Today's podcast features Laurent Meuwley. Laurent is the Head Coach for sprints, hurdles, and relays for the Netherlands. A former Swiss national coach and European Athletics Coach of the Year, he’s known for guiding world-class athletes like Femke Bol and Dutch relay teams, pioneering the “Flyers vs. Diesels” sprint-type analogy and his comprehensive approach to training.
Often in sprinting and speed training education, we get a small piece of the equation based on our social media algorithms or our immediate training culture. To fully understand speed training, we must look at both speed and environmental coaching concepts that span cultures.
On today’s podcast, Laurent discusses speed building on the level of the weight room, overspeed, speed endurance, and individual training factors. Laurent also talks about building a relay-based culture and a powerful training environment, along with many more nuances of building elite sprinters.
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Timestamps
2:31- Team Dynamics and Specialties in Athletics
21:15- Enhancing Speed with Rear Leg Propulsion
24:43- Efficient Cluster Training for Hypertrophy Goals
29:54- Explosive Training with Kaiser Machines and Variations
31:59- Individualized Sprint Training for Speed Development
35:12- Speed Reserve Optimization in Sprint Training
41:44- Individualized Training Approaches for Sprinters' Profiles
52:37- Aerobic System Impact on 400m Running
54:38- Optimizing Nervous System through Training Schedule
Quotes
(4:50) "In the second phase of the preparation, athletes are working more on individual exercises. And those are based on a test they do called the tensomeography test, where we check all the muscles individually and see how fast or slow they are, how strong or weak they are, how quickly they react, they can be activated or not." - Laurent Meuwly
(13:14) "Because a lot of strength program are thought in terms of which muscles are specifically used for the movement. But we also have to think in which kind of muscle contraction, what kind of Muscle contraction is then used and for different muscle groups it's a different contraction. It might be concentric for some, eccentric for others, isometric for some muscles. So in the specific work this needs to be taken into account." - Laurent Meuwly
(16:37) "If I take a hamstring exercise, when someone has struggled to activate the hamstrings quick enough, they might have an exercise where they are standing, laying on their shoulders up, one leg on the skateboard, the other leg in the air and they have to bring the skateboard back and forth under their butt as fast as possible." - Laurent Meuwly
(22:07) "The propulsion phase is really important in running and especially in sprinting." - Laurent Meuwly
(23:43) "The individualization in the gym is more to the way athletes are reacting in terms of hypertrophy. Some athletes would go a bit quicker away from max strength exercises, hypertrophy to be more in a velocity-based training, more in power than in strength development." - Laurent Meuwly
(33:00) "I think in Europe we are using overspeed quite more than in the US at least in track and field, I would say every 10 to 14 days." - Laurent Meuwly
(42:20) "A “flyer”, an athlete who is more speed based needs to be fast. And because speed is his or her strength, they also are going to recover from speed or even strength or whatever stimulates highly the nervous system quicker than athletes who are more endurance based and who are less talented for speed." - Laurent Meuwly