The LSU track and field teams are gearing up for another banner year this spring and are in the midst of a strenuous fall training regimen designed to help them compete against the nation’s best. The Tigers and Lady Tigers form the premier combined program in all of collegiate track and field with an impressive 31 NCAA championships and 47 Southeastern Conference championships all-time.
Fourth in a nine-part series updating LSU’s progress during the fall training season will focus on the throws group.
BATON ROUGE – Perhaps there are no events in the sport of track and field that require a combination of speed and strength quite like the throws, and that is certainly evident with the fall training regimen for the LSU throws group as it prepares for another outstanding season this spring.
While the approach to fall training is similar across all event areas, the throws group is unique as assistant coach Derek Yush trains athletes to compete in four different events.
With the indoor season just over two months away, athletes competing in the shot put and weight throw have spent much of their time this fall refining their technique in addition to building absolute strength in weekly Olympic lifting in the weight room. Yush leads his athletes through cleans and snatches two days each week with an additional two days each week spent performing squat movements.
Building absolute strength is an important part of the fall training program as an athlete must have control over his or her own body while moving around the ring.
LSU has an advantage over other programs in that the climate in Baton Rouge allows its athletes to throw and train outdoors into the winter months while preparing for the indoor season. LSU’s athletes in the shot put, weight throw and hammer throw are throwing outdoors up to five days each week.
While LSU’s discus and javelin specialists do not compete until the beginning of the outdoor campaign in March, they are hard at work building strength, speed, coordination and technique through longer training cycles. It includes the building of elastic strength using hurdles and weights, as well as explosive sprints up the concourse ramp of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center located adjacent to the outdoor track.
These particular workouts are designed to build the speed and explosion an athlete will need to perform at their maximum level when the outdoor season begins in March.
The throws group will be led once again by senior NCAA champion Walter Henning, who is coming off a phenomenal junior season in 2010 in which he won all 12 competitions he entered between the weight throw indoors and hammer throw outdoors while sweeping SEC and NCAA titles in each throwing event.
Henning, who is the only LSU Tiger in program history to be crowned the NCAA champion in the weight and hammer throws, also set new personal bests in his events during the 2010 season while ranking as one of the top performers in the country in each event. His personal best of 78 feet, 1 inch in the weight throw is an SEC Indoor Championships meet record, while his personal best of 239-5 in the hammer throw is an outdoor PR by nearly four feet from his best entering the season.
Joining Henning in both the weight throw and hammer throw will be junior All-American Michael Lauro, who picked up All-America honors with an 11th-place finish in the weight throw and a 12th-place finish in the hammer throw at the NCAA Championships a season ago.
In addition, junior javelin thrower Aaron Moore is coming off an all-conference campaign outdoors a year ago when he finished in second place overall in the javelin to earn his first career All-SEC honor at the SEC Outdoor Championships. Moore is also a two-time NCAA Championships qualifier in the javelin for his career. Senior Ross Roubion also returns as an SEC scorer in the hammer throw a year ago.
The Lady Tigers will be led in the throws by junior Samia Stokes, who emerged as one of the elite discus throwers in the NCAA with her performance during the outdoor season in 2010.
Stokes became the first Lady Tiger since Danyel Mitchell in 1992 and 1993 to win an SEC championship in the discus with her win at the SEC Outdoor Championships. Stokes then earned a spot in the semifinals of the NCAA Championships with a personal-best throw of 177-11 in the preliminary rounds.