The Training Principles of Jack Daniels
Jack Daniels is an exercise scientist and running coach. Daniels has a doctorate in exercise physiology from the University of Wisconsin. He has an extensive career as a college running coach, including many years at SUNY Cortland, where he led his team to eight Division III national championships, 31 individual national titles, and his runners were named All-American over 130 times.
Daniels also has coached many runners individually, outside of a college team. Three of the most famous runners he has worked with are the marathoners Joan Benoit Samuelson and Ryan Hall and the miler Jim Ryun.
Daniels is most famous, though, for his coaching philosophy. There are several layers to his coaching philosophy, from testing VDOT capacity to defining a set of training principles runners should run by to defining the different training intensities a runner should train with. In this article, I’m going to introduce the Daniels running philosophy and how you can apply it to your own training, and I’ll cover his VDOT concept and his training principles. In a future article, I’ll discuss Daniels’ philosophy of training intensities and how he applies them to his racing training plans.
If you are interested in learning more about Jack Daniels, be sure to check out his book Daniels’ Running Formula, published by Human Kinetics in 2015.
