Developing World Class Athletes Over the Course of a Career with Andrew Murphy

Andrew Murphy has coached for 30 years, including 15 years as Director of Athletic Development at a private school, developing grassroots programs through to elite-level athletes. He started in the sport as an athlete, representing Australia in the triple jump at three Olympic Games, eight World Indoor and Outdoor Championships, and four Commonwealth Games. Andrew has coached athletes to the Commonwealth, World, and Olympic levels across both sprints and horizontal jumps events. His training philosophy is centered around the balanced athlete who develops all the necessary qualities to provide the greatest possible outcomes to be the best athlete/person they can be. Andrew has a master’s degree in high-performance sport from Australian Catholic University.

Freelap USA: You competed as an international triple jumper. Are there any unique tools you use as a sprints coach that this background has equipped you with?

Andrew Murphy: The plyometric background comes to mind first. As a triple jumper, you go through a huge volume of plyometrics. Obviously, I don’t implement it to the same extent within a sprints program, but I make sure to teach the athletes the technical aspects of plyometrics, so most of my sprinters are able to jump well. They have good foot contacts and strong dorsiflexion, which is important with plyometric-type exercises because, without that, you can only do so much work without your shins starting to scream at you!

Being competent in plyometrics means we can get some incredible strength gains and teach the body to handle huge forces that we probably couldn’t replicate by other means. I implement this with my younger athletes while they’re lighter, and then we can gradually increase the loading over time as they mature.

As an athlete, I was lucky to have a very long career, thanks to some great coaches. But another thing to which I attribute my longevity is researching various aspects relating to training science, including recovery. I considered myself like a sponge, trying to soak up as much information as possible.

Therefore, in addition to the specifics related to my background as a jumper, I offer my athletes a holistic approach regarding what it takes to be an elite athlete. This centers around a lifestyle that is focused on the three big rocks of recovery:

1. Nutrition
2. Hydration
3. Sleep

Until those are in place, it doesn’t matter about all the wellness work you do, such as hot and cold therapies, pool work, mobility, and compression. They’re almost irrelevant if the big three tenets are not in place.

I’m lucky in that I deal with some very intelligent athletes. Rohan Browning is studying law, and I coach my son, who scored above 99% in his IB exams and is going on to study neuroscience. Therefore, they understand the value of lifestyle management for performance. However, intelligent people still need structure and strategies in place to get the best out of themselves.

I consider myself far more of a scientific coach than an artistic coach, and 99.9% of my decisions will be based on science. Share on X

Having athletes with great independent thought processes has been great for me because it keeps me honest and means I must know what I’m talking about. I think accountability works both ways. The athletes need to be accountable for their actions, but if I’m prescribing a training modality, then I need to be held accountable for that decision as well, so it’s important for me to have a solid rationale behind those decisions. Therefore, I consider myself far more of a scientific coach than an artistic coach, and 99.9% of my decisions will be based on science.

I will outsource to ensure I’m making the best decisions possible for my athletes, be it to biomechanists or whoever else. I try my best to consult with the best support staff in their respective fields in Australia to get the best possible outcomes.

Freelap USA: You have coached Rohan Browning since early in his high school career. At a young age, were there any attributes that stood out about him as an athlete that made you think he might be as good as he is today? How much of an impact on his performance do you think such a long coach-athlete relationship has had?

Andrew Murphy: I met Rohan while working at Trinity Grammar School, and one of the great things about my job there was that I was exposed to the movement of hundreds of kids from the ages of 8 to 18, and I think that helped improve my coaching eye. I started to notice patterns that were successful versus those that were not. I also noticed the type of athletes who had the ability to change and those who found motor patterns more difficult to break. All of this made me a better coach!

Working at the grassroots level was probably the best thing I did for my coaching career. A slight side note: When coaching younger children, you must have every minute accounted for. This leads to developing an awareness of how a session is “flowing” and the skill set to ensure it runs smoothly and maintains the athletes’ engagement. There may be times now when I have a group of 15 athletes, and this awareness and skill set is a massive contributor to allowing me to coach these group sizes effectively.

Anyway, Rohan started school in Year 9 at 14, nearly 15 years of age, having never really done athletics. I spotted him on the rugby field and liked the look of what I saw. He had natural mechanics with good stiffness and appeared to be really wired. I approached him and asked if he wanted to do a speed session once a week to help his rugby, with no intention of having him compete in athletics, and for a good six months, that’s what he did.

He then raced in our school season and ran pretty well. Then he decided he wanted to do a little more, but we didn’t make any drastic changes and just switched to two sessions a week. At this stage, we also looked at the strength and conditioning program he was doing with rugby, and I collaborated with the rugby coaches, and they allowed me to make some slight tweaks to what he was doing there to target his posture and hamstrings.

From there, the coach-athlete relationship progressed naturally as he moved more into athletics and rugby became less a part of his life, until he finished school and became a full-time sprinter.

Video 1. Rohan Browning competing on the track.

Rohan and I have worked together for a long time, which has allowed us to develop a great relationship where we can communicate honestly with each other without worrying about addressing areas that may not be working. As I mentioned before, he’s extremely intelligent, and he approaches training in a very professional manner while also helping to foster a fun training environment. The length of our relationship has allowed us to develop a great level of consistency and to build the program gradually as he’s been able to tolerate more load. We’ve got to know each other’s good sides and bad sides. I’m able to know when Rohan isn’t ready to have a great session, and I can typically tell before looking at his recovery data, such as HRV, etc.

My athletes, like most, want to do more work. I see my job as being there to ‘take away,’ because one session can ruin the whole season if we get over-excited; if you’re injured, you won’t run PBs. Share on X

As with most athletes, mine want to do more work. I see my job as being there to “take away,” as I know that one session can ruin the whole season if we get over-excited because if you’re injured, you won’t run PBs. Talent and programming being equal, success comes from those who can stay injury-free the longest. If my athletes are performing well on what they perceive as a low training load yet feel they want to do more, then I say, “Isn’t it good we can go somewhere else?! Why use everything at once? Let’s just use little bits at a time, and then we’ve always got somewhere extra to go.” Even after 10 years with Rohan, we haven’t used everything. I still have things that we can call upon later, which is exciting because it means Rohan has the potential to go faster than he already has! 

Freelap USA: What are some of the key technical positions you look for as a sprint coach, and what techniques do you employ to help encourage your athletes to move closer to these positions?

Andrew Murphy: I break the race down into chunks to determine what I am looking at. I look at block setup, block clearance, acceleration, transition, max velocity, and deceleration, and something I decided to implement into my training program was to focus each session on one of these aspects. If we’re doing acceleration development, that’s what we’re doing, and we’re not covering anything else, which gives us a clear objective for each session.

Videos 2 & 3. Rohan Browning and Ella Connolly perform block starts in training.

Within each of the above categories, I then think about the positions I want to see the athletes produce, and a lot of that comes down to drilling because it allows us to do a greater volume of work in those positions—because when we’re running fast, we may only have four repetitions. For example, if we’re doing maximum velocity work, we may do 3–5 runs. So, I identify the positions I want to see in the runs we’ll be doing that day. If it’s a 50-meter build into a 20-meter fly, I’ll be looking for things such as a figure 4 shape, the free leg out in front of the contact leg at touchdown, and tight dorsiflexion.

I then select drills that will target whichever position we are working on, and the athletes complete these prior to the running part of the session. By the time we implement these positions at speed, we only have a handful of opportunities to practice doing so—so we film each rep and assess whether we’ve successfully hit those positions.

Insert Video 4. Filmed reps to assess targeted positions.

If we have, great; if not, we consider our next plan of attack, which often involves a discussion about how they’re feeling. If appropriate, I may prescribe them a mobility exercise or tell them to trigger their hip flexors or whatever in the recovery interval, as they can be long, up to 8–12 minutes, for example. We then see if the intervention has helped get the athlete closer to the position in the next run and repeat as necessary.

Freelap USA: How much technology do you use as a coach? Do you do much in the way of testing your athletes to guide programming decisions?

Andrew Murphy: As my athletes have reached higher levels, I’m a lot more supported in terms of biomechanists, physiologists, etc., and this gives me greater access to technology such as Laveg, a laser system that provides data regarding instantaneous velocities, and Optojump to measure stride lengths, frequencies, ground contact times, etc. This data enables us to determine our gaps by comparing these numbers to World Athletics reports.

I think this sport is all about identifying gaps so we can devise a strategy to make us more competitive with some of the sprinters from overseas, which will also help to improve our average—this probably means our ultimate performance will also improve. With regard to an athlete’s average, it’s tough to run a PB at the Olympic Games, so I want to be in a situation where I can tell my athletes that all they need to do is run to their average, and they’ll qualify from their heats or whatever. For me, it’s not so much about PBs, but I want to know their top 5 performance level because I then know that I can put them in the biggest pressure cooker and they will be able to deliver that, but you can’t bank on an anomaly.

Video technology is something we use when working on an athlete’s kinematics, and this empowers them by bringing them into the assessment process in terms of making technical changes. Share on X

As I mentioned in the previous answer, video technology is something we use when working on an athlete’s kinematics, and this empowers them by bringing them into the assessment process in terms of making technical changes.

We have a 1080 Sprint, and I started using it more for assisted sprinting because I knew I needed to improve Rohan’s maximum velocity and expose him to higher velocities more frequently to mitigate the risk of injury when he competed. Rohan is the ultimate competitor, and he, therefore, runs substantially faster in competition than he does in training. In Tokyo, when he ran 10.01, he hit 12 meters per second, which I believe made him the athlete with the fourth-highest velocity recorded at those Olympic Games. When racing in Australia, he typically hits somewhere between 11.0 and 11.5 meters per second, and on a GREAT day in training, he may hit 10.7 or 10.8 meters per second with a nice tailwind on a beautiful 30-degree (Celsius) day.

This meant that he was always at risk when he competed because the intensities he would reach were so much greater. Injury prevention is a big thing for me, so being able to have Rohan move at 12.1–12.2 meters per second in training more regularly conditions him more specifically to the speeds he encounters in competition. I’m not sure we need to have him pulled much faster than is already the case because beyond this is probably not worth the risk. Ultimately, the mechanics tell the story; if we pull him so fast that the mechanics break down, then the injury risk skyrockets, so we are able to establish at which speed it is no longer safe to implement assisted sprints.

In our strength testing, we utilize force plates to monitor ankle, knee, and hip outputs. We use a NordBord to monitor hamstring strength and a GroinBar to monitor adductor strength. I also use Push for velocity-based training; to generate recovery data, we use an Oura ring to track HRV.

Freelap USA: What does a typical training week look like for Rohan?

Andrew Murphy: Sometimes seven days doesn’t work, and for this reason, I don’t often have my athletes compete week in, week out because two weeks means I can fit everything I need into a training cycle with enough time to spread things out and we can do a bit of work and then back off a little bit before the next race.

I like to be flexible, and therefore, nothing is ever written in stone. If I feel it’s necessary, I’ll reduce/modify sessions based on what I’m seeing and a conversation about how the athlete slept, etc., and I’ll look at their HRV scores. I tend to play the long game and try to develop my athletes at the appropriate rate, so I have no problem backing off if I feel it’s for the best, long term. I like to have some go-to sessions if an athlete’s not feeling great. In that case, we do a pick-up session, and they may only run at 80% to keep the load there to avoid detraining while at the same time not pushing for an adaptation.

I tend to play the long game and try to develop my athletes at the appropriate rate, so I have no problem backing off if it feels like it’s for the best, long term. Share on X

Having said all that, in a standard week, we’d do three track sessions: one acceleration, one maximum velocity, and one speed endurance or special speed endurance. We do three strength and conditioning sessions: one max strength, one power, and one prehab focused, which consists of more isometric work and picks up the overflow from things we may not have been able to cover in the other two gym sessions. These are our morning sessions; our afternoon sessions focus on things like pool regeneration, mobility, hot and cold therapy, massage, compression, electro-muscular stimulation, and maybe Pilates. Not all athletes do Pilates, but if I want someone to work on their posterior pelvic tilt, hip mobility, hip strength, or some ankle range, they might do it.

Saturday – Special or Speed Endurance

2–4 x 20–30-second runs

I like timed runs, and I put cones at their best marks and cones at 90% and 95% to gauge their intensity. I don’t like to jump too drastically in terms of percentages, and for example, if an athlete runs at 90% one week and 98% the next week, I think the spikes and changes in intensity can be the cause of a lot of injuries.

Sunday – Gym Maximum Strength

Monday

Off

Tuesday – Maximum Velocity

Something like 3–4 x 20m fly off 50m build

95% maximum if an athlete is racing that week, and we’ll let the real intensity stimulus come from the competition.

This session will have a technical focus and vary based on what we’ve seen in previous races. If he’s not quite got the transition to maximum velocity right and has lost his shapes, for example, I’ll design a session focusing on the 30m–60m range.

Wednesday – Gym Prehab

Isometric-focused and may finish with some pool recovery; ankle, hip, and thoracic mobility; and hot and cold therapy.

Thursday – Acceleration

Drills

4 x 10m starts, 2–4 x 30m starts

Often with some plyometrics contrasted in—start, 15m speed bound, start, etc.

Friday – Gym Power

Lighter and faster (velocity-based)

Saturday

Off

Sunday

Race

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