Late last year, WLTF Assistant Sprints Coach - Charlie Craddock - attended the ALTIS Apprentice Coach Programme (ACP) in Phoenix, Arizona.
Below, he shares his experiences, and key take aways.
“I had wanted to travel to ALTIS located in Phoenix Arizona, for their Apprentice Coach Programme for a few years. Last December I finally made the trip out there. Below I have shared my experience of the week and in bold highlighted some of the key take home points for the week.
Day 1
Day 1 started with a welcome meeting discussing the plan for the week and meeting all the members of staff. We also had a tour of the main facility that the course was based at: EXOS. The gym had all the facilities you could dream of, state of the art lifting equipment, curve treadmills, bikes, 1080 pulley system, 40-50m 4 lane track, AstroTurf area, cold plunge pool, swimming pool, treatment rooms, and not to forget the kitchen! It was great to see the collaboration between EXOS and ALTIS, and a breath of fresh air to see what was possible with integration rather than isolation.
The training theme for the day was potentiation. Mondays are used to activate and wake athletes up for a fast session on the Tuesday. This was very individualised to the athlete, with some choosing block starts, others just a warmup with mobility and activation drills following with light but fast weights. Every athlete reacts to a stimulus differently. Following observing morning training, head coach Dan Pfaff took us through a practical in warm up. The warmup started from walking movements and only progressing to jogging speed. The point Dan was trying to enforce here was, movement screening starts from when the athletes physically walks into a session, not from when they start their warm up, running or doing drills, it is also something that never stops, every activity is a movement screen of some kind.
After the practical sessions each day, lunch was served, we all ate out of the kitchen in EXOS, the food was incredibly nutritious and tasted amazing. Following lunch, we had a presentation by Stu McMillan on acceleration, this was part 1 of 2 (part 2 came later in the week), it laid down Stu’s philosophy on acceleration, his 3 key words for acceleration are shapes, patterns and rhythm. To end each day we had a poolside chat, these were approximately 1-1:30 hours long and were an open forum to discuss anything we’d seen during the day or any other questions we’d come with, the topics that came up were very diverse, that’s the beauty of putting 35 coaches in a room from a variety of sports, the discussions can run off at many tangents.
The whole day concluded with a group meal in the evening, this was a great chance to socialise with everyone on the course and have a chat with the coaches on a more informal basis.
Day 2
Day 2 started with meeting at EXOS and having Stu present part 2 on his acceleration presentation, this part focused on error detection and correction. Stu focused a lot on the emphasis of cueing, for example when to cue and when not to cue. In other words, is it a technical error or a mechanical error? If it was technical it would most likely happen on both sides of the body therefore it could be fixed by a cue. If it was mechanical, it would most likely be an asymmetry in which case cueing it would be limited in its efficacy.
Training theme for the day - Max Velocity. After Stu’s presentation we all headed down to the track together. I observed the short sprinters and hurdlers for the day. The short sprinters had a running complex consisting of a wicket run, 60m run on the track and a 120m run on grass. The hurdlers had a combination of sessions due to varying factors (returning from injury and overall mental/physical wellbeing of the athletes on the day) but the theme was a speed hurdles session. Following the track session, we headed back to EXOS to watch the gym sessions take place, these are done on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays when the main track sessions take place. Each gym session is categorised into a zone to compliment the type of track session that has just taken place.
Zone 1- explosive strength
Zone 2- work capacity/ hypertrophy
Zone 3- maximum strength
Following gym, we had a practical with Dan on acceleration. One of the points I took home was the impact of different types of arm movements, and how this inevitably affected his leg action. The take home point, watching and understanding arm movement is important and there is a lot of information we can draw from it, one being how it influences leg movement and vice versa. The afternoon consisted of a presentation by Keenan Robinson (from USA swimming) talking about jumping and throwing in populations that were never taught to jump or throw. Keenan used a very effective method of micro dosing all the throwing and jumping he done with his swimmers throughout the week, loading and de-loading where necessary. They would have frequent, but small exposure to these activities. Day 2 finished with another poolside chat.
Day 3
Day 3 commenced with a presentation by Nate Shaw. He worked in baseball for the Arizona Diamondbacks primarily as an S&C coach and the theme for his presentation was “why we do what we do”. Nate was a very enthusiastic and engaging character. Interestingly enough he had once attended the ACP too. He spoke about their philosophy behind why they do certain exercises and why they avoid certain exercises. The explanations were very simple, and based off functional anatomy for baseball, and injuries patterns in the sport, does it need to be any more complicated than that? The key learning point from Nate was, to include something into your programme make sure you can justify its reasoning, not only from a performance factor but a health factor too.
The training theme for today was Regen. All the athletes went through various regen sessions to help the body actively recover. This was followed by a practical with Dr. Jas on why we do regen and the in depth anatomical and physiological explanation, again this was another very engaging practical, it connected a lot of loose dots for me and filled in some gaps as to the importance of regen and active recovery. The afternoon started with a presentation by coach Kevin Tyler on “achieving performance in a contemporary sporting environment”. Kevin, Dan and Stu were employed by British Athletics back in 2009 for the build up to London 2012, they helped transform the athletics system from a performance perspective also having apprentice coaches working under them too. The two key points that Kevin touched on in this presentation was one of money, throwing large volumes of money at problems doesn’t always solve the solution if you’ve got the wrong people in charge. The other was one of simplicity, the human body is a complex system, not a complicated system, trying to put a complex training schedule in place for a complex system is putting complexity on complexity. This is not a good solution and only results in confusion. Again, the day was ended with a poolside chat.
Day 4
Day 4 kicked off with a presentation by Dr. Robin Thorpe from the sports science department, he was talking about “monitoring fatigue and managing recovery in elite athletes”. He presented about how they monitor fatigue and use certain tests in the gym and on the track, to track it. Since he hadn’t been there long, they were all still trying to work out how they could best use the data collected, trialling different systems of approach for example, so it was still a work in progress. However, he did provide a lot of evidence and use cases from his time spent at Manchester United football club. The main point learnt here was, it’s all good collecting data but you must have a use for it and must be able to interpret it, otherwise they’re useless numbers.
The training Theme for the day was acceleration, some groups were at the track, but I stayed at EXOS to watch the short sprinters and hurdlers use the 1080 motion. The main objective for Stu’s guys was as the weight decreased on the pulley (and horizontal speed increased as a result) could they maintain the same shapes, patterns and rhythms they’d be able to make with a heavier weight. The practical for the day was with Dan on rudiment and dribbles. Dan took us right back to basics with walking ankle dribbles and building from there, he did the same with the basic rudiment jumps, starting off with very small amplitude double leg jumps rolling through the foot from heel to toe. This could be progressed to become very challenging if single leg work and medicine balls were introduced too. Despite none if this being further than 10 yards, one of the other coaches took their heart rate at over 100bpm, proving simple tasks can achieve the same goals in terms of physiological reactions within the body. Another key point Dan made was not enough of us are nailing the basics before progressing, if in doubt keep it simple!
The last presentation of the course was by Dan on acceleration and speed development, he emphasised before it was presentation biased to his experiences, but after 47 years of coaching it’s only natural you’re going to be biased to your ways of doing things if you’ve had the amount of success with it as him! The main topics focused on here were injuries and how the injury may only be the outcome of imbalances or misfunctioning tissues elsewhere in the body. 9/10 you need to look elsewhere. In addition to that the importance of minimising training gaps during return to performance phase, if you can’t do certain exercises due to an injured leg for example, can you still do them single leg? The body has a neurological training cross over of 70%, he would rather close a 30% gap than a 100% gap. We concluded the course with a final poolside chat and a farewell to all the coaches and the people we’d met.