Mihály Iglói
Coach
Hungarian coach whose high-volume short-interval method, run by feel, drove a wave of distance world records in the 1950s. Influential coaching history, never formally studied.
Mihály Iglói (1908-1998) was a Hungarian distance coach whose athletes set a long string of world records. In the Hungarian era of the mid-1950s, Sándor Iharos, István Rózsavölgyi and László Tábori set world records across the middle and long distances. After leaving Hungary in 1956 he coached in the United States, where his athletes included Bob Schul, the 1964 Olympic 5,000 m champion, and Jim Beatty, the first man to break four minutes for the indoor mile. His biographical tally is often given as 49 world records, but that figure is a career total reported in obituaries that mixes official, indoor and now-discontinued distances across his Hungarian, American and later Greek coaching, so it is best read as a reported headline figure rather than an audited count of official records (Iglói biography). He is a foundational figure in the history of interval training.
His method used large volumes of short intervals, typically 100 to 400 m, run not to fixed paces but by perceived effort, prescribed with terms such as “fresh”, “good” and “hard” (Science of Running on Iglói). Athletes trained twice a day with frequent, controlled, rarely all-out repetitions, the intent being to accumulate quality work while staying fresh enough to repeat it. The approach predates formal sports science and was never studied in controlled trials, so it remains influential coaching history with a remarkable record rather than tested method. Its enduring lesson, controlling interval intensity by feel to allow high training quality, echoes in the modern double-threshold idea. See training philosophies.