Preparing for Doha, Part 2

In part one of this post, Dale Stevenson and René Sack shared some insight into how they will adapt their training plans for the 2019 season which, due to the late date of the Doha World Championships, will extend six-to-eight weeks longer than normal.

Dale (coach of 2017 shot put World Champion Tom Walsh) and René (coach of 2011 World Championship discus silver medalist Nadine Müller) are both adherents of block periodization, and they seem confident that this method of planning will provide them with the flexibility they will need to help their athletes adapt to the rigors of a monstrously long season.

JC Lambert, who last year coached DeAnna Price to an American-record in the hammer throw (78.12m), is also in the process of puzzling out how best to manage the 2019 season.

I spoke with JC the old fashioned way, over the phone, and he told me that he and DeAnna learned a lot during the 2018 season that will help them prepare for Doha.  Last year was an important one for DeAnna, as she had to get used to competing through August after several years in the NCAA system where the biggest meets take place in May and June.

“In previous years,” he said, “when she competed in a meet like the DécaNation in September,  she was mentally worn out. So in 2018, we focused on the Continental Cup. We wanted to see if she could throw far overseas late in the summer.”

The importance of throwing well at the Cup, which was held on September 8th, influenced the structure of DeAnna’s training for the entire season.

Indoors, that meant de-emphasizing the weight throw. According to JC, last year they “took maybe nine total practices with the weight and we didn’t even throw much during those practices, maybe eighteen throws. And she competed in three meets. I didn’t really care how far she threw in the first two meets. Then she went to USAs and we didn’t even peak for it–and she ended up going over 80 feet (24.51m) for the first time and got the win. But our goals all focused on the hammer.”

Outdoors, they chose meets based on how they might affect DeAnna’s ability to throw well late in the summer.

JC emphasized that, “chasing the money”  by competing in the IAAF Hammer Challenge meets was “not important.”

“She could have made some money doing that, but how would that impact her training? Would she have been in good mental and physical shape at the Continental Cup?”

Their plan worked well in 2018. After setting the American record in Des Moines in June, DeAnna won the World Cup in Ostrava in September with a toss of 75.46m.  And according to JC, she was in shape to throw even farther.

“If it wasn’t for the stupid format [Note: way too complicated to explain here, but I’ll include an excerpt from the Continental Cup team manual at the bottom of this post], if she had just been able to throw and go after throws she would have thrown 78 meters again. On the 75.46m throw, she had to back off the release just to make sure it stayed in the sector. To end the way that we did made me feel pretty good, though.”

And it gave JC confidence that following a similar approach in 2019 will prepare DeAnna to drop bombs  in Doha.

I asked JC if he would describe his approach to periodization as “block” or “linear.”

“Honestly, a mixture of both, if that’s such a thing. It’s linear from now until the outdoor season, then I block it up until the end. Certain blocks I want to make sure we get a good throw in. Last year it was the NACAC championships. I wanted to make sure that she could get in a good throw, good enough to win but not spend all our cookies at that meet. Then for the Continental Cup, that was a bigger block leading up to a peak.”

One issue unique to hammer throwers is the difficulty they face in finding quality meets when they need them. Right now, I’d imagine that Dale Stevenson knows which competitions Tom Walsh will enter from March through the World Championships. That’s not hard to do, as there are a ton of meets that feature the men’s shot.

Not so with the hammer.

There are plenty of chances for hammer throwers to compete in the States during the college season in April and early May (post-collegiates are welcome at many college meets), but once the NCAA Regionals take place in late May those opportunities disappear.

In the past, JC has hosted a couple of competitions in June so that DeAnna could stay sharp. He’d like to do the same this summer.

“My hope would be to put one on leading up to the USA Championships [held July 25-28 this year] just to make sure we can stay competitive, stay in the ring, keep it in the sector, not have to travel very far before the US Championships.”

And will she be competing in Europe as well?

“I’d like to send her over, especially since we don’t have to worry about the US Championships until July. I’d like to send her over early on, then get her back in the States with enough time before the US Championships, maybe four or five weeks before. Get her back on track with her sleep schedule, eating, training, lifting…make sure we have all the bases covered.”

Assuming DeAnna makes the US team for Doha, she and JC then have to deal with the two-month gap between the US Championships and the Worlds.

“There ain’t going to be many meets around that time in the US.  At that time, people are going to be shutting their season down, but  we are going to have to find competitions somewhere.”

The bottom line for a hammer thrower in this or any other season? Flexibility.

“You go with the flow,” JC explained. “You adapt and survive as you go. You play the hand you’re dealt and make the best of it. If I get an idea in my head of the ‘perfect scenario’ it ain’t going to work out that way, and then we’re going to be stressed. The way I look at it, if something comes up, it comes up. If not we’ll find a way.”

I touched bases with one final coach on the matter of preparing for Doha, and he may face the oddest situation of all trainers of elite throwers. Torsten Lönnfors is the coach of Chris Harting, the defending Olympic champion in the discus. Like JC Lambert, Torsten prefers to employ a combination of linear and block periodization when planning a season’s worth of training.

He told me via email that “for Chris, it will be a traditional linear periodization. Only the last six to eight weeks before Doha would be kind of a block, if Chris will compete there.”

When Torsten says “if Chris will compete” in Doha, he is not referring to the possibility that Chris might not qualify to represent the German team. Chris has made it known that he does not want to compete at the 2019 Worlds.

According to Torsten, Chris is “already concentrating on Tokyo,” and is concerned that the late date of the Doha Championships combined with a need to recover from the 2019 season, combined with his obligation to serve four weeks of police duty each fall will make it impossible to begin his 2020 training in time to get in top shape for the 2020 Olympics.

Something tells me, though, that the German Federation, which supports Chris financially, will try to get him to change his mind, especially if he proves during the spring and early summer that he is Germany’s best hope for a Doha discus medal.

Time will tell for Chris and for all the athletes and coaches trying to figure out the best way to adjust their training in what promises to be a strange year in athletics.

Speaking of strange, here is the explanation of the rules for the throwing events at the 2018 Continental Cup. I have cut and pasted it from the Team Manual published by the IAAF.

Enjoy!

502.3.2 Field Events High Jump and Pole Vault are conducted according to IAAF rules. Long Jump, Triple Jump, Shot Put, Discus Throw, Hammer Throw and Javelin Throw (“Horizontal Field Events”) will have two phases. In the first phase (Qualification), all athletes have three trials after which they are ranked. The highest ranked athlete from each team (i.e. a total of four athletes) proceed to Round 4. All other athletes are eliminated and ranked from fifth to eighth according to their best performance after three rounds of trials. Round 4 (Semi-Final) and Round 5 (Final) is the second phase of the competition. In Round 4, the two lowest ranked athletes are ranked third and fourth according to their performance in this round and are eliminated. The two best ranked athletes in Round 4 proceed to Round 5, which is the final round. In Round 5, the better ranked athlete in this round wins the competition, the other is second. The competing order in all the five rounds will be the initial draw order. If all the four athletes fail in Round 4, the two best ranked athletes after the first 3 rounds will go to Round 5. If in Round 4 only one athlete has a valid performance, the second athlete to progress to Round 5 will be the athlete (from a different team) with the best valid performance after the first 3 rounds. If in Round 5 both athletes fail, the winner is the athlete with the better performance in Round 4. If in Round 4 those athletes failed, the winner is the athlete with the better performance after the first 3 rounds and the other is second.

 

 

Preparing for Doha, Part 1

Winning a medal at a World Championships is never easy, but winning one in 2019 might be trickier than usual.

In most years, professional throwers practice and compete over a ten-month span. Serious training begins in November. Important competitions stretch from May through the summer with the most important–the World Championships or Olympics–generally taking place in early-to-mid August. At the Rio Olympics, for example, track events began on August 12th. The 2017 World Athletics Championships in London opened on August 1st.

The 2019 season, however, will be different. Due to the climate in Doha, where August temperatures tend to be unbearable, the 2019 World Championships will not begin until September 27th.

This creates a challenge for throws coaches who must design and manage a plan for their athletes that accounts for an extra six-to-eight weeks of training while somehow keeping them fresh for Doha.

Curious as to how different coaches would handle this predicament, I contacted a few.

One person I for sure wanted to check in with was Dale Stevenson, coach of the defending shot put World Champion Tom Walsh of New Zealand.

Dale and Tom have become experts at handling extra-long seasons because for them, every season is extra-long. As New Zealand is located in the Southern Hemisphere, their outdoor national championships take place in March, a full two months before the outdoor season even begins in North America and Europe where most of Tom’s competitors reside. 

So Tom and Dale have had to devise a system that allows Tom to maintain excellent form two-to-three months longer than many of his rivals.

And based on recent results, they seem to have figured out a way to do just that. 

Last year, for example, Tom won the Indoor World Championships in Birmingham on March 3rd with a monster toss of 22.31m.  A week later, he headed back to New Zealand and won his national championships with a put of 21.58m. He then stayed in great shape through the months of June (22.29m at the Oslo Diamond League Meeting), July (21.92m at Lausanne) and August (22.60m to win the Diamond League final in Zurich on the 30th of that month).

That’s six solid months of excellent putting.

I asked Dale, via email, how they’ll attempt to stretch that to eight months in 2019 and put Tom in position to defend his World title.

Dale seems confident that he and Tom can handle the challenge, and that confidence seems to stem in part from their use of block periodization.

According to Dale, he and Tom “always follow the same planning structure” for Tom’s training. That structure consists of a sequence of four training phases which Dale calls “Slow Eccentric,” “Fast Eccentric,” “Ballistic,” and “Competition.” The sequence can be modified to last anywhere from two-to-six months, and always consists of those four phases repeated in that order.

A quick note on terminology. In the past, when coaches referred to “periodization” they generally meant “linear periodization.” A training plan based on linear periodization would begin with a high-volume “preparation” or “hypertrophy” phase and gradually morph over a period of months towards a low-volume, higher intensity phase before ending with a maintenance phase during which an athlete would devote a minimum amount of time and energy to strength exercises–just enough to maintain the raw power necessary to throw far. This final phase would be timed to coincide with the most important competitions, and if calibrated correctly would allow the athlete to derive the benefits of all those months of hard training and throw their best when it counts the most. 

In a plan designed in the linear style, the various phases would not be repeated. Once an athlete moved past the high volume phase, for example, they would not engage in high volume training again until the following season.

A training plan utilizing “block periodization” would include the same basic phases as a linear plan, but over the course of the training year those phases would be repeated in segments or “blocks” of varying length. So, instead of engaging in say ten weeks of fairly high volume training during the winter months and then leaving high volume workouts behind for good as might be typical in a linear plan, an athlete training in the block style would engage in a shorter period of high volume training each time the block was repeated. And over the course of a ten-month season, the block would be repeated several times.

Here’s an analogy.

Linear periodization is like working hard at your job and saving all the money you can from November through May so that you can enjoy yourself on an extended summer vacation.  The more money you sock away during your “accumulation” phase, the longer your vacation will last. 

Block periodization would involve breaking up the save/spend cycle into a series of mini-cycles during which you’d save for a bit, spend that money on a shorter vacation, and repeat the process several times over the course of a year.

Advocates of a linear periodization system would argue that each phase of training must be maintained long enough to produce the desired training effect. If you want to produce hypertrophy in your athletes, for example, you must spend the time necessary to create that hypertrophy before moving on to another phase. Chopping the training year into blocks might not allow each phase of each block enough time to work its magic.

The challenge faced in 2019 by those using a linear model is that athletes cannot maintain peak fitness indefinitely. Once they begin a “maintenance” or “competition” phase and get farther away from their last strength-building phase, the clock begins to tick on their ability to generate maximum power. Eventually, the strength they accumulated during several months of preparation will diminish, like the savings of the aforementioned vacationer. With the Diamond League schedule beginning as usual in May, and the Worlds not taking place until late September, coaches have to figure out how to keep their athletes in competitive shape for a much longer stretch than they are used to.

Those like Dale Stevenson who favor a block periodization model might argue that it provides coaches the flexibility they need to manage this kind of situation. Each block contains a strength building phase, which would ideally restore an athlete’s ability to generate maximum power and produce peak throws.  Repeating the block ensures that an athlete never goes too long without rebuilding their capacity to throw far. 

Dale and Tom vary the length of each sequence depending on the importance of various competitions.

“If a short cycle is required (such as before World Indoors), then each phase is fifteen to eighteen days in duration, whereas a longer cycle might be forty-two days per phase. Pretty simple but it works for us.”

Rest will also be important if Tom is to be at his best in October.

He took seven weeks off after the 2018 campaign before starting back with twice-weekly sessions. Last week marked his return to a full training schedule.

Dale also plans to help Tom conserve some energy by de-emphasizing the Diamond League schedule.

“We will be sacrificing some of the meets in May-August next year to ensure we’re ready for October, some by reducing expectation of performance or simply skipping them altogether.”

Another coach who will be employing block periodization and emphasizing rest as he prepares his athletes for the 2019 season is René Sack, the German national coach for the women’s discus. René’s most prominent athlete is 2011 World Championships discus silver medalist Nadine Müller.

I spoke with René via the worldwide web, and he told me that the main adjustment he will be making in preparing Nadine for the 2019 season will be figuring out ways to include more rest in her training.

“I think you have to plan much more regeneration time,” he said. “I switched to the block periodization model last year. With Nadine, we do the European Winter Throwing Cup in the middle of March to see where we are at, then I will give her one or two weeks off. Then we will go to Chula Vista for three weeks for a training camp and begin the next phase.”

“The German Championships are on 3rd and 4th August, and the week after this she will get one more week free. You can’t train and do competitions for eleven months without finding ways to sneak in rest.”

René also plans to take special care to monitor the energy levels of his athletes throughout the season. He will regularly “do some surveys with the athletes where they answer a few questions to help me see how they are feeling so I can say ‘Ok, looks like you are really tired. Just go home and I’ll see you on Monday.’”

Like Dale Stevenson, René values the flexibility of block periodization and the way that the blocks can be stretched or shortened to suit an athlete’s needs.

René calls the first phase of his blocks an “accumulation phase.” During the first block of Nadine’s training, he will have her perform sets of ten during that phase. As the season progresses, the accumulation phase will always be the highest volume segment of a given block, but that volume will decrease relative to the accumulation phase in the first block. If Nadine’s first accumulation phase requires her to perform five sets of ten reps on various exercises, that may drop to sets of seven or “maybe a pyramid” in the second block.

“I change exercises too, ” he continued. “They might do heavy squats and leg press in the first block to prepare the structures for heavy lifting, and the next block maybe squats only, then later single leg squats or step-ups.” This is also designed to keep the athletes fresh over the course of a long season.

Like many coaches of elite throwers, René also has his athletes train with a variety of implements as a way of developing “special strength.”  Nadine routinely throws 1.2k and 1.5k discs in practice, with a 2k mixed in on occasion. Over the last two years, they have “played around” with a 0.8k disc, which Nadine can throw over 70 meters when she can get a good flight on it.

René estimates that Nadine has taken 120,000 throws in her life, so unlike a novice who needs to build technique, “she just needs to remind the body how to do it.”

If he can calibrate her training correctly, Nadine’s body and mind will be fresh and  ready to launch some big throws in Doha.

For part two of this article, I will share insights from JC Lambert, (coach of hammer thrower DeAnna Price) and Torsten Lönnfors, (coach of 2016 Olympic discus champion Chris Harting) on how they will prepare their charges for the rigors of the upcoming season.