100 Meter Interview

Building the Perfect 100 Meter Sprinter Interview Latif Thomas, Coach Mangiacotti

www.CompleteTrackandField.com/100-meter-training

Hey, everybody. It’s Latif Thomas from CompleteTrackandField.com and today I’m interviewing Mark Mangiacotti. As you read this, keep in mind it is the transcript from an audio interview, so the grammar won’t be perfect. Take some time to read the entire interview. There are some great takeaways here. And, as you read, think about how Coach Mangiacotti’s Master Class ‘Building the Perfect 100 Meter Sprinter…From Start to Finish will help your athletes and your program. That said, Mark Mangiacotti is currently in his first year as Sprints and Hurdles Coach for Brown University after spending six seasons at Division III Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

While at Wheaton, Mangiacotti athletes tallied 8 NCAA National Championships, 53 All American accolades and 31 school record performances. In fact, his Men’s 4 by 100 meter and 4 by 400 meter relays were the 2010 Division III National Champions.

He is USA Track and Field’s Level two certified in sprints, hurdles, relays, jumps and combined events. And in 2008, Coach Mangiacotti was voted the US Track and Field and Cross Country Coaching Association’s Division III National and Regional Women’s Assistant Coach of the Year.

Pretty impressive stuff there Coach Mangiacotti. Glad to have you on today and I think what we’re gonna do is just jump right into some questions if you don’t mind.

Sounds good.

All right, man. Let’s do it. First question, foundational stuff. Do you think that it’s important for coaches to spend time studying what other coaches do and testing that stuff out?

Or is it important for them to focus on what they’re already doing and work through it on their own.

Well that’s a great question. I think that when I first started coaching I was lucky enough to take on training plans from Tom Tellez, Dan Pfaff, Loren Seagrave, Vince Anderson, Clyde Hart and some other great coaches.

And I had an opportunity to look at what they were doing and broke it up into different segments of how they were training their athletes during different parts of the year. And I really looked at what they had in common.

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I wasn’t looking at the things that were different with their training. I was looking at the things that they all had in common. And so I realized that if they’re all doing the same things then those things must be correct. And so ultimately, I think it is important to look at other people’s work because I think that great coaches steal from other great coaches.

And so, ultimately, yes I do think that you need to look at what other people are doing because there’s always a different way to skin the cat. But I also think it’s important to know what you teach and to teach what you know.

And so, go to your practice on a daily basis, you want to make sure you’re giving workouts that you feel comfortable with that work for your kids, but at the same time understanding that learning is power and that the more that you learn the better your kids are gonna get.

Like I said, I do feel it’s very important to look at what other people are doing because you could always learn something new and add to your program.

How do you split that difference? You come in especially we’re talking about primarily 100 meter training today and the majority of the information out there in truth is really the elite level coaches talking about what they’re doing for the most part with their elite level athletes.

How do you split that difference between taking what they’re doing, looking at the commonalities between the different coaches and then reverse engineering back to the athletes that you’re working with, you’re at the collegiate level, little bit different.

I work at the high school level. I think totally different. Is there just trial and error? Do you just take notes? How do you do that without totally going off the reservation and just regurgitating someone else’s stuff?

Yeah, I think a lot of it is trial and error and what I always do is I always err on the side of caution. So if I take a workout from another coach that I want to try to use within my system, I try to just tone it down a little bit so that the athletes don’t get hurt.

I would try to get them through the workout and try to have some success with it than have them try to do it get hurt and not only do they hurt themselves, they hurt the team if they’re injured. So,



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a lot of times, what I do when I steal things from other coaches, I normally like I said just ease them into the system.

Let’s get a bit more specific in how you do things. When you’re training your 100 meter runners, what are the primary factors coaches have to consider when they sit down to design a training program? And then talking about these factors, why do you choose these over others?

Well I think that the biggest factor is that I make sure that I’m training speed from day one. Because speed is something that is a learned technique and is something that can be learned over time. It’s not something that can be taught in a one, two or even three week period.

And I know that there are a lot of times that coaches will try to add in speed towards the end of the season and kind of sprinkle it in at the very end of the year. But it’s something that needs to be taught from day one.

And so what I try to do is teach speed and acceleration from the very first day of practice and then build speed in with conjunction with strength.

So that I’m making sure that the athletes are training not only on the neurological side of things but also working on their cardiovascular system and building the amount of waste product their body can handle and so forth.

Okay so you talk about training acceleration from day one. Now are you talking – what does that mean exactly? Can you give me an example of a day one acceleration workout?

Well, first day of practice honestly every year we do it in accelerational warm up which is a warm up that will teach the athletes to prepare them for the demands of the day which is gonna be acceleration day.

And we do a lot of things – a lot of coaches will talk about blocks, 10s, 20s, and 30s. We do a lot of what I would consider block 10s and block 15s. Things that are short. But they’re gonna be able to do a lot of them because they’re not running as far with each one of the efforts.

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And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna make sure that we’re teaching what I call the prerequisite to blocks which are things like push up start, roll over start, touch and go start. Things that are gonna correlate to what they’re gonna do out of the blocks later on in the year.

And so it’s gonna teach the athletes to accelerate properly when we do put them in a set of blocks.

Okay so you talk about doing block 10s and block 20s, that’s a workout. What do you do running wise after that to give them some good work?

A lot of times when we have an acceleration day towards the beginning of the year. We are trying to build capacity. We’ll do a lot of short fast things and work on technique. But then after that we will throw in either things that will help them reinforce their technique like doing build ups.

It might be 100 meter build ups in the grass. It could be body weight circuits. It could be scramble circuits. There are a lot of different things you can do besides running to build work capacity. And so not only do we rely on the things we do at the track.

We rely on the things we do off the track such as body weight circuits, core circuits and weight room training.

Wow, good stuff. I want to get into that later. So I want to kind of stick to block stuff a little bit here. You know I’ve heard you talk many times. In your Master Class you talk about block clearance or the zero step being 5 percent of the overall 100 meter race, you call it the most important part of the race.

That if you don’t have that down, everything you do after that is going to deteriorate. So how exactly is that possible? Why is that such an important element of the 100 meters… of the 100 meters start?

Well you know the block clearance really sets the athlete up either for failure or success at the end of the race. And what I mean by that is it’s really a domino effect. If you do the block clearance correctly, you have a chance at succeeding further down the track.

If you do the block clearance incorrectly, you are doomed to fail by



the time you hit the finish line. So what we teach the athletes is all day long they walk around with their chest high and when they sit at the computer they’re looking up.

When they walk to class, they’re looking up. Pretty much all day they’re in an erect position. And this is the first time really in their lives that we’re asking them to be comfortable with their body being in a 45 degree angle.

And so kids are constantly trying to rush out of this block clearance as fast as humanly possible. And that’s not what we want them to do. So it’s important for them to understand early on in the year, that this has to be something they can’t rush.

They want to push violently and they want to push hard as long as possible down the track and they don’t want to just get up and run like we see a lot of young athletes do. And so like I said, it’s like a domino effect or a long division problem.

In a long division problem once you make one mistake the rest of the answer is incorrect. And it’s the same thing in track, once you make a mistake out of the blocks, everything else will be incorrect after that.

You won’t accelerate properly. You won’t transition properly. You’re not going to hit your max velocity at the right point in time and a lot of your race will be in the deceleration phase. And that’s obviously not what we want.

No. I like that long division analogy. As a sprints coach, I understand just how difficult this is for athletes to get down. It sounds straight forward to explain, but to actually do it is a different story.

What is your opinion? Is this lack of coordination? Is it lack of strength? Is it impatience? What are the reasons why athletes have such a difficult time clearing the blocks?

And, generally speaking, what do coaches need to get athletes to focus on to get them physically capable of executing that range of motion or that pattern of movement?

One of the things I always talk about is how when we get athletes if we’re a high school coach we get the athletes when they’re 14 years old and for 14 years they’ve played soccer, baseball, basketball, and they’ve been trained to be quick.

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And this is the first time in their lives that we’re asking them to go through a full range of motion and push hard and use big arms and so it’s completely new to them. And so what we try to do is try to tackle this as early on in the year as possible and continue to reinforce these things as the year goes on.

And I think that as far as things that we can do, we can do a lot of acceleration drills where the body is at a 45 degree angle and do things where they’re coming out of a crouch position. Because this is what they’re going to be doing in the race.

Have them feel comfortable with this because it’s something that they haven’t been taught earlier on in life. So we’re really teaching it for the first time. And we’re taking all the things that we don’t want them to do that they learned in these other sports and try to get rid of them.

And then try to introduce new things. So I think it’s important for the athletes to have these things reinforced not only during the year but throughout the year.

When you work on these things and reinforce these things with your athletes, how do you progress it? Do you – well this number of weeks we’re doing general prep training and we’re gonna cover X, but at week nine, we’re going to special prep.

And maybe your acceleration isn’t where I want it to be, but the training phase you’re in dictates that we gotta go to max velocity. Is it a skill based progression that you use? Or is it a time based progression, but individualized where possible?

What is your opinion on where and when you start moving out of just the acceleration work into some of that top speed stuff ‘cause kids gotta run a meet?

Yeah, I think regardless of where the athlete is at when you start moving to the meets. You’re gonna have to start preparing their body for the other parts of the race as well. So you do have to move into max velocity. But the great part about max velocity is that in order to get to max velocity you have to go through acceleration.

So as long as you’re not just teaching max velocity by itself you can do max velocity workouts and other types of workouts where the athlete has to go through acceleration first. So you’re constantly reinforcing the acceleration even though you might be doing a max velocity or speed endurance day.



That makes sense. So we’re talking about acceleration, we’re talking about blocks and I heard you talk about sprints early in the season doing block 10s, block 20s, but then prerequisites to block work.

So considering the importance of the start and acceleration and drive phase, if you believe in the ‘drive phase’, how early in the season do you have your athletes coming out of the blocks?

That’s a funny question and my athletes would laugh if you asked them, because block work is actually earned in our event group. That if you can perform all of the prerequisites to block work and show and prove that you can push down the track, we allow you to start coming out of blocks.

And so we kind of make it a little bit of a competition because you have freshmen on the team and they see that the juniors and seniors after two or three weeks are already coming out of blocks and they want to be able to come out of blocks as well.

But they have an understanding if they don’t perfect these prerequisites to the blocks they’re never gonna get into the blocks. So literally I will not let an athlete into a set of blocks unless they can perform the prerequisites correctly every single time they do it.

I’m stealing that actually now that I think about it. I really like that a lot. And so do you think that inspires athletes to be more focused in practice or workouts particularly as they see their teammates even especially teammates that are running similar times start to be able to get into blocks?

Or do they get frustrated when they can’t do it? How do you deal with those types of things?

Well I absolutely think it helps motivate them to want to get into a set of blocks because I realize in my coaching career working with the young student athletes is the worst thing that you can possibly do to a young student athlete is embarrass them.

And I think it’s almost embarrassing when everybody else on the team is coming out of blocks and there are only two or three people that are not coming out of blocks and I think they feel a little bit embarrassed by that.

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And I think those are the times when kids come up and they want to ask for individual help. They want to do extra so that they can get into those set of blocks. And it’s usually a time when you can build a really good connection with some of your student athletes.

Because they’re gonna reach out to you and ask for extra help. And how many times does that really happen in our sport?

That is pure genius. I hope people reading this right now stop and think about that and then start putting that idea in their programs. I heard somewhere along the way, Gary Winckler say ‘90 percent of speed is technique’.

And we know that speed of efficient acceleration is critical to success in the 100 meters. So how important is it, in your opinion, to teaching the technique of accelerating properly, because you’ve been kind of talking about this already, versus simply getting the kids going fast over short distances.

For example, some coaches have kids running 30s, 40s, and fly 20s, whatever it is. But they’re not really teaching the technique, they’re just having kids running fast. Where do you – how much time do you spend emphasizing posture and mechanics and things like that versus just running fast?

I feel like I spend a lot of time teaching the athletes the mechanics of the different parts of the race, whether they’re in the acceleration mechanics, max velocity mechanics or even deceleration mechanics.

And I think it’s something important to understand ‘cause they’ll know when they do it right and wrong. And ultimately I know when I’m doing a good job with my athletes when I ask them how they felt and they can breakdown how they felt out of the blocks and during acceleration and max velocity.

And when they can answer those questions, they can really just coach themselves and I realize I’ve done my job. And I spend a lot of time teaching these mechanics and I feel like in doing a lot of short fast stuff I’m just kind of like pardon my French, but just like hauling ass in practice.

You know there are some positives to that and there are also negatives to it because when you’re just doing short fast stuff, you don’t see all of the negatives that poor acceleration mechanics lead to until much later in the race.



So they can feel like they’re going fast and there are some positives to that, but it’s gonna come back to haunt them later in the race when they start getting to the full 100 meters not just the block 30 or a fly 30.

And so yeah, we spend a lot of time before doing our acceleration work and before doing our max velocity work, working on mechanics and drills and things like that. And then after acceleration and max velocity we work on some things that would relate to max velocity acceleration through strength training.

Now it seems to me that to do that it extends the length of a training session. Do you have to take off some volume somewhere? Because it seems like if you spend time doing all this technique and drills and doing that compatible kind of technical work before you do the max velocity workout say.

Does that again diminish the amount of volume you can get into a practice because I would assume there’s some fatigue factor physically and even mentally trying to work on those things and then trying to put it on the track so to speak?

I don’t think that I have to – a vast majority of my practices are two hours long or less. And if I can get two hours worth of work from a kid and they have to be able to work hard for two hours doing a warm up that’s gonna prepare them for the day’s events.

And then doing their drills and then doing their actual work out and a form of strength training or core training that they need to do at the end, it should take two hours or less. And so I think it’s important for coaches to understand that you don’t have to have three and four hour sessions in order to be successful as a sprinter or a sprints coach.

And so knowing that most high school practices and college practices are two hours and less you can get all of that done in two hours – in that amount of time.

Now I would assume that really is – getting a two hour practice is, in large part, a function of being organized and having everything thought out before practice because I know I that I have – as time has gone on my practices should have gotten shorter.

But early on I would be having really long practices and things would be all over the place. How much time do you spend setting up a practice?

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A lot of time. I think that when I sit down I want to make sure I write down what we’re gonna be doing but also visualize it to make sure that we’re gonna be able to meet the days demands in the amount of time that we have.

So when I first started coaching it would take me hours to prepare a week’s worth of workouts. And now going through my 15th year of coaching, I can sit down and write a week’s worth of workouts in probably less than 45 minutes and it’s just from trial and error and working on things.

I always felt like when I was a teacher that the first year you teach it took you so much time and effort to prepare every single lesson for each day of the week. But each year that you teach it just gets easier and easier.

And it’s the same with coaching. The first year you do it, you really have to put a lot of effort into it but it sets you up to be successful that year and for years to come.

Yes. That makes sense. Getting back to the speed work. Can you give us an example of one of your favorite acceleration drills or workouts that you use to develop the technique in efficiency that we talked about a little earlier?

Well really my favorite drill that I use for acceleration is a straight leg bound into a buildup. And I generally use the straight leg bound because the athlete is gonna spend longer on the ground and less in the air, just like they would feel when they’re in acceleration.

And as they transition into higher speeds and start running, they’re gonna start feeling like they spend less time on the ground and more time in the air so it’s more like max velocity. So they can understand the feeling of both parts of the race.

And so that’s something I use quite a bit. And after they master that I put them in a set of blocks where I ask them to get a little bit bound-y or kind of extend themselves during the first ten meters of the block start.

And then start to build on that and move into what we call max velocity mechanics. And by them understanding the straight leg bound first, the feeling of it is gonna make it easier to transition and carry over into the actual race out of block.



And then after they can push for ten meters and then transition for ten meters and use max velocity mechanics for ten meters, as time goes on we can adjust those distances to whatever amount or distance we want them to push transition and use max velocity mechanics later on.

And so for instance, at some point in the year, I’ll switch the first component of 50 meters from the blocks. So they’ll push for 15, and then they’ll transition for 15 meters, which is the first 30 meters which we call the acceleration phase.

And then I can move the final cone 10 meters from the second cone or 15 or 20 meters, whatever distance I want so they’ll feel the max velocity part of it as well. So they can really transition from doing a fairly simple drill which is a straight leg bound into a build up into something that’s highly advanced.

I like that. When you have athletes at different levels, say a freshman who didn’t come from a really technical high school program and a senior who has already worked with you for four years doing this kind of work, do you individualize it?

Somebody is doing say the bounds into the acceleration versus the athlete that might have to be shoved into acceleration and the transition max velocity. Do you individualize it there or do you try to keep people moving in similar paths?

At the beginning of the year, everybody starts with these simple movements because the more kids are away from our sport and playing other sports or just playing video games or whatever they’re doing, their body starts to almost forget what it had learned the previous year.

So we start off by having everybody do the simple things and move towards getting more advanced. But as I move them through to more technical drills, they need to earn that. And that is earned by performing the simple ones correctly and then they get more advanced and even more advanced after that.

I like that. Talking about acceleration and transitioning maximum velocity and obviously max velocity is a critical component of the 100 meter race as well, what should coaches be focusing on when it’s time to transition to max velocity? In terms of queuing and anything on the topic. And how is it different than teaching acceleration?

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One of the things I talked about before was that in acceleration we spend more time on the ground and less time in the air and then max velocity is the exact opposite. So one of the things that we talk about is the arms and I talk a lot about with max velocity about their arms because whatever your arms do your legs are gonna do.

So during acceleration we talk about doing arms the full range of motion so that your legs go through a full range of motion. And when we get to max velocity we talk about arms moving from – well I should say your hands moving from cheek to cheek.

So that we get our body in the correct position and our lower body in the correct position to push on the track. So a lot of the times what we’re doing is really focusing on what our arms are doing but reminding what we want our legs to be doing at the same time.

And how range of motion can be dictated by what you’re doing with your arms because as Sir Isaac Newton said there is an equal and opposite reaction. If your arms are moving through a specific range of motion your legs are going to go through that same range of motion.

Absolutely. Now when it comes to progressing the speeds, you talk about acceleration, technique and mechanics. But there is of course a tempo or aerobic or conditioning side, you’ve created what you call the Triangle Training Method, which I think is fascinating and something I intend to steal parts of.

Talk about the Triangle Training Method, how you came across the idea or this concept and why it works so well for you and your sprinters.

The Triangle Training Method is really just looking at building a sprinter using two different triangles. I think a lot of times when we think of training sprinters, we would use one triangle. And early on in the year just focus on volume and doing high volume at low intensity.

And as the year goes on we do less volume with more intensity. And so at the end, actually the last two or three weeks of a season, the sprinter would actually be focusing on running at 100 percent.

But as I said earlier on in the interview you cannot just sprinkle in speed the last two or three weeks of the season and think that you’re gonna be successful. And so when you look at training a

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short sprinter such as a 100 meter runner, you have to look at two different triangles.

You have to look at a speed triangle and a tempo triangle. And the way this is set up is that you can work hard two days in a row and I think that when I was in high school and even in college we would work hard one day and then have an easy day, work hard have an easy day, work hard have an easy day.

And it was always the recovery the next day. You can actually work hard two days in a row because if you do the speed day first, you’re really working the neurological system. And if you do the tempo day the next day, you can come back and work really hard.

And you’re really just working on conditioning and things that are at tempo and so you might work up towards speed endurance later in the season but early on you’re working on extensive and intensive tempo and just working on conditioning.

You come back that second day and you continue to work hard. If you work hard on day one neurologically and come back on day two and work hard with conditioning, on day two, the neurological system is still resting even though you’re working hard on day two on your conditioning.

And so I think it’s important to understand you don’t want to work hard just every other day, you can work hard two days in a row and then kind of take a general day or an easier day or an off day. And let’s face it, if I work hard two days in a row twice a week, that’s more than going every other day.

You’re essentially working the triangle training method; you can work hard four or five days versus only working two or three days a week hard. And if my athlete is working hard more times a week, per month, per year, than your athlete, then they’re going to be stronger and faster by the end of the year.

Yeah. That just makes sense. This kind of topic reminds me of what we were talking about earlier. We talked about borrowing from other coaches and stealing from other coaches and their commonalities.

And then understanding this triangle training method, really to me it comes down to understanding energy systems and understanding physiology. I am not a scientist. I don’t have a degree in any of the sciences, so it’s something that would be really more laborious for me to learn than other coaches with that kind of background.

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But how important is it for other coaches to spend the time going through the energy, the body, even as simple as understanding the three energy systems in terms of writing a workout. Because to me you can steal other coaches stuff until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t understand why it works then it’s just a bunch of nonsense to try to do it.

I agree with you 100 percent. And I think it’s important for coaches to understand the basic principles of physiology and training theory, but those words may sound big but it’s very easy to learn. It’s not very difficult at all and I think that that’s one of the reasons the triangle training method really makes life a lot easier because it breaks down each one of the sections and gives it a definition with specific examples of workouts that coaches can use during those different speed or tempo days.

And the information that they need to learn in order to be successful using something like the triangle training method is not very difficult at all. You don’t need any type of science background to learn this stuff.

Very good. I’m glad we’re kind of on the same page there because I was wondering that because I’m sure you understand people are always asking for your workouts. “Give me your workouts. Give me your workouts. Give me your program.”

And I hesitate to do that sometimes. Not because I have any issue with people seeing what I’m doing. But because I really feel like you’re gonna hurt some people if you’re just going to go and regurgitate what I’m doing.

Because what I’m doing for my athletes in the climate and geography and facility limitations where I live make it completely inappropriate for your kids.

Exactly. And I think that a lot of times high school and college coaches will ask elite level coaches for their workouts but the problem is when I get a freshman 100 meter runner he’s probably gonna be running 10.8 or 10.9 when I get him and I’m trying to get him to run 10.4 and 10.5.

Versus the athletes that they’re getting after they graduate from college, the elite coaches getting an athlete that probably ran 10.1 or 10.2. And so training these athletes can be very different at times. So understanding only the workouts but how they’ll affect your athletes is very important.

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I could not agree more with you there, Coach Mangiacotti. So gearing more towards the youth levels, because the majority of people reading this, that’s the level that they’re working at.

On a scale from one to ten, one being irrelevant, ten being can’t live without it. How important is strength training? I mean, strength training for the physical strength not the strength on the track, talk maybe a little bit more on the 100 meter work.

How important is strength training in terms of developing 100 meter runners and does that number change if we’re talking about male athletes versus female athletes?

I think if you ask me on a scale on one to ten, how important is strength training, the number would absolutely be ten. And I think it’s regardless if it’s a male or female. I still think it’s a ten. And there are different types of strength.

And I think it’s important for coaches to understand the different types and how they can use them within their training, whether they’re coaching men or women, middle school, high school, college or elite level athletes.

And you can utilize strength in a lot of different ways. Strength training improves power and will obviously improve time. General strength training is going to improve strength, power and coordination.

And the combination of these three factors directly correlates to running fast. And so if an athlete is just strong, that’s great even if they’re powerful, that’s awesome. If they’re coordinated, that’s really cool.

But if they can put all three of those things together then they’re gonna be really fast. And so understanding how to use those three things within a training day as far as strength training goes it’s important.

But also being able to couple those three things together so the athletes can understand the feeling of using strength power and coordination together to be successful on the track. Because when you perform a – let’s use an example, if you do a body weight squat, well that’s really good for strength.

And if you do a rocket jump, that’s gonna be really good for power. And if you use like a repetitive standing broad jump, that’s gonna be really good for coordination and it’s also gonna involve power and strength at the same time.

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And when we come out of the blocks and we extend out of the block and we’re pushing violently, then that’s the exact same thing. So what you do in the weight room can be correlated to what you’re doing on the track.

And it just reinforces the things you’re trying to teach on the track and it makes their body stronger so they can handle the demands of what they are actually trying to do on the track on a daily basis.

Now does that come down to compatibility in terms of what you’re doing or combining what you’re doing on a particular day? Let’s say Monday, because for me Monday is my standard acceleration – assuming no weird meet situation.

Generally speaking, Mondays are acceleration days. Is what you’re talking about in coordinating these movements, is it critical? Let’s even go back to our scale from one to ten. How important is it to be compatible when you train?

So the stuff you’re doing in your warm up, in the workout, with your strength training, whether that’s medicine ball throws multi jumps or in the weight room.

I think it’s really important because the workout starts with the warm-up. I almost cringe when kids think it is a warm up. Because it’s really not just a warm up it’s an extension of the workout.

The things that they learn in the warm up are also the things that they also need to know how to utilize when they’re racing and when there doing their workouts. And so for instance, on a Monday what usually is acceleration day for us, we’re gonna do an acceleration warm up.

And all of the things that they do in that warm up is specifically preparing them for things that they’re gonna do in acceleration workout. Then when they do their acceleration workout, their body is prepared. They’ve gone through the drills that are necessary for them to get a feeling of acceleration.

And then when they’re finished with the work out, if we go into the weight room or doing any kind of strength training on the track, they’re also gonna be neurological. Because as I said, if you can work your body hard neurologically on day one and then you can come back and work on conditioning the second day.

If we’re doing neurological style warm up, neurological workout



and neurological lifts on day one, on day two we can come back and do something like a general warm up, a tempo workout, and some sort of tempo strength exercise which could involve general strength circuits or a body weight circuit or a core circuit.

And while we’re doing all those things on day two, as I said earlier, all of the neurological things we did on day one, our body is recovering from those even though we’re working hard on day two.

It seems to me then from a common sense standpoint, I would be guessing at the high school level, for the majority of programs are not doing it this way, that you’re gonna see a lot less injury with that kind of training because you have athletes that their body and energy systems are recovering appropriately.

Have you seen those same things in your experience with doing it this way, or has it always been just a natural part of the way you coach that you really haven’t had – you really don’t know what it would be like to kind of combining energy systems and things like that.

I think that any coach can admit that when they first started coaching they made mistakes and I will be the first one to say that when I first started coaching, I screwed some kids up.

And what I found what happened is I would do some neurological stuff on Monday, some neurological on Tuesday, a little bit of neurological on Wednesdays, because I didn’t want to overdo it with the neurological system.

What I realized later in life is that when you do something neurological, it can take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for them to recover from that mode of neurological work. And so in turn, down the road, what I realized I was doing was three small things neurologically per day, I was really starting to fry their neurological system.

By the end of the year, they were just completely toast and they weren’t racing well. So what I found out through coaches education and clinics and talking to other coaches and my own experience is that if you just load them up one day on the neurological system you don’t come back for two or three days and do it again.

It will be plenty rested and the neurological system will be plenty rested and recovered so that they can go hard again and not chance frying that neurological system.

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That makes sense. So talking about the strength topic, what are from, in your opinion of the fundamentals of developing specific strength for 100 meter runners and by all the ground up, how does coach address these factors, particularly of high school coaches.

If we don’t have quality weight rooms, if we have large kind of unwieldy groups or we don’t feel confident teaching lifts and writing strength programs. I know if I had to take one area of relative weakness for me, it’d be the strength and power training.

If you had to kind of boil it down for developmental coaches, what are some of the most critical fundamentals of developing strength to get faster 100 meter times.

Well I think it’s important to start building general body weight strength and then as you feel comfortable and the athlete feels comfortable moving them into the weight room and when they get into the weight room, do their body building work on Olympic lifts, which are gonna be triple extension lifts, the same as lifts correlates to running, and then also elastic str.

And what I think scares a lot of coaches about strength training is they feel they have to do it all in the weight room. And that’s just not true. A lot of the strength training can be done on the track or on a grass field or just about anywhere.

And I think it’s important for coaches to understand that as I said earlier is if you just took a base body weight squat, a prisoner squat, that’s gonna work on strength. That’s great. But you can make it more advanced by doing a rocket jump or then it becomes a triple extension movement.

And then you can add a med ball to it to make even a little more difficult. And they’re probably not gonna hurt themselves doing a rocket jump with a med ball thrown straight up into the air, but it is gonna build power.

And then you could have them work on their elastic strength by doing rocket jump with a med ball, but hopping twice first. They’re gonna hop, hop, then when they land, they’re gonna do their rocket jump and throw the ball straight up in the air and that’s gonna work on their elastic capabilities as well.

And so you can kind of skin the cat by not even entering the weight room. So if you don’t feel comfortable in the weight room, there are a lot of different things with general body weight circuits that you can utilize to achieve power and strength without even walking into that weight room.



That makes perfect sense. I know I've gotten some good results with just body weight stuff. I’ve actually been surprised by how strong kids can get by just body weight stuff and then just transition them and save the weight room for those who are ready. That’s a good idea.

And I think one of the things that I learned early on in my career going through coaching education is that you have to be prepared for anything that could happen within a day whether you’re a teacher or a coach.

Just the other day, we were supposed to do upper body in the weight room and weight room was actually – there was a leak in the right room and we couldn’t actually use it. So I had to figure something else that we could do.

So I tried to get a little bit crafty and instead of doing bench press, we were doing pushups but obviously for a lot of the kids that was too easy. So we were doing pushups with a clap and for some of the kids that was too easy, so we were doing two claps.

And for a couple of the kids, that was actually too easy, so then we did pushups with a clap behind your back and then catch yourself.

And for one kid he could actually do that pretty well so then he did a push up, clapped behind his back, clapped in front of him and then land.

And so there are ways that you can build power with your lower body or upper body that you can work on your core. You can work on elastic capabilities, power, and strength without even going into the weight room.

I think that the weight room there are a lot of advantages to going into the weight room if you feel comfortable bringing your team in there. But if not, there are a lot of different things that you can do to at least get some of the positives of strength training.

I agree completely. You touched on something there that I’d like to get a little bit more into right now. And that’s on having a Plan B. You said you can pretty much sit down and put a week’s worth of training down or workouts in about 45 minutes because you’re a veteran, you get it.

But do you always have a Plan B? Do you have an organized Plan

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B or is it just a byproduct of understanding here’s the energy systems, mechanics, workout systems, physiological response that I’m looking for.

So if there’s a leak in the weight room or too cold out or the kids are really sore today, is it easier to come up with that Plan B. Sort of off the cuff or do you organize into training?

Because I think particularly at the high school level or when you work – we live up here in the northeast where this weather can creep up on you and affect training. How do you deal with that – alternatives to training when things don’t go according to what you have written down for that particular micro cycle or training session?

Well I think understanding the science that goes behind it makes life a lot easier as time goes on as a coach and as I said, it’s really not – you don’t have to go out and buy a college level physiology book and memorize it in order to understand this stuff.

All basic things that I actually go over when I talk about the triangle training method and the master class, and I think having a basic understanding of the science that goes behind training will make your life ultimately easier.

Because no matter what workout you pick if you lose the track and it snows out and you can’t use the track and gotta go into a 30 meter long hallway or gymnasium, there are probably 10 to 15 other workouts that you could utilize in order to achieve those same goals if you just understand the science that goes into it. And learning the science is very easy.

And so if you know you would come to me and say, “Hey I wanted to do an extensive tempo workout, today but I’m locked in the gym today.” There are literally in two seconds I can think of ten different workouts that you can do to achieve the same goal.

Absolutely. I think it comes down to coaches have to be willing to – just wanting to be successful on a consistent basis. Not being one of those coaches on particular high school level, don’t want to wait for the genetic lottery to come in and go, “We’ve got some good really talented natural athletes here.”

You gotta spend a little bit of time, learning the science of things again. You don’t have to spend all your time, you don’t have to get a degree in physiology but you do have to understand the basics if



you want to compete at those higher levels. Would you agree with that statement?

I agree with you 100 percent. I was fortunate that when I was coaching early on in my career at Wheaton College, I had a whole bunch of kids that ran 11 flat and 11.1 when they were in high school and when they left college they were running 10.5 and 10.6 and 10.7.

And it was really through just understanding science and understanding what their body needed as far as training goes both on the track and off the track so that they could be successful. And I did not major in biomechanics.

I did not major in physiology, kinesiology, or exercise science. I was an elementary education major when I was in college. And I have a good understanding of physiology, training theory, and biomechanics.

But it’s just because I read some books and they were not difficult to understand at all.

That’s good stuff. Because I know a lot of coaches out there are sort of intimidated by the science and especially if you don’t have a background. I know I was when I first started coaching and particularly like what you said earlier, if you’re not living in a world where you’re trying to take that 10.1 guy under 10.

But you’re trying to take that 11.5 kid and get him to 11.1 and 10.9, the amounts and complexity of the science you need to know is not the same. I would say.

I agree.

So we talked about the science and the mechanics and technique and all this stuff and all that is crucial stuff. But I’m a big believer in the idea that despite all of that, the reason I get results in my athletes is because I understand or know how to play the psychology game with them.

I know how to get them motivated, how to get them to buy in, how to get them to believe that they’re doing it. If I said, “The key to running a fast 100 is to go dodge cars during rush hour on the high way.”

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These kids would believe it and in their minds they would get faster, so how important to you is the – talk a little bit more on the psychological component of the developing your 100 meter runners and how you get them to buy in and believe that everything that they are doing is gonna make them better.

Well, I think that the psychological part is extremely important and something I’d start working with the athletes on before the season even starts. And when the season does actually start we work even more on it.

I start the year off by starting to send motivational emails and letters out to the kids and training and stuff so that they understand what they are preparing their bodies for as the season starts. But when you think about the psychology of a sprinter, I’m just gonna be honest with you.

You have to realize that most sprinters are egocentric, ego maniacs and completely lazy. And so I understand that and sometimes finding the motivation to keep them focused all year can be difficult as a coach and so what I try to do is make sure they stay motivated throughout the entire year.

And I do that a lot of times by teaching competition at practice. And so we do a lot of block starts and sometimes we do the block starts individually so I can watch the athletes.

But a lot of times we do the other block starts in groups because the athletes have to know how to prepare themselves mentally and physically for competition. You can’t just send them to a track meet on day one and hope that they’re gonna get it.

Now when they need to practice these things in each training session. And so keeping the athletes focused is very important and so we actually teach competition within our training and we can do that coming out of block starts.

Sometimes we might do a standing long jump or an overhead back shot-put throw or whatever it is I’ll measure it. And once you start measuring some things it becomes a competition with your athletes. So I want to make sure that the athletes are mentally and physically prepared for competition later on in the year.

Because I’m starting to pick my 4 by 1 for the conference championship or the national championship, I want to know who the gamers are. I want to know who the kids are who’ll rise to the occasion during competition and I also want to know the kids that can’t do it.



Because those are the kids I don’t want to put on the relay. So knowing who you want to put on is important, but also knowing who you don’t want to put on is equally as important.

And the other thing is we talk about is when we start doing focusing, it’s harder to refocus into competition is how that they need to run with blinders on and how that athletes have to compare themselves to themselves and not other people.

And we do any type of testing and then comparing their fly 30 time or their overhead back throw whatever the testing regimen is, they’re comparing it to, not just other people on their team, but themselves the last time they did it. Are they improving? And I explained to the athletes that if I put them same both in the lane next to you, I don’t care how hard you try or what you do, you’re not going to win.

But if you go out there and you run with blinders on and do every single thing you’re supposed to do correctly, if you clear the blocks correctly, you accelerate correctly, transition correctly, max velocity correctly, deceleration mechanic correctly, you have a chance to PR and that’s a successful day for you.

And that quit honestly you can go to certain meets and finish dead last and still have a successful day, but you can go to other meets and win a race but because you got thrown out of your race strategy, not run a fast time.

Even though you ran the race it’s not a fast time. It might be a slow time and it’s really not that successful of a day. It’s because now the athlete feels successful doing it incorrectly and they’re more likely to do those things again.

So we work a lot and practice on having the athletes what I call run with blinders. And so then finally psychologically I talk about nutrition and the importance of warm ups and things like that throughout the entire year.

So that when we get to meet the athlete we do put emphasis on warming and think about, “What time do I need to warm up. If my race is at 1:00, the warm up takes 45 minutes to an hour; this is what time I need to make sure I’m warming up by.”

And then also what they’re eating throughout the day because a lot of times we’ll have sprinters that do just more than the 100. They might run the 100, the finals of the 100, the 4 by 1, and we might even need them later on in the day for the 4 by 4.

Understanding what they need to eat because I always just assume



all of the sprinters are stupid and even though they do a big warm up every day for practice and they do all their drills and they prepare for acceleration and max velocity.

We get to a meet, they’ll go up in the stands and they’ll start talking to girls or guys and just kind of gossip and 15 minutes before the race you’ll yank them out of the stands and they’ll try to get their warm up done in 15 minutes.

And then when their done, they’ll go grab a soda pop and a candy bar and go sit back up in the stands. Literally you have to assume that they’re stupid and make sure that they understand psychologically what these things are gonna do to them.

If they make mistakes when it deals with their warm ups and their eating habits while they’re at meets and even at practice.

(Laughs) Sprinters are not generally the Rhodes Scholars of the team. Basically what you’re saying is that a lot of the stuff that you’re doing in practice is really preparing them psychologically or setting them up really for success.

And by measuring things, not measuring to measure, you’re measuring to see where your gamers are. So there’s really a secondary level of stuff that you have going on outside of just the pure physics of what you’re doing in training.

But really teaching that mental side but even though kids might not even be aware of what you’re doing. What I call Jedi Mind Tricking kids into – I’m not really a Yoda fan but, Jedi Mind Tricking kids into developing confidence and those types of things.

Because it’s not just purely a physical exertion. There’s that whole other component. Especially in the individual track that’s more like track relatively quick event like the 100s.

Yeah, I think that it’s important to teach athletes how to focus not only before the competition but during the competition and that can be done both at meets and prior to going to meets through practice sessions and I think it’s just one of the most important things.

And you talked about Yoda and I’m a big fan of Jedi Master Yoda and one of the things I think that I did a good job with one year was I had four guys that just were all equal in the 100 and they all ran the same time and they all within a thousandth of a second of each other.

Coach Mangiacotti:

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And I was trying to figure out which ones would be the best person for the first leg of the relay the second leg of the relay, the third leg and the fourth leg. And really physically and mentally they were all really tough and I had to think of something that would kind of make one of them step out.

And I knew that I wanted my second leg and my fourth leg to be the guys that would just gonna get after it and be my animals the ones that are just fearless.

And a lot of times it’s tough to find that out in practice and we were actually at an indoor pool doing a pool workout and they had a 10 meter diving board which for people that aren’t swimmers and divers that’s pretty high.

And I had four of them stand at the bottom of the ladder and look up at the top and I said, “All right, we’re gonna have a cannon ball contest. Who’s going first?” And the guy that got on the ladder and started going up first, well that was my anchor leg.

That was the guy that I knew was fearless and no matter where we were in the race he was just gonna haul ass and get after it and run through the line.

I like that. That’s good stuff. That conceptual idea behind doing that. I’m gonna write that down. So we talked about really a lot of different topics here over the last hour or so and technique and acceleration max velocity and workout planning and triangle training method.

A lot of stuff going on. And of course in your master class you break this down and you give sample programs and all your workouts. All that stuff for people to see, so it’s right there for people to have.But if you could just kind of sum things up for coaches who are trying who have read this and they’re trying to kind of wrap it all up in their minds, what would be one sort of general piece of advice that you could give coaches.

If they were just gonna jump in somewhere and start up creating the way they train their 100 meter runners, what advice would you give them if they came at you and were just like, “Coach Mangiacotti, man, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. Where do I jump in?”

Right. I think that there’s two pieces of advice that I would give. One is that the first thing you do when the gun goes off is go through acceleration so the athletes have to understand acceleration

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Latif Thomas:

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and the mechanics of acceleration in order to be successful in the race.

So that’s the first thing that they need to work on and it’s the first thing that they need to perfect. The second thing that I would tell any coaches that the best way to run fast is to train fast. That long slow running builds long slow runners.

And that we need to make sure we’re working on speed early on in the season because it is a learning trade and it is learned over not just weeks but months. It’s not something that you can just sprinkle in in the last two or three weeks of the season and expect the athlete to get it.

Agreed. That’s common sense. If I could just ask one more question, going back to specificity here, if you have kits, can you talk about speed, acceleration and training? That if you trained 50 weeks out of the year, let’s say. How many of those weeks are you doing speed work? Acceleration work?

Did you ask how many weeks or how many days?

How many weeks. If you have 50 weeks of training, somewhere in that weeks you can do true acceleration work, how many of those weeks in the 50 are you getting speed work in?

50. So I feel like acceleration work and working towards speed is something that you do, not just every week. It’s something that you do every day. But there’s no reason why you can’t do some sort of drill or something that is correlated to something that you would do in acceleration every single day of the week in any part of the year.

I like that. That’s something I stole from you this year. I like the results I’ve gotten from it.

Right. I heard a great coach once say that you need to accelerate a minimum of 10,000 times per year in order to perfect it. And so if that’s the case, then you can’t just do that in a week or two and you can’t even do that in a month or two. It’s something that needs to be done every day.



Latif Thomas: Man, you got that right. Do the math on that, that’s gonna be a lot to do. Well, Coach Mangiacotti, you gave us a lot of information today, I think that people that have read through to this point, probably have their head spinning on stuff that they can do.

I know after I watched your Master Class I was fired up and ready to get out there and coach. It was tough to be between seasons.

Regardless, you gave great information. It’s the best program I’ve seen on developing 100m runners, especially for high school and youth coaches. And giving away you entire season’s workouts and strength training, day by day, that’s valuable. It’s worth the cost of the program right there, in my opinion.

So to the coaches reading this, you kids won’t get faster by magic. Coach Mangiacotti makes the process as simple as I have ever seen. So grab your copy of Building the Perfect 100 Meter Sprinter…From Start to Finish and watch your sprinters…and jumpers…set new personal bests this season across the board.



100 Meter Interview

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