A Tale of Two Years

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My junior year of college could be called a breakout year for any athlete. I increased my high jump PR from 6'8.75 to 7'.25", and my triple jump improved from 42'2 to 45'11.75". All this came after 8 years of training and competition in track and field and stagnant sophmore and freshman years of training. I look over my training log from my junior year quite frequently and can pick out several key aspects that made this a successful season. Here are the ones I find most important:

• Year-long management of volume and intensity. I started the year with circuit training and ended with depth jumps. The progress between these two was not linear, but always had the end goal in mind.
  
• A focus on squats as the primary weightroom method instead of cleans...if you don't have a good squat base, your strength from your cleans and snatches are going to come from places that aren't helpful as a jumper.
  
• A focus on SPEED in the weightroom. Just about everything I did in the weightroom was pretty fast, even squats. I usually hovered in the 60-80% range for my training in the fall.
• Gradual improvement of work capacity and special strength fitness. I did a lot of tempo and general work early this training year, as well as a few longer runs a few times a week, just for the purpose of recovery and fitness.
• Concentrated Strength Block Work: I can give at least two times during the course of this training year where I hit the weights hard for three week cycles and although my performance might have decreased a little during that time, it improved a LOT afterwards and led to PR's.
  
• Focus on RECOVERY. I did a lot of hydrotherapy, foam rolling, and stretching this year and it really paid off.
  
• Focus on the primary sport movement from October on. My primary workout of each week in October and after (except for the strength blocks) was high jumping and triple jumping.
  
• Consistant recovery weeks (every 4th week)
• I had a relatively lower workload in my sophmore year season, I think this allowed me to experience greater benefits my Junior year.

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I would like to compare this season to my Senior year. My senior season was very disappointing to say the least, I hovered around the 6'6 mark in high jump for most of indoor, until I finally pulled out 6'8 and 6'10 at the end of indoor season. I triple jumped in the 44 range fairly consistantly, until I got 45'5 at the NCCAA indoor meet (which was really more like 45'10 but they marked off because of my shorts) Regardless, this season was very disappointing. I sprained my ankle at the national meet going for 7' and couldn't really high jump at all for outdoors. I also tore ligaments in my elbow which took away my javelin ability. Here are some reasons that I feel I did not perform quite as well my senior year.

• Too much plyometric intensity early on in the fall. I was doing a lot of plyo work and very little tempo or solid weightlifting work in the early fall. I felt that my strength levels were fine at about a 290lb backsquat (could do more last year!) and that I needed to work on speed. This may have been a good idea, but my special fitness level was terrible, and although I had some good high jump practices early in the fall, I eventually hit a big plateu and burnout mark in late October.
  
• Too little weightlifting in the early season. (I had read a book by Marv Marinovich and it was good, but kind of led me down the wrong path) I did mostly bodyweight exercises in the early season.....pistol squats and the like. Pistol squats are actually a great exercise for acute increases in vertical, but they wont really provide enough overload to the CNS because of the balance issue.
• Too little general strength/elastic work. Once I hit my wall so to speak and started really hitting the weights again, I virtually eliminated elastic work from my regime (Aside from some sprint work). Although I gained MASSIVE amounts on my 2 leg vertical (and even my single leg), I was increasing my ground contact time by training my body to rely on frictional elements for the takeoff and thus my full approach high jump was in trouble. My first high jump practice after some very well planned strength work resulted in almost scissoring 5'10 after not being able to make 5'8 for the majority of the year and at the time would have been a practice record. I couldn't really jump off a full run however, because I hadn't really been practicing it, as well as not working on elastic exercises.
  
• Loss of high jumping progression throughout the SPP period.
  
• Loss of ability to maintain strength gains (possibly because of 'erratic' training cycles)
• X-Factors, Honestly sometimes I think that I also did poorly this season because I have been training hard for so long, sometimes the wall just creeps up on you. I know legendary sprint coach Charlie Francis reccommends a year of lowered volume after so many years of consistant training (I think 7 years). I did manage to take off 2 months of training altogether last year, and it really helped for this past summer's work.
  

With all that written, I would have to say the moral of the story is this.......traditional methods are typically where it is at with training. Make sure you are doing mostly low intensity work in the earlier portion of the year, and get stronger in the weightroom while keeping the speed of your lifts up. Make sure you get to your primary movement work early in the year, and then strive to improve thoughout the fall. Work a few concentrated strength blocks in here and there, and make sure your recovery and diet are good, and you will have a great season.

Joel