A famous sprinter’s mentor talks about what it takes to be fast and why it’s so important to make an athlete believe.
Stuart McMillan is a Canadian coach who has worked with professional and amateur athletes in a variety of sports, including football, American football, bobsleigh, speed skating and track and field. He is considered one of the most knowledgeable and sought after speed experts in the world.
McMillan, a physical education graduate with a passion for art and English literature, has coached more than 70 Olympians, including more than 40 medalists, in 10 Olympic Games. He has worked with national governing bodies in six countries, including the UK, where he was at Lee Valley from 2010-2013 and worked with athletes including Dwayne Chambers, Marlon Devonish and Christian Malcolm. Since 2013, he has been based in Phoenix, Arizona, where he is the CEO of ALTIS, an elite athletic environment for athletes and a global leader in sports performance education.
How did you first get into coaching?
My dad was a really good footballer, he’s Scottish and I grew up in Scotland and England before he moved to Canada in 1981 and he started coaching in England. When we moved to Canada, he became the coaching coordinator for a big club, and a few years later, when I was 14, I started coaching the under-11 team.
I myself was still playing football at that time and was playing at a decent level. When I finished playing football I was 22 or 23, I was coaching full time so I knew enough about how people get better. I had some friends who were sprinters and they said, So I tried it and I was rubbish. I found out that I’m a pretty fast soccer player, but not a fast sprinter.
But I also knew enough about coaching to think, “Maybe I’m not fast because the coaching isn’t that good,” so in my second year of sprinting, I started coaching myself. I was able to talk some of my friends into training with me. I didn’t get any faster, but they did, so that was it for me. I ran sprints for about a year and a half and said: “That’s enough.” I liked the coaching part of it, so I just got more into it.
At the same time, they were starting a strength and conditioning group at the University of Calgary, where I went to school. I was really interested in speed, strength and power, so I said. “Let me mix it up.” Along with a few colleagues, we started the strength and conditioning group at the University of Calgary. We started out providing strength and conditioning services to various sports teams on campus and it just went from there.
What is your coaching philosophy?
I don’t think it ever petrified. I think it’s always repetitive. There are two things when I talk about philosophy. there is a coaching philosophy and there is a coaching philosophy.
Your training philosophy is what drives the training process and, for me, it’s quality over quantity. You have to earn the right to do more. Whether “more” is more intensity or more workload, you have to earn it; you have to make sure you can do everything well first, so that’s paramount.
I really value movement quality and I feel like we put too much emphasis on quantity over quality. We get into sports because we fall in love with the quality, not the quantity.
From a coaching perspective, I see coaching as a partnership, not a dictatorship. It is important to me that I work and help guide the athletes that are out there wishing to become a big part of the process. I don’t really care that much telling What should the athletes do?
I really like to challenge myself and I think the real challenge comes at the tip of the spear when you’re working at the highest level you can work at. It’s a partnership.
I also look at health and performance as the same thing, and they just exist on a continuum. I take a massive systems approach to it and particularly a complex systems approach where it’s not just about learning. This also applies to post-workout recovery. It’s training fuel. It’s the mental toughness you need to train and compete. And then also understanding how the “off” path components of your life affect sports. So those five things make up the health and performance system, and we talk a lot with athletes about why it’s much more important to have a balance around these five component parts than actually trying to optimize any one component.
Who has been your biggest coaching influence?
My father was my first mentor. I saw how he operated not only as a father, but also as a coach. I would copy what he did, what he said. My first and truly primary coaching mentor as an adult was Dan Pfaff. I first met Dan in 1994/1995 and he has been my main mentor ever since.
I learned so much, especially through peer mentors throughout the 90s and 2000s. We had a very enriching educational environment in Calgary, where it was the beginning of the professionalization of strength and conditioning training in Canada. It was just an incredible place to study. And then coached in different sports at different ages and levels for over 30 years. To me, that’s where you learn the most.
What are the key component(s) of a good sprint?
High degree of coordination. That’s what it’s about, because if you look at the eight finalists at the World Championships or the Olympics, you’ve got eight very different people, often very different heights, very different weights, very different limb lengths. They produce forces in many different ways. They have extremely different stride lengths and stride frequencies, as well as different ground contact and takeoff times. You have eight of the fastest people on the planet running really, really fast in a lot of different ways.
Now what do they all have in common? They are all incredibly coordinated. That is the only thing. They apply different forces at different speeds, in slightly different directions, in very different ways. Usain Bolt was very long on the ground compared to a guy like Christian Coleman or Su Bingtian.
So it’s very different, and I like to think it’s a game of coordination. Our job is not just to maximize the magnitude of the force, the velocity of the force, the technique, the orientation of the force, but how you do it all together speaks to the quality of the movement and how coordinated that movement is step by step. It’s really hard to manage, so if there’s only one thing, it’s top of mind for me.
Why is it important for every runner to learn good sprinting technique?
Every event boils down to a sprint now, right? I mean, sometimes it’s even a marathon. When was the last middle distance event you saw that didn’t result in a sprint?
The point is that the sprint pattern is different from the typical pattern of most middle distance runners. With most middle-distance runners, it’s more propulsive, so they’re hitting, they’re rolling, and they’re pushing out, whereas in sprinters it’s a lot more active contact, there’s a lot more eccentric force.
It’s how well they jump, how well they coordinate the timing of the kick between the foot and the ground, and that’s incredibly difficult to coach. It makes the difference between the fastest sprinters in the world and those who go a little slower. It’s also the differentiator between Cole Hawker and Josh Kerr, and those who are two or three seconds behind those who don’t have the ability to coordinate that impact with the ground as well.
It’s literally the hardest thing to get better at training. We can all develop better abilities, you can get stronger, you can get faster, you can add more volume to your training, you can develop different abilities, etc. Harder to get better is what is the primary differentiator among elites, and that is how well they coordinate impact with the ground. That’s all.
What would you say are the key qualities of a good coach?
Curiosity is paramount. If you’re curious, most of the rest of the important stuff comes down to it. You must be interested in learning, teaching, understanding more about the athlete. Interested in learning more about what goes into health and performance beyond what you do on the track for two hours a day? Curiosity is everything to me.
Do you think the UK is doing as well as it could in terms of coach education?
There has been a massive decline since we all left. Part of it has been budget constraints, obviously, but the biggest thing is that if coach education is important to you, you have to look for ways that you can invest in it, and I don’t think the investment is anywhere near where it needs to be.
Athlete development and coach development must go hand in hand. That’s why there was so much investment in coach development when we were all there. It was never just about the athlete.
I just don’t think there’s any real unified thinking about what coach education really is and what you’re trying to do. For example, what is the purpose?
And by the way, it’s not just in the UK, it’s all over the world. I think they do a lot better in New Zealand and Australia, and I think there’s a reason why New Zealand and Australia usually punch above their weight per capita in a lot of these sports, but in the UK, especially athletics, I think it’s really bad.
What is the most valuable lesson you have learned over the years?
Be curious and have as much faith in the athlete, in what they do, in the system, in the coach, in themselves. You’ll never, ever see a champion athlete who doesn’t believe that. That’s why, for example, Usain Bolt has eight Olympic gold medals. Even though his coach doesn’t objectively know everything, he was able to instill this magical belief in Usain that was above and beyond. It’s a game of faith, and I think if you start with that heuristic that your job is to instill faith, it changes everything you do and how you do it.
Then you understand that communication is really important, that your relationship with the athlete is really important. All of those things then come to the fore, rather than just thinking it’s a biomechanics or physiology game. Obviously, that’s part of it, they’re part of the system, but it all has to lead to the athlete believing in himself 100 percent when he’s on the line. that’s it. That’s the game.
