Training Design Do’s and Don’ts: Gary Winckler

Train to the athlete’s strengths

Gary Winckler has 38 years of coaching experience behind him. He has taken track athletes to every Olympic Games since the 1984 Olympics.

More impressively, each of those athletes has had a Personal Best or Season Best at the Games. He knows how to prepare for the big event.

I first met Gary 2 years ago when he presented on speed training concepts.

This presentation at GAIN in June 2014 covered the training design concepts that work for him and also how he has evolved his coaching.

Training Do’s

The most important factor is the performance requirement of the athlete. This is different from the performance goal. Once you know that, then it is essential that you look at ways of positively influencing that requirement.

Talk with the athlete about goals/ factor of the process, rather than how fast do you need to run. This means as a coach that you need to clearly understand the performance requirements.

Write them down! Then look at when your top performance needs to be achieved.

Evaluate the strengths/weaknesses of the athlete in light of these performance requirements. Can positive changes in the key performance factors be realistically achieved in the short or long term?

What will be required? Train to the athlete’s strengths as this will provide better and more consistent results.

So far, so good.

Devil is in the detail

James practising hip heists with Gary in the background

Do you understand the skills needed to bring about changes in performance? Can you design exercises that positively impact these skills? What exercises exist that I can use?

What exercises can I develop to most efficiently translate skills into performance?

This is what distinguishes Gary: he works from the top down. (Compare that to the current UK paradigm of learning 2 exercises and then reverse engineering how they improve performance.)

Once you have got this set of exercises look to perform them better today than you did yesterday.

Eliminate conflicting training stimuli: it may result in confused adaptations. For example if you have a speed development theme, then every exercise should lead into that or help develop that.

Understand the long/ short term adaptation to prescribed exercises with respect to Overload, Reversibility and Recovery. Does my exercise presrcription adhere to these principles?

“You can destroy a session by pushing that 1 rep too many“

Evaluate

• 

  James helping a young hockey player

  Constant tweaking of the session and exercises is necessary. “Does the athlete make the bridge between exercise and performance”? If they fail to improve performance, then why are those exercises in place?

• Evaluation is a constant: keep good records and take notes.
• Design training cycles that appropriately balance general and specific exercises. Too much specificity can halt adaptation. Too much general work can detract from performance.

Training Don’ts

Invest too much time in creating annual periodisation plans as they never end up working in reality. Instead look at the overall theme and then plan the microcyle in detail.

Design the training programme without understanding the current goals.

Get caught up in linear models for training volumes and intensities. A consistent application of volume is necessary for building and stabilising performance. An excessive amount of time dedicated to building volume leads to a decrease in performance.

(I find that with UK athletes, volume appears to be the prime directive. They are often given advice like “you must run 4 times a week” or “swim 8 hours a week” with little thought given to what happens within those sessions.)

Manipulating Intensity, Density and Volume

Gary gave some insights into how he does plan his training. He said that volume in speed/ power programmes has little variation.

Instead “the volume is dictated by the quality of execution demanded by a performance objective”.

Intensity is the degree of difficulty of the session and is expressed as a % of 100. Quality, however, is a % of perfect. Are you aiming for intensity of quality?

Density is the training frequency of a particular stimulus. This directly affects the training load. In order to enhance technical development, a number of smaller doses that are prescribed more frequently is better.

Complexity is the co -ordinative demand (related to intensity) of an exercise or sequence of exercises.

By manipulating these variables correctly, Gary stated that planned restoration is built into the training plan, rather than having to be put in as an extra. He and Vern Gambetta both expressed an opinion that Overtraining did not occur in Speed/ Power athletes (I have to disagree on this having had personal experience of the effects of huge volumes of intense training under stress).

Gary finished by talking about individualisation of training. This can take many forms by varying: sets, distances run, reps, weights, altering heights of boxes or exercise choices.

Low intensity training is safe for groups. High intensity training must be individual.

Summary

It was a privilege to listen to Gary and get the chance to ask him questions. This quietly spoken coach has bags of experience, knowledge and wisdom. He was happy to share this over the course of the conference in his sessions and in the down periods. Really invaluable insights.

I have taken his advice from 2 years ago and applied it in the speed training I do with our athletes. I have used this training design advice already in preparing athletes for upcoming Championships. I just hope that they benefit as much as Gary’s athletes have.

Further Reading;

Planning your training programme in season