It was January in Illinois. The temperature outside was -22 with wind chills of -50 (or colder). Everything was closed, everyone was stuck inside, and we were two days away from an indoor track meet. All over the state, the Midwest really, coaches were freaking out about how to keep their athletes sharp, or progress their training, or prep them for an upcoming meet, but at our school this was only minorly more inconvenient than our everyday situation.
 
We train to sprint and jump during the brutal Midwest winters without an indoor track and without many of the amenities of most collegiate weight rooms. We have a hallway that is 35m long, a basketball court (94 ft x 54ft) that we can use (when it is not being used for basketball), a racquetball court, a weight room with your most basic collegiate weight room expectations, and 15m of turf with a sled, in addition to your sundry track and field items (wickets, hurdles, tape measure, short shorts…). Despite that, in our first handful of meets we rewrote most the school’s sprint and jump record boards with a shot at making a significant improvement in our conference standings from previous years.
 
Most coaches assume that in order to train the sprints and jumps without proper facilities you have to be really creative, but I would disagree and say you have to simply break down what you need to do into its most basic components. We do that by addressing what I would call the three main pieces of any complex movement: biomechanical demands, metabolic demands, and psychological demands. We take these three components and blend them over the course of the season to simulate the training we would get on a track.
 
Training the biomechanical demands gets sub-categorized into posture and single-contraction power. We typically progress our biomechanics through weight room progressions and ballistic drilling. Our weight room progressions go through the standard simple-to-complex form ending in single-leg high-speed movements while maintaining ideal sprint postures. Ballistic drills start with simple marches and end in single-leg high-speed plyometrics. This simple form of progression allows the athletes to break the high speed and complex movements of sprinting and jumping down into slower single impulse movements and gradually focus on maintaining ideal posture under greater forces.
 
In the early season, we separately train their metabolic demands. The benefit of not having space to sprint indoors means they almost never have an opportunity to develop poor sprint habits by losing posture under fatigue. That’s one of the most tangible benefits of coaching inside the constraints we are dealt; we only dose sprinting under fatigue in small amounts and when we know it will be done successfully. Because the metabolic (or bioenergetic, if you’re fancy) demands vary greatly from event to event, there are several tools we use to layer that training over the posture/power training. After their general physical preparation (GPP) phase, we move into a three-zone lifting program.
 
 

Zone 1		Zone 2		Zone 3
Low Volume		High Volume		Hypertrophy range
High Intensity		Low Intensity		Simple movement
Vertical		Horizontal		"Lift by feel"
High Rest		Circuit-based		Rest/Mobility

 
 
Our zone one is done on the heels of our technical sprint training days, which are typically wicket sprints over 70ft, skips for height, and/or other max velocity drills done in circuit form to allow rest for reinforced proper posture. In the zone one lift they focus on vertical displacement of the weights (vertical push/pull, step ups, single leg squats, single leg vertical plyometrics, etc.) with high intensity. In their technical session, we’ve primed their nervous systems and introduced some fatigue, to follow it up with loading them for lower reps and heavier loads. We will often include eccentric work on zone one days to help develop mindfulness of movement, in addition to all the other benefits of eccentric loading on the mechanical system. Either session alone would be beneficial, but the complement of high-speed technicality to low speed intensity seems to create a synergistic effect.
 
Our zone two typically follows the zone one day. The technical work is horizontal (acceleration) based and very low volume. We will often focus simply on a few block starts (which is quite a production with spiked blocks on a wood basketball court) and a seven-step sprint, where the athletes have to come out of the blocks and cover the most ground they can in seven steps. Immediately following their technical horizontal work, we move into the weight room for a high-volume horizontal lift. Because the nature of acceleration is explosive and intense, we complement it with a higher volume session (the inverse of our maximum velocity/zone one day). Zone two is simple movements (push-ups, rows, weighted hip bridges, etc.) done at higher volumes with minimal rest. It’s not a perfect substitute for 150m-200m sprints, but when stacked on zone one and the explosive technical session, it does work the system we want when we are looking at sprinters and high-volume jumpers.
 
Zone three follows a day off of training and precedes our technical session for the day. This is our “bodybuilding” day. Hypertrophy training is typically contraindicated in sprinters/jumpers, but we have had a lot of success with this session coming two days before a competition. Boo Schexnayder (the world class jumps coach) likes training like this for these types of athletes to get some mechanical training in without taxing the nervous system. Because it is done before their most technical session of the week, it acts as a great slow lead into their activation exercises and allows us to slow down skills training without hurting anyone’s ego.
 
The final piece of the puzzle is the psychological demands. It is nearly impossible to recreate the suffering that an athlete experiences during a 400m race, or over the course of multiple races in a single day, even if you have a track. In order to promote stress inoculation, we perform lactic trapping exercises twice a week. Initially, we just end a workout with timed intervals of split squats, lunges, or single leg bridges and without rest they perform a wall sit. As that becomes more manageable, we add on being relaxed under duress by performing a lactic trapping set followed immediately by high speed bounding in small doses. Letting the athletes feel that they can still fire their muscles with some power after they “feel the burn” reminds them that they can still sprint while in the throes of rigor mortis down the last stretch.
 
While not perfect, this system of training allows us to simulate the demands of high- speed technical movement covering 7-70 seconds without the use of traditional space. The benefits we get from using this modified method of training are that we always compete with a chip on our shoulders and we tend to avoid overuse injuries because our sprint volume over the course of a week is closer to what some programs are doing in two days. The general breakdown of our week is below:
 
 

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Max Velo	Acceleration	Recovery	Zone 3	Pre-comp prep	Competition	Off
Zone 1	Zone 2	Mobility	Event Specific technical work