The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [148]
“Favorite sprint or speed coach?”
Answer: Charlie Francis.
Ah, Charlie. Charlie Francis is also my favorite speed coach. Unfortunately, he’s most famous for training 100-meter gold medalist Ben Johnson, who tested positive for steroid use (stanozolol) in the 1988 Olympics. Few realize the sophistication of Charlie’s training techniques.5 He was a legitimate genius.
Francis was first and foremost a biomechanics and training expert, not a chemist. One of his innovations involved using extremely short distances and training at 95% or more of max effort—never between 75% and 95%. Less than 95% was too slow to be speed work, and the higher volume accompanying slower speeds was too hard to recover from within 24 hours.
Joe DeFranco adapted these concepts, among others, and prospered. Case in point:
Rather than running 400 meters or more to build a base for sprinting and then working down, as is common, DeFranco had one of his Division III football players, the aforementioned Miles Austin, spend more than 80% of this sprint training on 10-yard dashes. Miles focused on perfecting the starting stance, the exact number of steps for optimal speed, and the precise posture for sustained acceleration. Despite the fact that Miles ran just three 40-yard dashes among more than 100 10-yard dashes, he ran 4.67 seconds in the 40-yard dash at the Combine and was later clocked at an official 4.47 seconds.
If Joe was a Combine specialist, he appeared to be a 40-yard dash savant:
“For improvement, the vert is 9 out of 10 people. The 40 is 1,000 out of 1,000.”
Them’s strong words.
I had visions of breaking Ben Johnson’s record on little more than a Greek omelet and several gallons of shitty coffee. It was going to be a good day.
The Warm-Up
First things came first: warm-ups. I used basic soccer cleats without spikes, and Joe underscored the importance of mimicking the habits of good sprinting in the warm-ups themselves:6 using arm action, etc.
GENERAL MOVEMENT PREP
20 yds. of skipping × 2
Reverse lunge × 6 reps one side, then 6 reps on the other side
Backward cycling7 (for quadriceps and hip flexors) 20 yds. × 2
Side shuffle in half-squat8 20 yds. × 2
Notice that I bend the supporting knee first, bringing the knee over the toes before I extend the opposite leg backward.
GROUND-BASED DYNAMIC STRETCHING AND MUSCLE ACTIVATION9
10 × roll-overs into V-sits
10 × fire hydrants (to each side)
10 × mountain climbers10
FREQUENCY DRILLING TO PREP THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
Perform as many repetitions as possible of each exercise in the time allotted:
Pogo jumps × 20 secs.
Half-squat deep “wide-outs” × 2 sets of 5 secs. (10-sec. rest between)11
Joe kept the warm-up short and gave me time to recover. One of the oldest tricks in the training world, he explained, is to fatigue an athlete prior to their “before” testing with an extensive warm-up, then retest them later with a minimal warm-up. Voilà, instant measurable improvement.
Trixy coaches.
The Set-Up
My times wouldn’t depend on DeFranco’s eyesight or judgment. We’d be using the Brower system, the same technology used at the “big show” of the Combine.
My finish time would be clocked automatically when I passed between two paired laser detectors at the 40-yard line, both of which were synced to his hand-held counter.
As a baseline, I ran two 10-yard dashes with no coaching:
Dash #1: 2.12 secs.
Dash #2: 2.07 secs.
Then I impressed Joe with a blistering starting 40-yard dash of …
5.94 seconds.
“The good news is that you broke six seconds,” Joe announced as he pointed to the screen on the hand-held. “To paint that in a positive light, it’s not bad if you’re a below-average 320-pound lineman.”
Pacing back and forth with a bounce in his step, he looked up at me with an ear-to-ear smile:
“Where to start.… You are going to make me look good today! Big day for Joe!”
It was time to let Joe work his magic. The “where to start” was easy: