Today’s guest in Andreas Behm, sprints and hurdles coach and education director at ALTIS. He is the coach of Aries Merritt, the London 2012 Olympic Champion at 110mH, the 2012 Diamond League winner, and now the World Record holder with his 12.80 at the Brussels Diamond League.

Andreas’ upbringing and mentorship in the field has been highlighted by some of the biggest names in the sport with the likes of Dan Pfaff and Vince Anderson. He also works alongside standouts in the coaching field such as Stuart McMillan at ALTIS.

Today’s episode touches on Andreas’ specialty of hurdles, but we largely discuss practical, general concepts for all athletes seeking speed through better training design and management. This is one of the best “nuts and bolts” episodes we’ve done on the podcast thus far, and Andreas’ willingness to share his insight to the training process is really amazing.

Between listening to Stuart McMillan speak at TFC-4 in Chicago, and then talking with Andreas for the show today, I feel like I’ve literally jumped several levels in my knowledge of not only speed coaching, but athletics coaching in general. Many of the concepts that Andreas has mentioned are also highly relevant to me in my training of swimmers.

Topics on the podcast that Andreas gets into are: Thoughts on weekly training setups, individualizing potentiation sessions, relationship of the hurdles to other events and athletic arenas, addressing and instilling rhythm in athletics, ideas on special strength work for sprinting, and much more.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.