Charlie Francis

I recently attended one of the Charlie Francis seminars in Australia. Prior to the seminar I thought I had a reasonable understanding of his training philosophy and principles after all I have read Speed Trap and Training for Speed, own 2 of his DVD
 
Weights and plyos
Weights always follow track running never the other way round. That way you can adjust the weight volume (or even drop it) to manage the CNS.

Sprinting moves weights up not vice versa.

The higher the level of the athlete the less need to change the weights program. Don
 
I don't really know where to start with this.

I guess before I get on to the details of the seminar the thing that sticks out in my mind was that of Charlie the person. It
 
7) Stretching
If you are tight DON
 
27) Athlete Development
The best 100m runner will not be a good 100m runner when they are young. For a child there is minimal time to top speed and the vast majority of the race is speed endurance. A good 100m runner as a child likely has shitty top speed but good speed endurance and will be a good 800m runner (or something like that I forget what he said) when they are older. 30 metres for a child is like 100m for an adult.

Early in a career both volume and intensity will increase. Within years it will be impossible for volume to continue to increase for intensity to improve and must plateau. In the later stages of a career volume will have to decrease to ensure that improvements in intensity can be made or even maintained.

The percentage of high intensity work must decrease with time also (rather than just volume as a whole) as young athletes are incapable of overloading their NS because they can not reach the output levels. A much greater % of work as a youngster can be high intensity in nature without burning out.

2Cool Athlete development again
Take whole seconds where you can get them ie. a young guy is better off worrying about speed endurance early on. No point perfecting his first 40metres, he may gain 2 tenths of a second there if he can cut his 200 time by a second just by getting better at running 200m. Later though, you will need to train and extend the alactic threshold which is covered in the next point.

I have a question about this later too
 
You know, I really should read the books I have. I have CFTS somewhere... haven't looked at it in years.
 
I've only read part of the second post, but so far that guy sounds likes a pussy who squeals about fear of overtraining and inadequate preparation as keys to success. No offense.
 
Wow, he sounds like a pretty controversial guy.


Half squats are OK.

Train your strengths, not your weaknesses.
 
ghostwipe said:
I've only read part of the second post, but so far that guy sounds likes a pussy who squeals about fear of overtraining and inadequate preparation as keys to success. No offense.
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You phail hard core.
 
ghostwipe said:
Like I said, I'm not done reading it yet.


Nonetheless, I'd be happy for you to point out my misobservations.
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Francis is widely regarded as one of the best speed coaches in the world and is probably the only Western coach who's ideas get equal respect when compared the Eastern European giants of athletic preparation. He also is tied into lots of sweet drug scandals.
 
Donut62 said:
Francis is widely regarded as one of the best speed coaches in the world and is probably the only Western coach who's ideas get respect from the Eastern European giants of athletic preparation.
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Well I guess that's a start, but right off the bat he's already saying some things that would be considered sacriledge here and other places, and that's what I'm asking to to disprove.
 
ghostwipe said:
Well I guess that's a start, but right off the bat he's already saying some things that would be considered sacriledge here and other places, and that's what I'm asking to to disprove.
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I find your notion that a guy who has trained more champion sprinters than anyone else walking the planet has to defend himself to an internet forum that doesn't even concern itself with track and field preparation fucking hilarious.

And by half-squat he is referring to a parallel power lifting legal squat, as opposed to the full squat being olympic style hamstrings to calves. As for CNS managment, Charlie is saying what anyone with a half a brain knows. Frying the CNS during a training cycle causes lost training time due to the recovery required. It's better to stay sub-maximal during blocks of training not concerned with realization of maximum potential.
 
Donut62 said:
And by half-squat he is referring to a parallel power lifting legal squat, as opposed to the full squat being olympic style hamstrings to calves. As for CNS managment, Charlie is saying what anyone with a half a brain knows. Frying the CNS during a training cycle causes lost training time due to the recovery required. It's better to stay sub-maximal during blocks of training not concerned with realization of maximum potential.
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Congratulations on knowing that's what he meant by the term "half squat," but it won't be readily apparent to a lot of people reading those nuggets of training wisdom that that was his intended meaning.

As for frying CNS, well it's obvious that would be counterproductive, but again, I would argue that a good majority of trainees don't know what their threshold is, and therefore would not recognize where a good point to back off from training would be without indicators of overtraining such as getting sick, disruption of normal sleeping patterns, recurring injuries and stalled gains.
 
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