Arthur Lydiard had been a very influential middle and long distance running coach coming from New Zealand and his legacy has gotten major affect on the training of athletes ever since. Arthur Lydiard has become known for making running or jogging popular during the later 60's and early 1970's. Some have implied that Lydiard even invented jogging. He coached many Olympic winners from NZ in the 60s (Peter Snell, Barry Magee and Murray Halberg) together a major impact through other coaches on some other well known New Zealand athletes including John Walker who was the first person to run greater than 100 sub-4 minute miles and run a mile quicker than 3 minutes and 50 second. Lydiard was born 6 July 1917 and died on 11 December 2004 at the age 87. Arthur Lydiard has had been given many accolades in his own NZ along with Finland where his mentoring became the cause of an upsurge of Finnish distance running in the early 70's. The publication, Runners World named Lydiard as the RW coach of the century in their millennium issue. As an athlete himself, Lydiard took part in the marathon at the 1950 British Empire Games, completing 13th having a time of 2hr 54m. His impact on athletics continues to be enormous and way past his own feats as an athlete himself.

With regards to Lydiard's coaching viewpoint, he believed in separating the year into distinct running intervals or stages. The base or background period of time was the endurance phase which was made up of at the very least ten weeks of highest miles that the athlete is capable of doing so that you can increase their aerobic foundation or background. This is where his famous 100 miles every week came from as he deemed this is the ideal. Lydiard suggested with the lengthier runs might be about 20 miles. These kinds of distances are run at a pace that was just under the anaerobic tolerance and could be kept as a steady aerobic tempo. The target should be to build the largest endurance base feasible for the subsequent periods. The next period had been the hill training phase that mainly involve uphill bouncing or springing exercises to create power within the legs that has been typically carried out three times weekly. Some middle and long distance aerobic running is still done within this stage which would last for about 4 or so weeks. The subsequent 4 or so week period had been called the sharpening or speed period in which some anaerobic interval and speed work running is carried out so the athlete might improve your speed. Following that 4 week interval, the hard running is backed off and the concentration is then on staying focused and healthy for racing.

Many consider it improbable that any coach is ever going to have more effect on the training practices of endurance athletes than Arthur Lydiard. The plan which he designed completely changed middle and long distance coaching with regard to the volume of work Arthur Lydiard considered a runner should be undertaking. The actual routines was made up of a great deal of hard work. Most training methods used by runners these days can find their roots back to that which was touted by Arthur Lydiard.