Critical Velocity Training for Runners

with Tom Schwartz, Ph. D.;
Founder of Tinman Endurance Coaching;
Coach of 2015 National Foot Locker Champion Drew Hunter

Coach of high school phenom Drew Hunter, Tom "Tinman" Schwartz is a USATF Level 1 coach with over 27 years of experience coaching runners and other endurance athletes on how to improve their performance. Coach Schwartz is a lifelong student as well as an educator. He earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in exercise science. He added additional practical experience over the years working as a physical education teacher at the high school level.

Training distance runners is becoming more complex as coaches try to find the correct training system and schedule for success. The main objective of the critical velocity training plan designed by Coach Tom Schwartz is to yield better results in a short period of time.

Critical velocity training is a tool used to elevate lactate threshold. Schwartz will explain how this program will improve workout and/or race performance, yield better results, and make you a better coach. By breaking down his strategy step-by-step, Schwartz also identifies and troubleshoots common issues in training that can negatively impact performance. In this video, you will learn how to determine an athlete's critical pace and learn common training progressions.

Developing Appropriate Training Paces

The first step to implement the system in training is to identify the critical velocity paces of each athlete. In this segment, Coach Schwartz shows his formulas for calculating training paces by event group with different formulas for sprinters, middle distance and long distance runners.

Common Training Progressions

Once paces have been established, it's important to create a sound progression system to safely overload the athletes and enable them to improve. Schwartz breaks down three types of progressions that he uses over the course of a season to help his athletes continue to develop. These methods include: decreasing rest intervals, increasing length or rep duration, and increasing speed.

You'll find sample workouts that you can easily convert for your runners of equal fitness levels. There are multiple charts illustrating in-depth concepts on scientific rationale and conditioning protocols with a common questions list from other coaches that you will find extremely useful.

Troubleshooting Excessive Fatigue

Coach Schwartz also provides insights on steps coaches can take when athletes demonstrate excessive fatigue during these workouts. Explaining a variety of strategies, he provides you with a variety of tools to adjust any workout, or terminate a session early to ensure work quality remains high.

By detailing all of the advantages to critical velocity training and ways to implement the program across various ages and ability levels, Coach Schwartz gives you a step-by-step break down of how to develop training programs in this video. By using critical velocity training, your athletes will be able to cruise at higher speeds in workouts and races, recover faster between races, and increase their ability to out-kick their opponents earlier in races.

34 minutes. 2017.