Planning as part of preparation for major competitions

The recent web blog  just prior to the Scottish Championships was titled  ‘Preparation for Scottish Championships are going well‘ and now looking back I can say that careful preparation and planning certainly helped me as a coach to instill confidence in my athletes that things were going into the right direction. Interestingly, while writing this blog I received an email update from Scottish Athletics headed Coaching Zone Edition 5 – Planning and preparing – as a team. Well, although Stephen Maguire the Director of Coaching, was referring to the upcoming Commonwealth Games, the principles of planning and preparing still have value when coaching at the grass roots level. (Coaching Zone is a monthly CPD e-bulletin with a short selection of links to useful online resources to scottishathletics-registered coaches.)

There were a few challenges for me as a coach with regard to planning, which might be worthwhile sharing with other coaches, in particular with our assistant coaches (level 1),  who are still in the process of becoming qualified Athletics Coaches.

The first question could be why do you do planning and how do you plan for major competitions ? One reason why planning might be beneficial is that a structured approach leaves less to chance and luck and can lead to predictability and in the end to confidence. Planning can be divided into long term and short term (4-5 weeks cycles) but both should really be embedded into the overall development plan that is based on the Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model.

Long term planning can cover years where the expected results can take many years to come to fruition and it requires a lot of patience from athlete and coach. The results cannot only be measured in improved performance but more importantly usually in improved technical skills. Evie  Bartl was privileged to join Robert Wilkie (former National Javelin Coach) at Scotstoun as a 10 year old with the aim to learn to throw the javelin. Although Evie was already able to throw the javelin as an U11 around 15m, she had very little knowledge about the technical aspects of the javelin throw (neither did I), which at times resulted in a sore elbow when applying a wrong throwing technique (not getting the elbow above shoulder height). Although Evie’s performance has steadily improved over the last 3 years  (about 4m per year), more importantly she has acquired a reasonably good technique for her age.

videos of  technical improvement 2011 ( U13 (22.21m) and 2013 U15 (30.77 m)

For me as a parent the most valuable aspect of her development was not only that she achieved her goals (silver medal 2012 and gold 2013) but that so far Evie never had any sport injuries despite her success in the event. Contrary to common assumption, Evie really trains only once a week for this event for about 2 hours. Quality versus quantity! What people don’t realize is how many hours practicing are involved over the years.

 

 

I have seen a number of young kids joining this group but most left soon as they did not have the patience to learn drills or the tidies repetition of certain movement skills. Athletes spend considerable time training without  actually  throwing a javelin, using a broomstick for conditioning exercises or a weighted ball to drill the correct throwing technique.  What athletes and their coaches were looking for was a quick fix to their problem (usually some points in league meetings) and no real commitment to a long term development plan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This year was particularly challenging due to the high number of major competitions starting with the West District end of May, Scottish Schools a week later, National Pentathlon in mid July and finally the Age Groups in mid August. Hence, the outdoor season started in earnest at the beginning of May, following with a 4-5 weekly cycle between each major competition. One particular challenge was to work out how to prepare an athlete (Evie), who does multi events? How do you devise a training plan that covers all these different events and more importantly how do you fit them into the limited time available. After a couple of evenings working on it, I came up with the following preparation plan leading up to the West District and Scottish Schools, which is a 4 weekly training’s cycle.

For an outsider the training plan might look really busy and it was only possible to achieve this with a good discipline; that is making the most of the available limited time, usually 1 ½ hours. For example by starting Harriers 30-40 minutes earlier trying to cover at least 2 events, usually hurdles and shot. Again what we would be looking for was quality and not quantity. A few good runs over the hurdles with fluency and decent speed was enough; starting off with a few runs over 1-3 hurdles and maybe 1-2 runs over the full distance.

In the shot put the task was to rehearse the competition where the athlete has 3 initial throws and the best 6-8 athletes get three further throws. Hence, the athlete has to be able to have at least one good throw in the first round, which ideally is close or over the 9m mark. Once Evie has registered a few 9-10m throws the shot put session over. The main aim was really to develop sharpness with regard to a competition environment.

Preparation for the high jump was similar where we were not looking for new PBs or outstanding performances rather than consistency in her jumps, confident jumps over 1.30m at first attempt were good enough to instil confidence. Having too many jumps can be detrimental as it leaves the athlete with tired legs instead of developing ‘springy legs’, which are light and fast.

Preparation for endurance (800m) is probably the most time consuming and requires real commitment. If not done at least 2 weekly (20-30 minutes) there will be little improvement with regard to fitness. The task itself included various reps of 200m/300m in or around 40/60 seconds was not too high and worked actually quite well. To Evie’s credit she was able to improve on her previous PB of 2.58 within a relatively short time running a 2.49 at Linwood.

Open Graded Meetings were really part of the overall training plan and I believe are ideal opportunities for the athletes to see where they are in their preparation process. Measuring distances or exact times were not really part of the weekly preparation as this could be achieved at these meetings, where the whole atmosphere usually gives an extra buzz to perform well.

So, has it been worthwhile all this planning and preparing? I suppose Evie’s  9 national medals this year are some indications that it helped to get the job done. However, despite the euphoria of winning a collection of medals this was a real learning experience for me as a coach, in particular as it raises the questions how to best structure training at this development level. Reminding ourselves at what level an U14 athletes is, it is the Train to Train (11-15) and not the Train to Compete stage (15-17). Hence, although being successful can be a bonus and hopefully a motivation to continue in the sport, the main focus should still be on development with regard to the whole range of athletics skills. It is interesting that despite training and competing in so many events (shot, javelin, discuss, high jump, long jump, pole vault and hurdles it did not prevent Evie from achieving excellent results in some of her main throwing events, javelin (30.77 m  and shot (10.14 m).  I would even argue that BECAUSE  of doing multi-eventing an athlete’s development can significantly be enhanced as training for throws can benefit jumpers and vice versa. Why is this? Because there are certain movement patterns like the triple extension, which are present in all events. It is therefore not surprising that part of the coach education for jumping  is a module about throwing and throws coaches learn about jumping. There are many general preparatory exercises like medicine ball throws that will benefit all  jumpers, throwers and runners, as are plyometric jump exercises.

 

This really leaves us with the notion of how important it is to provide a training’s structure where young athletes should be exposed to the widest range of athletics skills. What about the double Scottish sprint champion in U14 Lauren Greig trying the pole vault? video of Lauren jumping into sand pit