Strength and conditioning coach Andy Kay explains why now is the perfect time to spot your shortcomings
This can be a crucial time of year for many track athletes. With the summer season quickly becoming a distant memory, its now when the important foundations are laid for what lies ahead next summer.
With training intensity a little lower to begin with, there is an opportunity to work on the extra elements which can prove invaluable further down the line. Its where some backwards thinking away from the heat of competition can help you get ahead.
Andy Kay, founder of Pure Performance, is a leading strength and conditioning coach who has worked with Jake Wightman since 2016 and was part of the backroom team which helped lead the Briton to world 1500m gold earlier this year.
At the start of every season, Kay will profile the athletes he works with to identify their biomechanical weaknesses. Working on those not only becomes the first port of call but also provides the purpose and direction to the off-track training programme he will put together.
With a background spanning multiple sports, the Royal Marines and now making a big impact in athletics, he believes that running and strength and conditioning are now working more hand in hand than they perhaps did in the past.
Here, he outlines why and how making it a part of your programme can help pay real dividends.
How would you sum up strength and conditioning and what you do?
Strength and conditioning is a term used for work thats designed to either improve performance or reduce injury.
My job is to give the athlete as much time and capacity as I can for them to spend on the track because thats ultimately where theyre going to get faster.
But theyre not going to do that if theyre injured or only capable of putting in a small percentage of what they could if they had, say, greater running economy, were more efficient or were springier.
Imagine your bodys a race car and youve got to get faster on the track. Were the guys in the pits that keep it in top condition, if you like. Strength and conditioning is very much an accessory but the better you get, the more important it is.
Why should an aspiring athlete be doing it?
If you look at the big picture, there are certain factors around performance and injury that youre not going to get from running alone.
A big one for me is tendon stiffness and reactivity, which is crucial in the production of force.
In simple terms, how springy are you? The only way to really improve that is through plyometrics or heavy isometrics basically overloading the tendons and ligaments more than you will through running.
From an injury prevention perspective, tendons in particular respond and get better through loading. Thats long, eccentric or isometric loading, which is the opposite of what running is.
If you want to get better quickly and stay healthy, thats the only way to do it.
Unless youre naturally very good, and you dont really get injured, then at some point youre going to need to use some kind of strength and conditioning to improve or get back on the track.
Is it all about lifting weights?
Definitely not. The strength side is only one piece of the puzzle. A lot of the time we spend in the gym will be on things like isometric holds that can be a leg press or a squat rack with weight but, equally, it could just be a doorframe or just using a lifting strap and using that to create tension.
A lot of the work we do also involves plyometrics such as jumping, landing and reactivity again, no weights involved. Theres a lot of conditioning work, too, which is very much just bodyweight.
What are the biggest mistakes you see athletes making with strength and conditioning?
The classic one is treating gym sessions like its a track workout or the old school circuit mentality where the only aim is to just be tired. If the only aim is fitness and being tired then youre doing something wrong if youre not getting that from running, because running will get you fitter for running than burpees ever will.
For some people that approach will help but, as soon as youre reasonably good as a runner, its not what you need.
Also, picking workouts that arent suitable or youve just pulled off the internet its just a waste of time unless youve picked something thats going to benefit you.
Have a good reason to do something and finding that only comes from working backwards from the sport and from your own issues and injuries in the past.
For all the athletes I work with, we do quite an extensive profile at the start of every season just to see where their weaknesses lie. We work on those first.
What simple steps can a runner take to make themselves more robust?
Start small, focusing on capacity and localised conditioning to injury-prone areas.
For example, if you can get to the point where you can do 20-30 single leg calf raises, youre going to have a much more bulletproof Achilles, calf, plantar fascia and shins than you would have had before and for very little cost.
It definitely helps to build up your core, too, with lots of planks and side planks to start off with. Then hip conditioning, with exercises like glute raises get to the point where you can do lots and lots of these prehab-type exercises.
Its very hard to overdo it and theyre the things that will give you a tangible difference in terms of feeling it in your running.
You can also look at plyometrics and working them into your warm-ups. Just 10 minutes before you run, you can do some isometric holds, some light pogo hops, some squatting to get mobility in your hips theres lots you can do. If you do that before every run and you run five times a week then thats quite a lot of volume.
Build the foundations. I always say treat it like a running season so have your winter first lots of volume, lots of capacity work, really drill the skills before you go into your intense block where you start to lift weights and get more aggressive with it. Similar to running, progressive overload relies on gradually increasing intensity.
Jake Wightman (Mark Shearman)
Fantastic elastic giving Jake Wightman firepower
If you look at him early on, it stood out that Jake wasnt very reactive from a landing and jumping perspective. If you spend a lot of time on the floor, in any jump, it shows that youre not able to produce force quickly.
Why does that matter on the track? At top speed your foot is on the floor for less than 0.1 seconds, so you havent got very long to produce force. If you and I run at the same speed and youre able to apply more force in a short space of time, Im going to hit my top speed sooner and youll be able to overtake me.
Im not overly concerned with someone being very strong because you dont have time to express strength in running you have time to express extreme speed and power.
That meant we spent a lot of time on making him springier and building elasticity into the tendons through lots of jumping and lots of repetitive, pogo-style, low-level bouncing work.
If you look at him now, hes so elastic, its unreal. The amount of power he can produce and the height he can jump its fantastic. We did some testing with British Athletics on his peak force output and even with calf raises alone he can produce four times his own bodyweight in both legs. Its twice as much as the benchmark theyd set.
Hes super, super powerful now and that was always the aim because the springier you are the more elastic you are, the less energy you have to put into every step and therefore the less oxygen you use and the faster you can go.
Thats just an example of working backwards from the sport to find the most minute physical qualities that I can improve which will eventually feed up the chain and take seconds off the clock.
For more information you can visit ppconditioning.com or follow Andy Kay on Instagram: @andykay_performance
He also recommends the book Strength and Conditioning for Endurance Running by Richard Blagrove.