that these factors are? I’m thinking
about coordination. To me coordination is one of the greatest
limiting factors and you can talk about coordination of speed,
coordination of strength, coordination of all types of different
things.

How big a factor is that in terms of being able to express more

powerful or more complicated movements? And when you think
about the number of things that you have to pull together to
accelerate properly, to run at maximum velocity, to speed
maintenance and to prevent high rates of deceleration, is that
something that you specifically focus on throughout the year or is
that something that --?

Interviewee: Every day, every single day in almost every activity. It’s
absolutely crucial for us. So from the warm-up to the cool down
coordination matters. Movement patterns matter. We have a

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whole series of sprint drills that we look at to help the athlete, well
not only be coordinated, but to look at what’s their fitness, are they
ready to train; things like that.

When we’re doing acceleration that’s very high level coordination

work. When we’re doing Olympic lifts that’s very high level
coordination work, balance work, proprioception work. So there’s
never a time during the week when we’re not addressing these
things. All the activities they feed into each other ‘cause it’s
multifaceted and multilateral.

Interviewer: Right; absolutely. So when you talk about prioritizing

neuromuscular development and also the way you look at the
general training, the medium to low intensity kind of work that
you’re doing throughout the course of the week, when you’re
looking at athletes how do you evaluate their readiness?

What are the things that you look for when you’re looking at
individual athletes, but also when you’re looking at your group as a
whole, whether it’s your hurdlers or your sprinters or your 400
meter, 400 meter hurdlers? I’m talking more from like an
assessment or a movement screen standpoint. What are the things
that you’re looking for when you are watching your athletes and
you’re looking at how their readiness for particular elements of
training?

Interviewee: Some of the things that we look for are we really try to look at
posture and what’s the athlete’s posture like. Are there deviations
in good posture? What’s the symmetry like and range of motion.
So is the same thing happening on the left side as on the right side?
Does the foot come off the track the same way? Is one side as
elastic? Are their arms and legs moving through the same range of
motion on both sides? Those types of things.

Then just in general if they’re skipping or they’re walking or if

they’re doing sprint drills looking at how elastic and how reflexive
those things are. Are they having to struggle to get into position
during the warm-up and things like that or if we’re gonna do a long
speed workout, when they’re doing the accelerations to warm-up.
How do they look? Is it smooth? Is it bouncy? Is it open?
Meaning are they going through a good range of motion? Those
types of things.

So looking at those things; posture, symmetry, elasticity,

reflexivity. Those are what we use to evaluate their readiness to
go. Are they always 100 percent. No. But when it’s very

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aberrant, where it’s very deviated from what we consider to be

good, then we know that we’ve gotta intervene in some way, shape
or form or go to Plan B or warm-up more. There’s a bunch of
different ways to intervene, but we know that something has to
happen in order for that workout to be a success that day.

Interviewer: Is there differences between these type of assessments between

male and female athletes and is it important for the coach to spend
some time learning, studying the Gray Cooks of the world who
really are known for their FMS stuff, the functional movement
screen stuff?

How do you differentiate between male and female athletes and

how important is it for the sprints coach, with technique being so
important, to understand these things and be able to develop that
eye for these little idiosyncrasies that you speak of?

Interviewee: I think that the better athletes that you have that it becomes more
important because for maybe the 12.5 girl, her being off 1 percent
or 2 percent or even 3 percent might not be that big of a deal. She
probably can run down the track and be okay, but when you’ve got
an elite person that 3 percent is a big deal and you might be setting
up an injury situation. I’m not saying that the less developed
athletes they can’t get injured ‘cause they obviously do, but I’m
saying those little differences are more magnified the better you
are.

Boo Schexnayder has a saying about car crashes. He says if you’re

riding down the street and you crash into a sign at 10 miles an
hour, no big deal. You just get out the car, check it out, make sure
everything’s okay. No harm, no foul kind of thing. You just have
a dent in your car.

But if you do it at 50 miles an hour well then you call an

ambulance. That’s kind of the difference with the developmental
kids and athletes or even the sub-elite ones can have some issues
and because their power output is not as high, they don’t get beat
up as much from those mistakes whereas the real elite people,
being a little bit off, sometimes you look at the Formula 1 races,
Indy and stuff like that, they’re a little bit off. Their car’s a little
bit off, they crash.

Interviewer: Right.

Interviewee: So that’s the difference. Everybody wants their car to run well, but
if I ride my Honda Civic and it’s off a little bit, no big deal. I’m

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just not as efficient. I gotta put more gas in, but those guys in Indy
if they’re off 2 or 3 percent, they’re crashing into the wall and they
don’t get paid that day.

Interviewer: That’s a great analogy. Now are there differences between male
and female athletes? I say this both for the developmental level,
looking at, say, the 12.5 HS girl. For most developmental coaches
you’re hoping to get the 12.5 girls, but talk in terms of the 12.5 girl
and the 11.5 boy versus the 11.5 girl and the 10.5 boy or even
faster than that.

Interviewee: I think there’s some differences between genders, but not so much
that you’ve gotta go into a whole other field of study. I think that
women sometimes can do more elastic work and men can do more
absolute strength work at different times of the year. I think that
the hormonal output is obviously different between men and
women because they’re just setup differently.

But in terms of movement screens I think that – I’ve seen women

that certain loading schemes, certain types of training tend to
bother the low back area more than others than the guys. Some of
that’s just anecdotal, but in general I’d say it’s 95-96 percent the
same for the gender thing.

For the different levels like elite, sub-elite, super elite or whatever,
then the differences just become – things become more fine. Little
mistakes magnify more for the elite athletes I think.

Interviewer: When you talk about these evaluations, is that something you’re
doing when you’re at practice? Are you watching your group
warm-up or go through a particular circuit or whatever the
particular thing you’re doing that day is, are you looking at the
group and making group assessments or are you taking each of
these kids individually and putting them through their own
movement screen where you’re going to work on the individual
strengths and weaknesses of that particular athlete?

For example, would you say maybe more individualized or

individual athlete specific if you’d worked at the collegiate where
you have a smaller group versus like say myself. I have 90 kids in
my sprint group. I can’t do a movement screen for each kid. I can
barely run practice.

Interviewee: Right now my group is small, but I’ve had larger groups, relatively
larger, 20-25 kids. I don’t write workout, warm-up evaluation
stuff for each athlete. We write one thing or two things or

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depending on if I’ve got throwers, jumpers, hurdlers, sprinters,

then maybe we’ll have three different warm-ups on that day at
different times; sometimes at the same time.

But my point is that no, I am not definitely trying to evaluate each

and every athlete each and every day. Sometimes you might know
okay, this kid’s a little beat up. I need to watch them a little more
and see how they feel and see what they’re doing and see how
they’re moving.

Or you might notice see, this kid, he doesn’t quite look right. You
talk to them and see are they feeling okay or sometimes when you
see aberrant behavior and aberrant movements it’s because
something’s wrong or sometimes because they’re not
concentrating. So sometimes you talk to them and say, “Hey, you
feeling okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay. Let’s make sure we do this.
Make sure you got your hips up and make sure you’re doing this.”
Then it gets better and okay, there’s no injury issue. They just
weren’t concentrating.

Then sometimes just that, the not concentrating part is maybe a

window into their life. Maybe they have other stuff going on that
day or in their life and maybe they’re not mentally ready to train
really hard that day. Now obviously if that happens all the time
that can be an issue, but it might give you a window. Hey, this kid,
we had this workout plan, but they’re kind of blown out the water.
Maybe they had a fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend or their
mom or dad or they failed a test and that workout has to wait a day
or two.

So it’s not just always the physical part that shows up when you’re
doing these screens or these evaluations. It’s just they got mental
and they’ve got life things going on, too.

Having said that, like I’ve got Movement by Gray Cook. It’s a
really good book, but it’s not necessarily what I use and that’s not
a knock on Gray. We just design our warm-ups so that there are
enough things to evaluate with regard to those things I talked about
earlier; posture, range of motion, symmetry, elasticity that we can
try to look for those things or the lack of them in the warm-up
activities that we choose.

We have certain dynamic movements that we do. We look at that.

We have certain sprint drills that we use to look at body landmarks
and look at posture and awareness, elasticity.

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So those things in our warm-up are a big window to see who’s

ready, who’s not ready, who’s having issues type of thing. If
someone’s injured we also evaluate those to say okay, on day one
after they were beat up or injured they looked like this. On day
five they looked like this. On day 14 they looked perfect. So
they’re 100 percent.

So somebody might on day 1 may be only able to do 50 percent

work. On day 3 they might be able to do 90 percent. But
sometimes that curve from 90 to 100 might take a little bit longer.
Like the improvement curve might be really fast, but the last 10
percent might lack a little bit. So essentially you have to get more
finite with certain people.

Interviewer: That’s an interesting point. Can you give us some specific

examples of the type of movements that are the most universal or
some of the important areas to consider in regards to addressing
some of these issues or common injury chains or problem areas
that coaches can put in their minds to look for tomorrow at
practice?

Interviewee: Yeah; some of the things that we look at – I’ll go over a couple
areas. We look at the foot and the lower leg. So obviously let’s
just say from the knee down there’s a lot of things that can happen
and a lot of areas that have a big impact on your ability to do speed
and power work, on your ability to sprint.

Looking at the talus and the calcaneus so going towards the bottom
of the foot at the end and then sometimes those shift. So if the
talus and the calcaneus shift it creates problems. So sometimes if
kids slow down incorrectly, they’ll get a talus-calcaneus shift. If
they’re blocking when they sprint, like they’re sticking their foot
out they can get that to happen.

Sometimes when kids have lower leg issues or foot issues

sometimes that’s the problem. The cuboid, right in the middle of
the foot, sometimes that gets frozen or stuck. So sometimes we
have to get in and work in that area or take a look at that area or
have our medical people look at that area.

So if those or the cuboid stuck, then you get ankle issues and foot
issues and that can shoot up. When those get locked up and you
get back pain, hip pain. So those areas right there can be a
problem.

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The shin splint area or the shin splint issue that everyone goes
through at some point in their career and sometimes you have
years where you feel like your whole group has it. Looking at the
peroneals, the peroneal muscles.

So those muscles sometimes get gummed up where they get really

tight and when those get really tight that’s when you have the shin
splints. So teaching the athletes how to do massage with ice cups
or use a tennis ball, sometimes even a golf ball, using a foam roller
or a stick can help to relieve tension in the fascia, help to unbound
those areas in the whole lower leg complex.

Sometimes you have to get in and do manual therapy on the

peroneals and surprisingly a lot of that stuff sometimes is also
related to nutrition. So with the peroneals and you have shin
splints, you ask the kid how many fruits and vegetables did you eat
today? The answer is well, I had a tomato on my burger or I had
some ketchup. That doesn’t count. I had some lettuce on whatever
and that’s not it.

So getting the right amount of fruits and vegetables, getting the

antioxidants in the body helps the healing process and helps things
to glide correctly. You ask them how many cups of water did you
drink today, how much water? Well I had some water when I had
lunch, one cup or I passed the water fountain and had some water.
You gotta tell them that you need about a gallon of water a day.

What I found is kids that have shin splints issues, when they eat
more fruits and vegetables, when they get Omega-3 fatty acids in
their diet, when they drink a decent amount of water some of that
stuff starts to fix itself because the body’s healing, the body’s in a
nutritionally non-deficient state.

Looking at the tibialis anterior. That’s an area when you have shin
splint issues that’s tended to be inflamed or it tends to get cinched
down. So working that area as well can make a big difference.

So what we also look at in the lower leg foot complex is we look at

the ankle joint. How much flexion versus extension do you have,
one side versus the other, more healthy versus unhealthy, looking
at the supination and pronation of the foot, looking at those types
of things. How much dorsiflexion do we have? When we’re doing
our sprint drills or our sprint awareness exercises, is it in the right
sequence; those types of things.

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So we evaluate those things in the lower leg to look at the health

and the ability of the athlete to do speed power work. So if you
have a lot of lower leg issues, the ability to sprint and be fast and
do lots of volume of work is going to be very limited.

So it’s not a matter of the kid being lazy or not trying or not
running fast enough. It’s a matter of they’re not physically in a
state where they’re ready to do true speed and power or true
sprinting. So you might have to go a plan B or get them to the
medical people or have them do some homework at home, whether
it’s the foam roller or the tennis ball or a combination of those
things, which is probably best.

That’s one example of looking at some of the lower leg and that’s
a real surface evaluation or real surface overview of some of the
issues that can go on on the lower leg, but something to understand
because the foot’s where you make contact with the ground.
That’s where all the force is applied. So if that lower leg is giving
you issues, then it’s gonna be very hard to sprint, hurdle and jump.

Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. So would you consider this to

something that just really comes down to having a fundamental
understanding of flexibility in your program design because a lot
of things you’re talking about here seem like the kinds of issues
that can potentially just pop up even in the best of programs or the
with most knowledgeable coaches or workout planning type of
person. Is it you’re just talking about having a plan B where you
may have to send a kid home and have them do a foam roller or
send them to the training room, et cetera?

Interviewee: Yeah. I think the better your training is going the closer you are to
great performance, the closer you are to injury. I think that’s –
Because when you’re close to great performance you’re on the
edge. Well when you’re on the edge any little thing can make
things go awry. So sometimes it can happen. Not because you had
bad training design. Sometimes you got great training design and
you just went one day too far. You had bad luck or the kid didn’t
sleep well that day, that night before. I’ve seen some crazy things
happen at the worst time and it’s not necessarily the coach’s fault
or really the athlete’s fault. It’s just you reached a limit or you
were near the limit, but if you don’t ever get near the limit you’re
not gonna have ultimate performance.

There’s a time and place for everything and yeah, you’ve gotta
rest. Rest is a crucial part of performance and a crucial part of elite
performance, but you can’t just rest. You’ve gotta get ready to go

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as well, but that’s part of the art. Anybody tell you they figured it
all out, they’re lying to you. No one’s figured it all out yet. It’s an
art and it’s a science and they’re both very important.

Another area that we tend to have issues with, every coach that’s
coached a sprinter has kids with hamstring problems. So when
they go to the training room the kids are told ice and stim and
stretch. That rarely works.

Everyone gets hamstring injuries and the kids take eight weeks to
come back or they’re out for the season. I’ve been fortunate
enough to be involved either with good therapists or good coaches
or I’ve done good research and you have good resources to rely
upon in terms of people that when I’ve had some injury situations
happen at inopportune times to get on the phone and call and say
hey, this is what’s going on, this is what I see, this is what I feel.
What do you think I should do?

A lot of times with hamstring issues, if you look at the psoas and
the iliacus or sometimes it’s called the ilio-psoas, it’s very tied into
hamstring issues and because of the design of the way it attaches
on the femur and the way it attaches on the spine. So if the psoas
is not happy, if it’s trigger points, if it’s not releasing correctly,
then you can bet the hamstring issues are a day away.

So it’s important to do activities that either keep the psoas

elongated and moving efficiently, whether it’s sprint drills to
evaluate or whether you’re doing extension activities or whether
you’re doing manual therapy after certain types of hard training
that that area has to be operating correctly in order to sprint
efficiently.

When it’s not operating efficiently it creates a whole host of

problems. So we need to get past the idea that okay, the
hamstring’s tight so I need to work on the hamstring. A lot of
times with hamstring issues, it’s not the hamstring at all that’s
really the problem.

It’s the hamstring’s being overworked because the psoas might be

out of whack or the piriformis or you have to do work along the
iliac crest to get the hamstrings to relax because once you get those
other areas to relax then the tension’s gone out of the system and
everything can operate efficiently again.

Interviewer: That’s a great point, Kebba. Can you give us maybe just one
example of the type of activity or movement that you would do if

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you have an athlete who’s having this type of problem that you
would do to address that? Even a very general example.

Interviewee: One thing I’m gonna look at is I’m gonna look at the psoas, the
piriformis, the abductors and see if they’re working correctly. If
they’re not those are the first areas that go when kids complain of
hamstring issues.

So, looking at those areas, looking at the anatomy there. When

those are out, when there’s issues in the hamstring I look there is
what I’m trying to say. So, that’s part of the evaluation process.
Can they do A skips? Can they do B skips correctly? Can they do
skipping type of things?

So doing those things and looking at those things will give you
some idea as to how bad it might be or where the culprit might be.
What’s the posture when they do those exercises? What’s the
reflexivity when they do those exercises? Can they lift? What’s
their lifting like? Can they really open up the hip type of stuff. So
those are things you might consider.

Then there’s also just muscle testing type stuff. It’s not to say that
– trying to think what the word is – it’s not to say that muscle
testing on the table necessarily is going to be completely predictive
of what they can do on the track because sometimes they can test
great on the table and then they still can’t sprint.

Sometimes you do a muscle test and some of the stuff from Thiel,
like Touch for Health type work. That stuff is very, very helpful,
but just because they can pass those tests doesn’t mean they’re
ready to sprint all out yet. There might be a bridge to okay, we’re
on the path towards wellness, on the path towards health, but that
stuff is very instrumental; stuff that we use a lot.

So there are a lot of good therapists, like Thiel and people like
Leon Chaitow’s stuff is very, very influential and very helpful and
the Travell and Simmons book. Their work on anatomy and
trigger point therapy is absolutely crucial and has been great in
terms of helping me understand the anatomy and helping me
understand the change and looking at Thomas Myers’ anatomy
trains work.

That stuff is super because it lets you understand where to look at

for dysfunction and how to maybe find the bombs that are hidden
in different places and why certain things might be connected

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when they wouldn’t necessarily look so in an anatomy book. Does

that make sense?

Interviewer: No; that does make sense. It’s interesting. You have to shift your
perspective a little bit or go beyond maybe what the common view
on things is.

So, let me shift gears here a little bit or maybe leap forward. At
the end of the day it seems to me everything that we’re doing from
day 1 from warm-up to cool down from recovery day to speed and
everything in between really is gearing us toward a championship
season and getting us prepared so that athletes can be at their best,
at their healthiest during championship season.

Talk about how you use these considerations or these evaluations

for major championships? Can you give some examples how you
gear this to get athletes primed and ready to go for the conference
championship or regionals or nationals or the state meet or the
league meet or whatever it is?

Interviewee: Yeah; I think that one is there’s so much mythology behind

peaking or ideas about peaking is that it’s not really a set of magic
workouts. I don’t have any magic workouts. I think I have very
good workouts, but I don’t have –

Interviewer: Can I cut you off there real quick because you just said something
I don’t want to forget. What do you say to people who always
want to know your secret peaking workouts?

How do you explain to people that if you haven’t’ been addressing

all the things that you’ve talked about so far today, it doesn’t
matter what you steal from Dan Pfaff or Boo or Kebba Tolbert, it’s
not gonna work.

What’s your response to that because people always want to know

the magic workout that’s going get the kid to run the crazy time at
the championship meet?

Interviewee: A couple of things. One is I have workouts that I like to do later in

the year versus early in the year and workouts that I like to do
during championship season, but they’re not magic. Sometimes
they’re just indicators to me of where we’re at, but there’s nothing
special about those versus what somebody else is doing
necessarily. I feel like I have a good sequence of things and we get
to that point responsibly by not doing too much volume early and
not backing off too late in the season.

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I think even in championship season you need to have a certain

volume of training or else the athlete can get too stale. So in terms
of the magic peaking workouts, a lot of the ability to perform well
at the major meets is does the athlete confident? So the
psychological factors. Does the athlete feel healthy? If you get an
athlete that’s going in healthy and confident, then that’s 75 percent
of it; maybe more. If they’re in shape ‘cause most athletes should
be in shape by that point; whatever you might call in shape.

But are they healthy and are they confident? Well if they’re
healthy and confident and then that’s huge. So on top of that you
need to have to back up to the fundamentals, like can they execute
various movements under pressure? So a lot of times what
happens is it’s not that the workouts weren’t good. It’s that the
athlete doesn’t have the psychological composure to handle
pressure. Some of that is from training.

So some of our practices are designed to exert a lot of pressure on

the athletes. Sometimes in practice they fail and that’s okay
because failure in practice doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re
gonna fail in the meet. If they’ve never faced failure, then they’re
not going to succeed.

I’m a huge Star Wars fan. One of the things that when Luke
Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back, he has this big failure at the
cave in Dagoba. When he’s getting ready to leave Dagoba and go
fight Darth Vader, Yoda said to him, “Remember your failure at
the cave.”

You’ve got to use that as a learning experience to save yourself

from destruction. So failures as coaches sometimes we have them
and failure of athletes at certain times of the year aren’t necessarily
a bad thing. Sometimes they can be huge learning opportunities
that allow us to succeed later.

Interviewer: That’s good stuff. Talk about how you create a pressure
atmosphere where you can imitate meet pressure? How do you put
that pressure on the athlete in practice in such a way that they can
directly apply what they learned from it from a success and even
better, a failure standpoint to a championship meet and that final or
whatever it is, that last jump, et cetera?

Interviewee: I think one of the things you have to be demanding. I think you
can’t be afraid as a coach to be demanding. That doesn’t mean you

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can’t be sensitive. Doesn’t mean you can’t be caring. Doesn’t

mean you can’t be understanding, but you have to be demanding.

If you look at the best universities and the best high schools in the
country, they have demanding professors and teachers. They ask a
lot of their students. They don’t cut corners and even the students
who may have a lot of potential but may be are lazy, they don’t cut
them any slack.

I think in track sometimes we feel like oh, well they’re trying or

that’s the best they can do when we know in our hearts that they
have more to give. Sometimes you’ve got to challenge the athletes
to give their very best at practice.

I don’t mean necessarily they gotta run a certain time, but when
they warm-up are they focused. When they do their sprint
exercises are they focused. When they’re doing their block starts
are they focused on the things they need to do to be excellent on
that day on that week in that year.

So certain times of the year I’m very demanding about certain

things because they need to have those qualities present at the
championship time of year. How we setup the blocks and I don’t
let my kids set them up any which way. I want them set a certain
way because those yield the best opportunity to setup an efficient
acceleration pattern. So I’m demanding about that.

I’m demanding about how we exit the blocks, about how we come
to set. They might seem like small things to somebody else, but
I’ve seen so many kids blow races by not coming to set correctly.

Interviewer: Yeah; right.

Interviewee: So that’s how you exert pressure. Then the next level is doing
acceleration work with three really good people together. So
you’ve got your 4 by 1 relay practicing block starts together.

Well can they perform the activities correctly? Can they accelerate
correctly with two other good kids around them? Say you’re doing
12 block starts that day. Can they do nine of them at least a B
level or is like they get two really good ones and the rest of them
are all scattered, with a scatter gram if you had to plot those or
grade those.

So a lot of times what happens is maybe the kids who are real
talented but young can maybe only do a few really good efforts

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and then maybe by the time they get to be juniors or seniors or they
get to elite status their ability to stay focused over a whole workout
from warm-up to cool down is much better than when they were
younger.

I’ve had kids that were all good and did the track workout great,
but then the multi-jumps such and the lifting sucks –

Interviewer: Yeah; right.

Interviewee: Kids will go around the track and they might not like doing track
stuff, but they like the weight room. So they’ll be really focused in
the weight room or they’ll be really focused on the bench press,
but they’ll let their Olympics be sloppy.

Well part of being elite and part of being a champion is learning

how to do all those things really well, at least at a very good level
so that you can bring all those qualities to the starting lineup.

Interviewer: That’s a really great point. Let me ask you a question, Kebba.
Again, I’m a developmental coach. I don’t work with the type of
athletes that you work with. The athletes you have on your team
are like once in every ten year type of kids for me, but I always say
to people that I really feel like what I really excel at is not the sets
and the reps and how many multi-jumps to do on this day, but it’s
the psychological component.

I get kids to buy in. I can get kids to believe they can achieve
things or run times or compete at levels that they didn’t think they
could do at the beginning of the season when we first got together.
You talked about this a few minutes ago, about maybe feeling
confident could be 75 percent or more.

So would you say that’s an accurate number? How important is

the psychological component in your personal opinion, in your
personal experience of training, versus the physical component, the
sets and the reps and the Xs and Os?

I think you can have an average knowledge of all these things

you’ve talked about over the past hour, but if you can get kids to
believe that they’re in the greatest program and that they have the
ability to achieve things, if they can outperform the coach’s
knowledge per se just based on that confidence or that belief or the
feeling that they can do it or they can get to that next level or run
those times. How important to you is the psychological

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component when you’re working with your athletes as a group and

then an individual basis?

Interviewee: I think that the psychological part, especially in terms of buying in

is absolutely important. What I mean is I’ve had some very
talented females over the years, kids I thought could run 22
seconds. I’ve had three females I think could have run 22 seconds
in the 200 meters. Only one has. The other ones ran 23 low and I
think the reason was at that time they didn’t have the confidence in
themselves to execute the race plan the way it should have been
done.

They were in shape. One of the girls ran 27 250 and 16.6 150,
which is fine, but she’d never go 23. She worked her butt off. She
was a very, very hard worker, a very talented female, but because
she didn’t have the belief in herself, she couldn’t express those
qualities when it came to competition.

She made the world championships and Olympics, so she was

relatively successful compared to the rest of the world, but
amongst her own peer group, top 20, top 30 people in the world,
she couldn’t climb to the top just because of those issues. She just
didn’t believe and at certain times she didn’t buy into things that I
thought were very important. But she was successful. Just not
quite the level that she had the talent level to be, as an example.

So I think that’s a crucial area to look at. Yeah; Xs and Os are

important. Training design is absolutely crucial. Speed and
power, absolutely crucial, but there are other things that go into the
pot as well and the athlete’s mental approach and the coach’s
ability to help the athlete develop the mental capacity to do those
things under pressure is important.

And that’s why we try to have practices with pressure to perform

things correctly, where there is an expectation that whether you’re
feeling great that day, a little bit sick that day, whether you had a
bad test or you were up late studying that there’s still some
standard of excellence that we expect because when you go to the
meet you can’t say to the person next to you I had a bad day
yesterday; I’m not gonna be able to run; will you take it easy on
me. They’re gonna try and blast you no matter what.

So you have to come to practice, you have to come to training with

the attitude of I’m gonna try my best to leave this stuff at the door
and do the best I can.

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Now that doesn’t mean as a coach that you’re not sensitive. So

maybe if this kid is at an A- level normally, but on their bad day
they’re at a B level, well that’s not such a bad drop off, but the kids
that are usually pretty good and when everything goes bad, they
don’t even look recognizable. Those are the kids that are gonna
have problems under pressure to me.

Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. I like that. I hope people reading this
right now really take that into consideration.

You’ve covered a wide range of topics we could take anything you

said right here and make that its own hour long discussion But, I’m
going to ask you one more question and maybe you can give us
some good information to maybe allow us to go off on our own
direction here.

What are some resources that we can look at to get more

information, to get more in-depth in some of the topics that you’ve
covered in this discussion so far?

Interviewee: I would say from the anatomy and therapy standpoint, one of the
books that I would suggest, I would suggested Anatomy Training
by Thomas Myers to most people.

There’s a Soft Tissue Manipulation by Leon Chaitow He also

wrote Clinical Applications of Neuromuscular Techniques, which
is a very good read and very helpful. Touch for Health is very
good by James Thie. Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction by Travell
and Simons is a bible in a sense.

Cressey and Robinson wrote Assess and Correct. They did a DVD
series on that, which is very, very good to learn how to assess
certain movements and assess certain body areas to see and how to
correct those areas, too, when there’s dysfunction.

The Movement book by Gray Cook who is an inventor of the

functional movement screen is very good. Mark Lindsay, a great
therapist up in Canada has a book called Fascia. It’s very, very
good. Then the Primer on Anatomy and How to Look at Anatomy
has very good diagrams. There’s Anatomy of Movement by
Blandine Calais-Germaine, a French author. That’s a very, very
book. I refer to it all the time.

So maybe some of the therapy, anatomy, movement related type

stuff. Training Theory, there’s the classics, too. Looking at
Bompa, looking at Medraev, people like that. While every part of

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it doesn’t necessarily apply to what we’re doing today, there’s lots

of very good information in those books that were written 20, 30,
40 years ago. Some of the old German literature and Soviet
literature on psychology and restoration I think are very important.

So I think there’s a big rush to read the new stuff, read the new
stuff and look at the new stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s
classic that’s still very, very helpful.

If you use these resources and listen to coaches like Tom Tellez
and Dan Pfaff from the TrackandFieldLegends program, you’ll get
some outstanding results. So I recommend going to Track and
Field Legends dot com and taking a look at that program or, at the
least, put your email address in, if you haven’t already, because I’ll
be sending you information like this as time goes on. So do that
and you’re on your way to superior performances.

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