Ryan Banta is a track and field coach at Parkway Central High School in Chesterfield, Missouri. His athletes have achieved 109 school records, 3 top four finishes at the state championships, 5 district championships, 180 state semi-finalist (sectionals), 122 state qualifiers, 2 state records (3200 and 4×800), 14 national ranked events, 57 All-State performances, 10 state championships, and 11 runner-up performances, and two were Gatorade athletes of the year. Ryan is a USATF level II coach in the sprints, hurdles, relays, and endurance, and he recently earned a USTFCCCA track and field technical coaching certification. He also an author and speaker. His book, The Sprinters Compendium, is available here.
Coach Banta is an expert at training sprinters, as well as speed endurance athletes. He goes in-depth on his methods and how his experiences learning the “Formula One” model at ALTIS have shaped his coaching methods and his team’s culture. Ryan explains how he breaks his programming into specific daily goals and builds these goals into every aspect of the training day, from warm-up to finish. He describes how he adjusts the techniques he has taken from higher level programs to the high school level. Coach Banta has been successful instituting universal high-performance warm-up protocols with large groups of athletes, and he gives insight into building a high-performance team culture at the high school level.
In this podcast, Coach Ryan Banta discusses with Joel:
- How programming can be built around a “performance therapy” model in preparation for avoiding injury and using readiness protocols.
- The use of manual massage and other recovery techniques in the high school setting.
- His insights into programming and using track movement-based protocols to improve the performance of high school football athletes.
- His plans for training “speed-oxidative” athletes who are very fast-twitch by nature.
Coach Banta has written multiple pieces for SimpliFaster: Click here to read them.
Podcast total run time is 1:01:24.
Keywords: culture, speed training, performance therapy, acceleration, recovery
