Jump Training: T&F, Basketball, Football, Etc

Site Updates

2011-11-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

I have been updating my new blog on a weekly basis, so if you haven't checked out my new blog or website, I would love for you to check it out!

www.justflyperformance.blogspot.com

www.just-fly-sports.com

Regards,

Joel

New Videos and Posts!

2011-11-11T18:24:00.000-08:00

I recently uploaded a few videos onto YouTube. The first is a core circuit I invented based off of some exercises I found in Charlie Francis' excellent GPP DVD. I find this circuit to be much more relevant to the core needs of an athlete. You can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIfkCC6JqBU&feature=relmfu

The second is an acceleration development series I have been doing since my college coach had us do it in training. It introduces excellent variety and positions that force some proper mechanics into training. You can find this video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7bUyZUpx4w&feature=relmfu

Aside from this, I have been updating my new blog on a regular basis. Check it out at www.justflyperformance.blogspot.com. Follow it, and be kept in the loop of whatever my brain comes up with.....

Finally, thanks for Jack Woodrup for mentioning my new website. His excellent site for all things vertical jump related can be found at www.verticaljumping.com

Regards,

Joel Smith, MS, CSCS

Just Fly 101 Series: Basic Training Principles

2011-10-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

The following article is the first of a five part series of mine on training basics for speed/power athletes. If training is your passion, this series is going to be a must-read for you. This article is also featured on my new website: www.just-fly-sports.com, and is featured there with pictures for those of you who have ADD like I do. Without further ado I present to you the standard in strength/power theory for the modern athlete.

Just Fly 101 Training Basics for Speed/Power Athletes

PART I

This is the first article in a series dedicated to simplifying the training process. The reason I am writing this particular series is that many of those visiting my site or reading my articles might not be too familiar with some of the core concepts of training theory. My goal as a writer has always been to provide readers with training concepts that I feel are not well known that are important to developing a solid training program. These articles and concepts can get a little complicated, but in reality training is fairly simple. Some, and perhaps even most of the best athletes in the world today have reached their levels of athleticism with fairly primitive training schemes and setups. Hopefully through reading this article, you will become better acquainted with how simple becoming an amazing athlete really is!

Three years ago, I began teaching a course on sports performance development in the college I currently work at. The book I chose for the course was “Science and Practice of Strength Training” written by Vladimir Zatsiorsky and William Kraemer, two extremely intelligent sport scientists. I feel that teaching this class and becoming very familiar with the simple concepts of training in conjunction with actual training and coaching experiences has allowed me to provide a concise manuscript on basic training principles. Sometimes when we get caught up into all of the current research and dichotomies that exist in the field today, it is tough to really see though the fog and look at the groundwork that gets so many athletes so far in their given sport. With that said, let’s get to the basics of training theory!

I am going to divide this article into a five sections, and then finish with a few examples of how these training concepts can be combined to produce a serious athlete! The sections that we will deal with will be as follows:

Part 1

CNS training and structural training

Specificity in training

Part 2

Training the body as one piece

Arranging training

Part 3+4

Training progression

Part 5

Proficiency vs. Efficiency

Training environment

Once you have learned these sections, you will realize that 90% of applicable training theory is right here in this article. The first part of this four part series will talk about CNS vs. structural training and then the importance of specificity in training.

CNS and Structural Training:

Training the human body primarily has effects on two “systems”: The Central Nervous System and then the actual structure of the muscle-tendon complex. It is important to learn the difference between these two systems and the types of training that will influence each one. The Central Nervous System, or CNS for short represents the brain, spinal cord and all of the muscles that it innervates. It is the ultimate controller of all movements in the human body and is far more important in expressions of strength and power than the actual composition of the muscles themselves. Within your own body is the capability to produce amounts of force beyond what you ever thought possible, such as lifting a car off of a child to save a life.

We do have enough force capacity within our muscles to perform incredible feats, but the fact that we would all be in the hospital with strained backs if we went around lifting cars on a daily basis is a good reason for the body to put a severe limit on when we can perform these type of movements. The CNS will limit the power production ability of the muscles until it is trained to do otherwise. Training does two things really. The first is that it will teach the CNS to be more powerful by recruiting more nerves/motor neuron units each time that an exercise is performed. This is only true up to a point, however, and training needs to be very intense to reach high levels of CNS recruitment. The second thing that training does is strengthen the muscles and connective tissues to the point that they will be able to withstand the more intense signals given to the muscles by the CNS.

Training will always influence both the CNS and the muscular tissues of the body in some way, it is just that some training happens to stress one more than the other. Examples of training that will be more demanding on the CNS are heavy weightlifting, plyometrics, maximal jumping, maximal sprinting over short distances (less than 40 meters), and throwing objects with max power. If you didn’t notice, the word “maximal” is key when it comes to CNS training activities. You are going all out to attempt to increase the number of motor units that you are activating. Training that will enhance the structure of the body to a greater level tends to be of the more repetitive type. Although more repetitive training does not maximize the CNS and motor recruitment, it is still important in developing the total athlete. Examples of training that will emphasize the muscle-tendon structure in the body would be strength training for more than 15 seconds in each set (usually around 8-10 reps or more), repetitive jumps (such as skipping rope or cone hops), repeated submaximal sprints, long hill runs, and repeated multidirectional work (such as playing a sport where lateral movement is involved). Multidirectional work is important in training the structure of the body as it will assist the in the development of the stabilizing and supporting muscles of movement.

The average athlete who plays a team sport is going to be getting both types of this training in their system, as most sports have explosive, repetitive, and multidirectional components. The key in training is to develop the CNS and structure of the body in a balance that is appropriate to your sport. Training only one system can have potentially negative side effects. Performing only CNS work will tend to make athletes prone to injury or overtraining. Highly trained and genetically superior athletes can tend to handle a greater amount of CNS training as opposed to genetically weaker athletes, and those with little training experience. On the other hand, performing only structural based training is going to severely limit the upper power potential of the body. It is a bit safer form of training (as long as ridiculous volumes are not performed), but it will tend to limit the explosive performance of the athlete in tasks such as jumping and sprinting.

Specificity of Training:

This is a pretty simple concept that most people are familiar with. If you want to be better at a given movement, you need to practice that movement, or at least movements very similar to it, on a regular basis. There are essentially three methods of improvement in any sporting movement:

Primary: Performing the movement itself (The fastest way to improve)

Secondary: Performing the movement with resistance (A stronger training stimulus and the second fastest way to improve)

Tertiary: Strength Training (Supports the primary movement and are processes that improve over time)

Practicing the primary sport movement is always the fastest way to improve performance. Let’s take for example, jumping. If you do not have a lot of training experience, the fastest way to jump higher is simply to practice jumping a lot. When you practice, of course, you need to practice jumping as high as you possibly can, because after all, you don’t want to practice jumping low (unless your goal is to jump low)! Your training results will tend to be quite specific to the training that you put in! The big reason that many streetball style dunkers can jump so high is mostly just because they practice jumping all the time, and have decent levels of general fitness that they gain from simply playing basketball. For another example, look at the training of Michael Johnson, the world record holder in the 400m dash, and former world record holder in the 200m dash. Johnson did not do many squats or Olympic lifts in his training regimen. Plyometrics were nowhere to be found. What Michael Johnson did do to become great was practice his primary movement, which was running very often. He also did this in a very organized and systematic manner under one of the greatest track coaches of all time, Clyde Hart. Fancy training regimens are not nearly as important as practicing the sport movement you want to improve often, especially performing it in a competitive environment!

Along with the primary movement being vital to the training process, it also need to be trained with the proper technique. Performing your primary sporting movement under the eye of an experienced coach, or at least a video camera can be one of the best ways to increase your performance. This aspect of training is more important in more complex movements, such as the field events in track and field, or sport movements, such as a golf swing or tennis serve. In terms of basic motor movements, such as running and jumping, repeated practice of these from a young age often allows athletes to form a good working technique, although there will always be room for improvement. Various forms of these movements can be implemented to teach proper technique, such as performing scissor bounds to assist a sprinting athlete in learning the motor pattern of recruiting the glute and hamstring muscles to a greater degree in the ground phase of the sprint.

The second fastest way to make performance gains is to practice a movement with resistance. Using the vertical jump example, to add resistance, one could perform maximal jumping attempts with a weight vest or ankle weights on. Depth jumps would also offer a form of this primary training method with a degree of resistance. When training only the specific sport movement, the body will eventually adapt to just jumping with ones own bodyweight, so an athlete will need to try either jumping with a vest or doing depth jumps to continue to make performance gains. If you were working on improving your sprint speed, an example here would be making the use of an incline like a hill in your training.

The third method of improvement is that of strength training. Strength training by itself will not typically yield direct gains in performance in a short period of time. In reality though, strength training is almost never performed in isolation, especially with team sport athletes. If you are playing a sport and lifting weights, you are getting the primary pieces of training you need to become a great athlete. The most important thing to realize about strength training is that it is typically not the fastest way to improve athleticism, but in the long term development of an athlete, it is possibly the most important method of the three that I have listed.

Strength training is very important in the total development of an athlete because it raises the potential of that athlete’s force production. Performing training methods such as sprinting, throwing and plyometrics are nice, but they do very little to increase the total amount of contractile proteins/size of the muscle past a fixed level. Training without using weights or strength can be very effective up to a certain point, but there will come a point in the training of many athletes where progress will no longer be possible unless some sort of strength training is performed. This is due to the fact that the body is recruiting the majority of available muscle fibers, and there simply is not any more muscle for the CNS to recruit in a given movement! In this case, creating more muscle cross sectional area will be necessary for further gains. Science has shown that performance gains that are made as the result of increased muscular/myofibril size and density will last for a longer period of time than gains that are made because of improvements to the nervous system. This leads to a tangible example that gains which are made from months of strength training will last longer in terms of performance improvement than gains made from months of plyometric training.

The last point in this section is as follows: The sport specific movement looking to be improved needs to be practiced on a regular basis through all levels of training. A positive aspect of team sports is that participating regularly in games and practices will help to ensure a regular diet of functional sports movements. This is only positive so long as the practices and games are not extremely taxing on the lactic and aerobic pathways of the body (excess conditioning). Many people get very caught up with secondary and tertiary methods at high levels of training, and will forget the training mode that got them there in the first place, which is actually practicing the main movement. To continue to improve your results, the primary sporting movement must be present on a regular basis.

SUMMARY

· If you are a speed/power athlete, limit the time over the course of the year that you are performing general/conditioning based training. Focus your training of profiency/power, and less on efficiency/conditioning.

· Try and emphasize the specific movement you are trying to improve in your training. If you want to run faster, than sprint fast in practice! If you want to throw faster, throw a lot! If you want to jump higher, jump as high as you can a lot!

· Perform the sport specific movement in a competitive environment for the best possible results.

REFERENCES

Baechle, Thomas R., and Roger W. Earle. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2000. Print.

Gambetta, Vern. Athletic Development: the Art & Science of Functional Sports Conditioning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007. Print.

Moore et al. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. In Press.

Moura, Nelio A. "Training Principles for Jumpers." Training Principles for Jumpers. CoachR, May-June 2001. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.http://www.coachr.org/tpjrs.htm

Verkhoshansky, Yuri Vitalievitch., and Mel Cunningham. Siff. Supertraining. Rome,

Italy

: Verkhoshansky, 2009. Print.

Zatsiorski, V. & Kraemer, W. (2006) Science and Practice of Strength Training, 2nd Edition, Human Kinetics Publishing, Champaign IL.

Part II Coming Soon!

New Post

2011-10-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

Hello,

Just wanted to let everyone know, I will be having new posts every several days on my new blog: www.justflyperformance.blogspot.com

This blog is featured on my new website: www.just-fly-sports.com

Check us out! We are updating the site rapidly and aim to be the best out there in terms of helping you become a better athlete.

Joel

Moving into the future

2011-10-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

Hi!

I haven't posted in quite a while! I just wanted to let everyone know that a GREAT new series is coming up and I am getting ready to release it on this blog and several websites. It is going to be the flagship article series for my new website (www.just-fly-sports.com) and will be called JUSTFLY101. This will feature articles that talk about the solid facts of training theory, periodization, vertical jumping, sprinting and strength training. It will form the ground work for what we base our training programs and help to weed out the mud of the internet training world.

The first 4 part series of this upcoming information will be released in the next couple days.

Also, my new blog which will be updated much more frequently and that will complement my new website is located at http://justflyperformance.blogspot.com/

The first post will be coming tomorrow as soon as I can film a new exercise I need for the series. Hope to see you there!

Joel Smith, MS, CSCS

CNS Series Part III: Tuning the Nervous System for Maximal Power

2010-07-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

CNS Series, Part IIIA: Tuning the CNS for max performance (weightlifting method)

Welcome to the last article(s) in this series on the Central Nervous System. I am really aiming for this to be the most practical and easily applicable of the three. The first two articles in the series spoke a lot about the general theory behind some aspects of training. This article is going to deal with the practical ways of teaching the central nervous system to be as powerful as humanly possible. In a nutshell, you will learn the most powerful training techniques available for increasing speed and explosiveness.

There are basically three training systems when it comes to maximal nervous system recruitment. These would include weightlifting, plyometrics, and complex training. Part A of the third part of this series will deal with weightlifting, while part B will involve plyometric and complex training methods.

The most common method of improving strength and power of the human organism is that of resistance training. Today we have entire college degrees focused on this area of performance improvement, which would indicate that it probably plays an important role in training. Resistnce training is very effective for several reasons: increased cross-sectional area of muscle, neuro-muscular efficiency and strength to bodyweight ratio to name a few. If performed correctly it can also improve neuro-muscular patterns in the body such as triple-extension of the hips, knees, and ankles (with Olympic lifts). Resistance training has many forms and varieties, so a common question is which type of lifting will help transfer to dynamic ability (running/jumping) in the best way?

Here are a few simple answers to the question:

1. Use primarily ground based movements (Squat, Deadlift, Olympic lifts)
2. Use less reps and more sets (most lifts at 1-4 reps per set)
3. Train with both heavy and light weights for strength and speed
4. Make sure to train using movements that emphasize hip extension

I think it would be a safe assumption that most of the people reading this are pretty familiar with the above recommendations. In this article, I would like to discuss the strength training methods that I use to create a high nervous system output through resistance training methods. First, I would like to talk about the lifts that I like to use. I will then discuss the sets and reps for each specific lift that I feel tend to work the best for training goals and phases.

When it comes to lifting, there are two types of lifts that can be done for performance:

Traditional and Dynamic.

I consider traditional weightlifting to include: squats, deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, presses, calf raises, and similar types of slower tempo lifts. Dynamic lifts are the explosive lifts: Olympic lifts, jump squats, and barbell skips….basically anything that involves a high level of explosiveness and the where the feet tend to leave the ground. All these lifts are standing-ground based, so for the main part of my workouts, I don't use leg-presses, lying hip extensions, or anything like that, although sometimes I will put these in as supplements.

When it comes to the traditional lifts, there are a lot of possibilities that are available. In terms of vertical jump development (all forms) I like the following: backsquats to parallel, partial squats, front squats, squats with a 3 second pause at the bottom, tempo squats, deadlifts, deadlifts standing on a plate, barbell step ups on 12-18” high boxes, Romanian deadlifts and calf raises.

Here are a couple of those lifts you might not be too familiar with:

Plate Deadlift: A must-do lift for sprinters

Barbell Step-up: A must-do lift for jumpers

For most of my experienced athletes, I tend to put about 15-25 reps of Olympic lifts in one workout. After that we usually do around 30-40 reps of traditional lifting. The sets for the Olympic lifts are almost always 3 reps per set or less. 5 sets of 5 is definitely not the best way to go when it comes to the Olympic lifts! In order to really get the best recruitment out of the CNS, the reps must be lower! Some of the typical sets and reps that we use for OL’s look like this: 6x3 (2’ rest), 8x2 (90”), 15x1 (1’). Even in the early season, I still like to use lower reps for the Olympic lifts…but I will make the rest between sets a bit shorter, say 20x1 with 60% max and only 30” rest between reps. I think that putting the same mentality we have in the traditional lifts into the Olympic lifts is a mistake. In my own lifting, I can feel the loss in hip extension and explosiveness after 3 or 4 reps, so I really think that keeping those reps low is pretty important, unless you are using very light weight.

Regarding the Olympic lifts, I find that using a large range of weights in respect to the 1RM tends to work well. The lower %RM ranges will allow for greater speed, and the higher %RM range will allow for more power. Both are necessary for the best results. I have had some good success with using 20x1, starting at around 70% of the 1RM at the opening sets, and then slowly building up to 90% after set 10. I have also noticed great results doing a 20x1 or 8x3 with only around 60% of the 1RM and just working on speed of movement. There is really no magic % point in the Olympic lifts (or lifts in general) but I feel that the most important thing is to work hard at all ends of the speed and strength spectrum. Even when the weight is light, you can't take it easy on the bar, maximal hip extension is a must. Just watch some videos of olympic lifters training, and watch the hip power they put into the bar on every lift. It is one of the keys to their high level of athleticism.

I am not really huge into jump squats as a replacement of olympic lifts because I think that clean pulls and related lifts can match the dynamics and simplicity of jump squats with less strain on the back. I will use jump squats from time to time, however. A dynamic lift that I really do like that is not an olympic lift is the barbell skip. I think that it is really invaluable for single leg jumpers.

Barbell Skip: An important dynamic lift for single leg jumping

In a yearly training plan, max strength can be touched on, but I don’t really use anything below 4 reps for heavy sets more than 3-4 weeks out of the year. Now I do think that people can and do make pretty good jumping gains by using max effort squats, but I feel that if your program also has a lot of speed lifting and plyos in it, you just don’t really need to go max effort on your traditional lifts. In my own opinion, the programs that do well including max effort lifts are either combine programs or fairly low frequency training programs. If you are training on a high frequency program (6-8+ sessions a week), I think it is important, for the sake of recovery, not to spend much time going over 90%. I do think though, that you should spend a lot of time in the 80-90% range in those lifts, but above that percentage is pretty taxing.

Some studies have shown that doing depth jumps alone following a period of resistance training will increase the back squat, even when the weights have ceased. What this means is that the high CNS power in the plyometrics can fill your "max effort" lifting needs in a sense. Remember you are an athlete and not necessarily a powerlifter.

For most squatting movements, I like to go for about 20 total reps. 4 sets of 5 is my typical prescription, but early in the season I might choose 3-4x8, or 5x6. When going for power in the squats I’ll go for something like 6 sets of 4, but I don’t usually go below 4 reps in squat, simply because I choose other exercises for my power development, such as Olympic lifts and plyometrics. I feel that traditional weightlifting exercises should mainly be used for developing your motor neuron and muscle pool and not so much for max strength (some may disagree with me here).

Lastly, I would like to mention a quick point about hip extension, and strength training. Traditional weightlifting is very important, but I feel that if it is overemphasized, the athlete can lose hip extension because of the neural pattern involved in slower lifting. In order to counter this, the creative coach can come up with a few variations that can combine both time-under-tension, and explosiveness. There are a couple of variations that I personally like.

The first is the clap-back squat:

The second is the slow-eccentric, fast concentric back squat:

(you don't need the hanging devices on the bar to do this, but it is a nice tool)

As a conclusion to this first section, I will include a few example lifting programs that myself and my athletes might use during the training year.

Pre-Season Phase III, Strength and Power
Jon Doe: Bodyweight. 168, Squat 1RM. 300, Clean 1RM. 235, Standing Vertical. 31”, 3 Step VJ. 38.5”.
Dynamic Warmup
2x10 Overhead Squats with 45lb bar
20x1 Cleans: 165lb, 30” rest (last 5 reps increase up to 205)
4x5 Barbell Step Ups, 18” box: 135, 145, 155, 165lb (3’ rest)
4x5 Glute Ham Raise
3x10 Barbell Calf Raise
3x10 Renegade Rows: 40lb dumbbells
3x20s weighted sprinters stretch

In-Season Phase II, Strength and Power
Jill White: Bodyweight. 124, Squat 1RM. 165, Clean 1RM. 130, Standing Vertical. 25”, 3 Step VJ. 29”.
Dynamic Warmup
2x10 Overhead Squats with 45lb bar
12x1 Power Snatch: 75lb, 1' rest
4x3 Split Jerk:85lb, 2' rest
5x3 Clap Back Squat: 105lb, 2' rest
3x5 Pullups
3x20s weighted sprinters stretch

German Volume Training

2010-07-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

I just did my first session of what is known at "German Volume Training" yesterday. It involved 10 sets of 10 front squats with a fairly slow tempo past parallel with 135lb. I took 2 minutes rest between sets. This is not a lot of weight, but it got really tough by the end! My goal this year is to get a little more cross-sectional area in my legs, so I am pretty sure doing this workout over a few months will help do the trick. My legs haven't hurt like this in quite a while.

On another note, I'll be done with my next installment in the CNS series within the next 24 hours.

Joel

Structural and CNS Training Systems

2010-06-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

THE YING AND YANG OF TRAINING:
CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TRAINING AND STRUCTURAL TRAINING

In my last post, I talked about how the CNS (Central Nervous System) is of prime importance in athletic improvements, and how to avoid its overtraining. In this post I would like to talk a little bit about the two sides of the training coin in athletics. These would include training the structure of the body and then the central nervous system. Here is a quick overview of both types of training before I go into greater detail.

Structural Training: Training that focuses on the muscle-tendon structure of the body, the energy systems which support movement, as well as the endocrine and cardio-vascular systems that support the general well-being of the body as a whole.

CNS Training: In a nutshell, this is explosive strength and power training…plyometrics, olympic lifts and heavy squats…you get the idea. CNS training works the neural pathways from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles that they innervate. This training stimulates the central nervous system to become more proficient, as opposed to more efficient.

To acheive the best results in your training, what needs to happen is an optimal training frequency of both types of training. The overload that tends to happen, and cause training regression, is in CNS training. This particularly will occur when too much CNS specific training is undertaken and too little structural training has occurred. To give you a picture of what this is like, imagine what would happen if an overweight, untrained, 50 year old individual suddenly had the nervous system output of a professional level athlete. What would happen would be a high count of injuries, because that untrained persons muscles and connective tissues could not take the high force output of an amped up nervous system. Likewise, their body could not sustain that type of training for very long, because they wouldn't have the endocrine and cardiovascular support that would help them recover from the intense CNS output that they now had. Needless to say, it is important to do a good job with both aspects of training.

So I would like to now go into a bit of detail with structural training. Most of what I am concerned about when it comes to the structural training of an athlete is that of their muscle-tendon complex. In human movement, it is not just the muscles that bring about the movement, it is also the tendons. Our tendons act as speed and force amplifiers for the muscles in the body. Think of them as giant rubber bands, lets actually use a slingshot as an example. When you shoot a sling shot, your front hand is on a forked apparatus, while your back hand pulls back a band which usually contains a rock/bb/paintball/whatever you can come up with when you are 8 years old. Think of your front arm putting pressure on the fork as the work your muscles do….then think of the band being pulled back as your tendon action. The end result? A projectile being shot much faster than you could throw it. The mechanical and elastic elements work together to produce an enhanced reaction.

Back a few years ago, I did a large amount of research on tendon structure in athletes, and how it changes through training. To cut a long story short, tendons play an incredibly important part in human movement, and to neglect the fact that running and jumping is a dynamic interaction between the muscle fibers and the tendon units can really hurt your athletic performance. Now, when training volume is cut low to the point where one is only doing CNS type training (you can only do so much CNS work) you are going to start to neglect the "springyness" of the muscle-tendon structure. This will especially happen when the majority of your CNS style work is done in the weightroom. In fact, what most athletes will typically find if most of their training is done in the weightroom is that...their standing vertical jumps, and maybe 10m dashes will go up, but running jumps and top end sprint speed will go down. Bottom line…..the faster the movement…..the more the elasticity of the tendons will play a role. Sprints and running jumps rely a lot on tendon spring.

If you are not training your body structure to run fast or jump high, CNS training will not pick up the slack, even if you are doing a decent amount of plyometrics. I will say though that a fairly intensive plyometric training program certainly helps, but you can't sustain it all year long. So what exactly are some methods that are used to train the structure of an athletes? Its really a lot simpler than you might think.

The best exercises to train the structure of an athlete are simply repeated jumping or running exercises. If you are involved in a team sport, such as basketball or football, you are probably getting plenty of structural training in. If you don’t really play a team sport, or play a team sport, but don’t really practice the sport much in the offseason then you might need to do a little extra work in regards to your muscle-tendon structure. Some training methods that some elite track coaches use to remedy in-elasticity are called “rudimentary jump circuits". These jump circuits involve multiple jumps over a distance of around 20-30 meters. The jumps are low intensity, however, and instead of shooting for max distance, each jump only covers between one and three feet. In each jump, the aim is for minimal flexion of the knees and also low ground time. Biomechanically speaking, the tendon units will come into play to a greater extent when the ground time is minimized.

From my understanding and experience, changes in tendon stiffness are the result of repetitive efforts (100+ contacts/session). Research has shown that distance running has a positive effect on increasing the stiffness of the Achilles tendon. Now I don’t think that aspiring strength/power athletes should spend a lot of time running distance, but I think that repetitive efforts are important to optimize the tendon function of the body. So, take home message of this section, you are not going to get a whole lot of elasticity by only doing 4 sets of 5 depth jumps a week for jumping work. The elastic changes are the result of prolonged stretch-shortening cycle work. Flash back to discussions about the "training" of guys like team-flight-brothers (they don't train in the traditional sense, they just play basketball and practice dunking) these guys get a great mix of structural and CNS work, from just playing ball all the time, and then practicing dunks.

So what exactly would constitute a “structural” type workout for an athlete? Well, for a team –sport athlete, just playing your sport usually is a pretty good structural workout, as there are many ground contacts, jumps, cuts, etc. For non-team sport athletes, such as track, structural work includes warmup and general strength work, mobility, tempo sprints and repeated jumps, hops and skips and med ball throws. For those of you familiar with track, I am sure you are also familiar with many of these exercises. Here is an example of a typical non-CNS, pro structure and fitness based training day.

Jog 800m
General Strength (squats/lunges/inchworms,etc) and Light Accelerations
Hurdle mobility work
Sprint Drills, A-Skips, B-Skips, C-Skips, etc.
Repeated Skips: 3x20m for distance, 3x20m for height, 3x20m double arm
3x200m at submax pace
10 minute medicine ball circuit
Abdominal/Core work and stretch

So that would be a structure based training day. The opposite of this would be a CNS training day. A CNS training day might look something like this.

Jog 800m
Sprint Drills/Accelerations
2x20m, 2x30m, 2x40m sprints @ 97%
10x jump attempts/dunk attempts
2x5 depth jumps over hurdle
4x4 hurdle hops

So I am sure you get the idea, and it is a pretty simple concept really. I feel that the more difficult aspect of this comes in the split of the weekly workload and deciding what workouts to do. I think early in the season, aka preparatory period, structural workouts will dominate the training of the athlete. A preseason schedule could look something like this:

Monday: Structural
Tuesday: Structural
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: CNS
Friday: Structural
Saturday: Structural

Once the season is a little farther along, the training will shift to a little more CNS intense work. The week might then look something like this:

Monday: CNS
Tuesday: Structural
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: CNS
Friday: Structural
Saturday: Competition (CNS)

The last training setup listed above is a more traditional program, but works well. My favorite training setup for jumps actually wouldn’t really fall into a clean-cut version of dividing CNS and structure work, but I’ll try to divide it up below.

So here is my favorite training split for jumping events.

Monday: Weightlifting and Structure (50%CNS/50%Structure)
Tuesday: Track Work and Plyometrics (heavy CNS demand)
Wednesday: Structure, non-impact focus…med ball, hurdles, core circuits, etc.
Thursday: Weightlifting and Structure (50%CNS/50% Structure)
Friday: Track Work and Plyos (heavy CNS again)
Saturday: Long jog or tempo sprints (structure and fitness)

The reason that this setup will work is because of the principle of workload spacing. Olympic lifters will lift over 10 times a week, and sometimes more than that. The reason that they can handle it is because the space out the lifting sessions, and have a lot of recovery sessions. In the 4-day CNS training setup, each CNS session is fairly short (45 min) so the heavy fatigue from a big lifting/plyo session is not there. I will say though, that this type of block, over time, will bring about some serious CNS fatigue so it is important to schedule rest/structure weeks.

The main goal of this article was to show a little bit about how it is important to balance training the CNS and the structure of the body. I covered the structural training aspect of things a bit more in this particular article, so in the next one, I am going to cover how to maximize gains in the training of the Central Nervous System. Hope this is helpful to you! If you have any questions, the best way to get them answered is to email me at joel.smith.7@gmail.com

Joel

Final Note: This past weekend, Chaunte Howard Lowe broke the American Record in high jump, with a leap of 2.05m! This jump is also currently #1 in the world!

Central Nervous System Series: Part 1

2010-06-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

So I am dedicating myself this summer to writing some more articles, and fortunately, I think I have learned just enough in the last year to put some new fresh information out. My summer vacation is underway, and right now it is the first time in 8 years that I haven't spent the months of June, July and August slaving for the man to make some extra change. So basically, this should give me an opportunity to write just a bit more than I have been in the past year.

So right now I would like to talk a little bit about the Central Nervous System (CNS). I think that this is a buzzword and popular topic in strength training today (as it should be), so lets get into it shall we? In a nutshell, the CNS is the primary controller of strength and power gains in athletic pursuits. Most of the gains that you make early in a strength training program are not the result of your muscle-tendon unit becoming stronger, but that of your CNS working more powerfully and efficiently. A simple way of looking at this is in terms of fiber recruitment. In any movement, a certain number of muscle fibers are involved. In a state of de-training, however, there will be a lot of muscle fibers that are left out in a given movement. When you train though, your body will turn on more of these fibers. You can't turn on 100% of your fibers though, except for in life/death situations (lifting a car off a baby, etc.). I beleive the maximal number you can turn on in normal situations is around 80-90%, but you get the idea.

For speed/power type work, training emphasis is usually on "recruiting the fast twitch muscle fibers/fast twitch motor neurons", which is theoretically done by doing explosive work with all out effort (to recruit all available fibers). This is why doing 3 sets of 5 depth jumps with 5 minutes rest between sets beats doing 2 sets of 100 squat jumps with a minute rest (the sets of 5 will allow each jump to be much more explosive, and thus have higher recruitment, then the 2 sets of 100).

Now eventually, in any strength program, the gains that your CNS will pick up will max out, so to speak (can't recruit any more fibers/all available fibers are now recruited), and now the only way to keep gaining strength will be for the muscle to increase in size. This is not a completely fine line (pure neuro gains for certain time/then all muscle size), but a small muscle can only produce so much power. Also, an interesting and important fact is that performance gains that are acheived by muscle size gain will last longer than those gains which are brought about by CNS recruitment gains. Part of the reason that this is true is the "soon ripe-soon rotten" principle. An athlete who does high powered CNS training for 6 weeks prior to basketball season will probably make some great gains in that 6 weeks, but will also lose it pretty quickly once the season is underway, unless he/she is somehow able to maintain that training.

Before I get onto the next section of this article, let me quickly get into what I would consider "CNS" training. I have ranked these in order of the CNS demand of these exercises.

1. True Plyometrics: Depth Jumps, Hurdle Hops, Bounding....Basically any type of max-effort rebound style exercise. These are very high demand exercises!

2. Heavy Weightlifting: Anything 80% or greater definitely falls in this category, but explosive lifts in the 50% and above range could fall in this category as well.

3. Short Sprint Work: The shorter the sprint, the higher than CNS strain. Sometimes sprint coaches will actually steer athletes with weak nervous systems towards towards longer distances in their sprint workouts to avoid overstraining the CNS. I would say sprint work that falls into this category would be any sort of max effort sprinting that is 100m or less. Hill work also falls into this category.

3. Jump and Dunk attempts: Any sort of high jump/dunk attempts would be considered a high CNS effort, but not so much as something like a depth jump. I would put this in a similar CNS category as short and intense sprint work, so I labeled them both #3.

4. Medicine Ball and Shot Throws: Any all out full body overhead or underhanded shot or med ball throw. Not talking about chest passes or ab twists here. This is more of a track and field specific exercise.

Alright, so there are some way to train the Central Nervous system.....so whats the point? Well, the point is that too much CNS specific training, or too much sequential training with an emphasis on the CNS will lead to overtraining and greater likelihood of injury. Also, although CNS training gains come the soonest, overtraining of the CNS will also last the longest (as opposed to overtraining other systems in the body). Overtrain the CNS of an athlete and they will be functioning submaximally for weeks, or sometimes even months if you did it bad enough. This alone is a very important reason to pay attention to the amount of CNS in training. I am assuming most people reading this article have, at some point in their training reached a point where they were very worn out because of this type of burnout.

Now I am not one for babying training, and only going hard once in a great while, in fact, I think that you can train hard every single day. The catch though is, that you can't train the CNS hard every day, you have to rotate the trainable facets of the human organism. A great DVD I bought in the last couple years is on the 5 biomotor abilities in athletics. They include speed, stength, endurance, flexibility, and coordination.

You can find a link giving a greater rundown of these abilities HERE: http://www.coachr.org/fitness.htm

Now really, you can divide these qualities up into CNS and non-CNS demand abilities. The CNS demand abilities would be Speed and Strength. The non-CNS demand abilities would be endurance, flexibility and coordination. I don't really recommend training the CNS hard more than 2 days a week in most situations, so a weekly setup involving the training of the different motor abilities for a team sport such as basketball could look something like this:

Monday: CNS Speed-Strength (Plyos and Weights)

Tuesday: Specific Endurance (maybe something like 10x45 second sprints)
Wednesday: Coordination and Flexibility (this could be as simple as game drills and stretching)

Thursday: Upper Body Submaximal Lifting (under 80% max)

Friday: CNS Speed-Strength (Speed and Weights)

Saturday: Endurance and Flexibility (2 mile jog and stretch)

Ok, so this is a weekly setup with 2 intense CNS training days a week. An average trainee will be able to make some decent gains off something like this for a month or two, but after that a plateau will occur because of the CNS stress. This will happen even with a switch of exercises and format. I will mention that some athletes have stronger nervous systems than others. There are a few things you can do to reduce the total CNS stress of the training system. Probably the best thing you can do to combat CNS overtraining is have an easy training week every 3rd or 4th week. This is one of the most important, but overlooked principles in sport training. In an easy training week, you could have one or zero CNS intensive days, but still train the other qualities throughout the week. The following is an example for a low CNS stress week.

Monday: Endurance/Flexibility

Tuesday: Coordination/General Strength Training

Wednesday: CNS-Weightlifting (the one intense day, but no plyos...the #1 stressor)

Thursday: Endurance/Flexibility

Friday: Coordination/General Strength Training

*General Strength Training would be bodyweight style circuit training and possibly low intensity repeated jumping drills.

So over the long haul, say 3 months time, a training set up designed to reduce CNS burnout could look like this:

Week 1: CNS 2 day

Week 2: CNS 2 day

Week 3: CNS 0 day

Week 4: CNS 2 day

Week 5: CNS 2 day

Week 6: CNS 1 day

Week 7: CNS 2 day

Week 8: CNS 2 day

Week 9: CNS 2 day

Week 10: CNS 0 day

Week 11: CNS 2 day

Week 12: CNS 3 day (shock week)

Week 13: active rest

Week 14: active rest

Week 15: start over again (bump up the volume 5-10% next time around)

So this concludes the first part of this series. The next article will talk about training the structure of the musculo-skeletal system in conjunction with the nervous system for optimal results!

10 Training Tips for the New Year

2009-12-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

I don't write much online anymore. Maybe it is because I ran out of good ideas, or maybe it is because I feel like these journals are not as well read as I would hope for my current level of professionalism.....but really I don't think either is the case. I think the real matter is I have just gotten comfortable with my job and a bit lazy with the "self promotion" of the blogosphere. Anyhow, I do need to write a bit more, and so....due to the lack of frequency in my posts, I would like to try and put a bit "extra" in for this particular post, in the form of 10 ways to make your training better. Despite the fact that I am in my 14th year of my own training, and my 4th year of training other athletes, I am still learning new things on a fairly regular basis. So, here goes, 10 ways to make your training better in 2010. I mean you only have 2 years now until the world ends, so better make it good! Actually I think what is really going to happen in 2012 is that the Gazelle is going to make a world-wide comeback.

On to the training:

Number 1> Progress your training volume. Basically, if you did 5,000 meters of bounding last year, and lifted 20,000 tonnes of weights, do 6,000 meters this year and lift 22,000 tonnes of weights. It's really that simple. A gradual increase in volume from year to year will produce results. Try to look at old training logs, and just put a small bit of extra volume in from what you did last year, or, try to gradually progress to slightly higher volume in workouts a few months down the road. A nice way to increase your training volume, if you have the time, is to divide up your workouts into AM and PM work. I enjoy doing weight training in the morning and then sprints at night. The day after this I might do upper body weights in the morning and hills at night. It tends to work a lot better than cramming it all into one session.

Number 2> Increase your plyometric and jumping volume. The problem with doing high CNS type work and not a lot else is that your muscle-tendon structure won't really adapt well to the high powered changes that your CNS is making. One thing that I have noticed is that a high volume of bounding, hurdle hops, depth jumps, etc... is that this not only will tune up the CNS and make it more powerful (if you don't overtrain by too much too soon) but it will tune your muscle-tendon structure into a jumping machine. It is by this principle that something like "air alert" could produce at least some results (although it is hell on developing a powerful nervous system). One thing that is a downfall of a lot of weights and little jumping/sprinting is a severe structural hit in terms of spring and elasticity. When you do a lot of jumping or sprinting, you are training your natural body structure to be powerful. Just be careful in terms of building up to high volumes.

Number 3> Work on your core more. You know what, squats/oly's/deadlifts are good for the core....BUT....they come far short of what I would call optimal core development. To develop the core well, try a large volume of trunk flexion, extension and rotational work. You can also take these core routines and link them up into circuits to help with overall fitness. If you want some great core routines, check out Dan Pfaff's general strength DVD. My personal favorite is the "pedestal circuit". A lot of athletes who seem strong can turn into glass when it comes to these types of circuits.

Number 4> Get in killer shape. This seems obvious, but is it really? What is killer shape? Basically, it is this.....if you want to be a great athlete, you should have (in addition to a powerful CNS) a great endocrine/cardio system and low bodyfat levels. How does having a good endocrine/cardio system help the CNS? Well honestly, it probably doesn't much, but it does help your movement tissue become stronger and recover faster. It also is going to lead to lower bodyfat levels, which means a better power to weight ratio. I think a lot of people are just afraid of doing too much work past the 30 second window because it doesn't develop the CNS, but this work is vital to helping overall fitness. An example of this might be running repeated 100-200m sprints, a 10 minute light jog on a cross country course, 50 yard sprints followed by pushups, weight training circuits with 50% 1RM, 20 minutes of sprint drills/jumps in a pool and anything else you can creatively come up with that isn't just straight cardio on a machine.

Number 5> Get some sleep. 8 hours a night. At least. This will most likely be easier if you single and don't have a lot of other committments, but for what it's worth. Sleep=recovery. Oh yeah and while you are at it, try to watch your alcohol consumption and stress levels.

Number 6> Try using some tempo in your strength training routines. A lot of athletes freak out at tempo because, well, its SLOW and sport movement is FAST. Plus, I mean we want to make our strength training specific to sports right? Well, yeah sort of.....but, basically a lot of research has shown that the specificity of weightlifting to actual ballistic movements is like apples and oranges. The muscle-tendon interaction and muscle firing sequence is VERY different between doing squats and jumping for a rebound in basketball....even though the joints involved are similar. Now....I was one myself who really shied away from tempo in training for a long time, but I was forced to use it after a back injury from squatting. Anyways, long story short, I set a standing vertical jump record after only about a month of tempo based squatting movements. I feel like tempo is a great option in training, but I would make sure that there are fast or olympic type movements in the program as well. Here are some example tempos that can spice your training up a bit: 3-0-1, 5-0-1, 2-3-x, 4-0-2. (tempo is read E-I-C, or eccentric, isometric, concentric). Research has been positive when it comes to tempo work, and other benefits of tempo style work is increased muscle cross-sectional gain and hormonal response to training. You will also have a lower chance of injuring yourself.

Number 7> Find a glute-ham machine. Get on the glute-ham machine. Do glute-ham raises. Jump higher/Run faster.

Number 8> Change your sets/reps on olympic lifts. I picked this one up from HPC sport. Instead of doing something like 6x3 or 4x5 for your olympic lifts, try 20x1. Ever since I have switched the set/rep schemes, I have put 20 lbs on my clean in 6 weeks and don't feel like going back to 6x3 any time soon. I use 45 seconds between reps, and about 80% of my 1RM although I go a bit heavier on some of the last sets. Each rep should be all out power, just like plyometrics.

Number 9> Work some hill training into your routine. Especially in the early training months. Hill training, isn't really what I would consider a special form of training any biomotor ability, but blends a lot of them together nicely. It also is a really great stimulus for the posterior chain and hips when it comes to developing sprint speed. Some examples of good hill workouts would be 2x(6x30m) all out with walkdown recovery, or for more of an aerobic effect, 3x(3x100m) with slow jog down recovery.

Number 10> Keep it simple. There is no need to jump way off the training templates that you have found work well for you. There are really only small changes that need to be made in the course of a training program. Back squats to front squats, 2-0-1 tempo to 5-0-x tempo and hurdle hops to depth jumps are examples of small changes that can go a long way.

Hamstrings and Sprinting Performance

2009-10-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to just share with you quickly a simple lesson I learned from some personal experience in my training over the last few months. First a quick history. I am a jumper in every respect. I jump much better than I can run relatively speaking. According to jumping tests I should be able to run 100 meters in about 10.6 seconds, which is not anywhere close to happening. Also, as a jumper I am a bit quad dominant, and this is where I tend to feel muscular fatigue in my sprint workouts.....in my quads. I also have historically lacked a bit of frontside mechanics in my sprinting (can't get my knees up).

Anyways, over the past couple years I have become more and more aware of the importance of hamstring activation in sprinting (good sprinters will feel sprint fatigue in their hamstrings), and also that of evenly based frontside and backside leg swing mechanics in sprinting. For my GPP on Wilmington's track team I have had the sprinters do hill work 2x a week. They have also been doing a decent amount of work on the glute-ham machine. I have been doing all the workouts I write for my athletes this year, and also did a large amount of hill work this summer.

To make a long story short, I ran 4x300 extensive tempo with the team on monday (first day of official practice) and for the first time in my life I felt the fatigue from the sprints in my hamstrings. Every time I have done this workout previous to this year I feel the lactate formation in my quadriceps or sometimes inner thighs. So I guess this means that I have been making good strides in improving my sprint speed. I feel like hills are really invaluable in building sprinters, and especially those intermediate level sprinters who might not be optimally activating their hamstrings to create a "pulling" type stride rather than pushing down on the track. It isn't really rocket science of any sort, hills are sprints that force your posterier chain to work a bit harder and if you do it enough, you are going to start to wire it into your system.

Oh, not to mention, I am also faster this year than I ever have been before.

Although this is a jumping based blog I hope you might have learned something useful from it.

Joel

How to screw up your training.

2009-04-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

Over the years I have noticed some good ways to screw up your training. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Lift too heavy too often, or increase amount of weight lifted in a sharp manner (over 10% per week)
2. Do a hard jumping workout or plyos when you are really sore.
3. Don't give yourself a break from either weights or plyos every 2-3 weeks.
4. Neglect elastic work from your program, or basic jumping exercises
5. Jump too many times in a single session in hopes of a PR (example, doing 10 sets of hurdle hops instead of 4 when going for a PR, when you only did 4 sets the week before)
6. Do some sort of CNS intensive training the whole year without a break.
7. Don't enjoy a good social life outside of training.
8. Follow someone elses training program without thinking about the context.
9. Dont train in a progressive manner throughout the year, gradually increasing volume by no more than 5% a week.
10. Don't spend time doing lifting sessions devoted to speed, i.e. squats and olympic lifts in the 50-80% range

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

I am currently relaxing at my parents home in Milwaukee, and everything has died down quite a bit around here lately, so I have decided to write down a program template that I have found incredibly effective.

This program is designed pretty strictly for improving single leg jumping ability, although two leg jumping ability could also be improved a lot as well, it would just depend on what exercises you wanted to plug in, and what your needs are as an athlete.

So here it is. The KEY here is partly the cycle format. It is 2 weeks on and 1 week very easy, and this cycle continues until training effects (improvement are no longer noted). After this, it may be wise to move to a fatigue based cycle incorporating fewer workouts in a longer period of time. This program is a frequency based program, and has the potential to increase your single leg jump several inches in a 3-6 week time period, even if you have been training for a long time.

ON Week 1:

Monday: Weights,

Dynamic Warmup
Clean 5,4,3,3 moderate weight
10-12" Barbell Box Step-Up, 3x6, moderate weight
Barbell Calf Raise, 3x10, moderate weight
Jump Squats with minimal knee bend and ground time , 2x15, 45lb
Stretching
Recovery Methods

Tuesday: Plyometrics

Dynamic Warmup
Bounding: Full Recovery Between Sets
LRLRLR x 30m
LLRR x 30m
LLLRRR x 30m
LLLL x 30m
RRRR x 30m
LRLRLR x 50m x 2

Hurdle Hops: 6x4 over higher hurdles

3x50 Jumproping

Wednesday: slow jog/stretch/recover

Thursday: Weights

Dynamic Warmup
Snatch or Jerk/Push Press. 5,4,3,3 moderate weight (75-80% 1RM)
1/2 Squat. 3x6 moderate weight
Single Leg Calf Raise. 2x10 with weight
Jump Squats like Monday. 2x15, 45lb

Friday: Plyometrics

Bounding with 8-16lb weight vest
LRLRLR x 25m
LLRR x 25m
LLLRRR x 25m
LLLL x 25m
RRRR x 25m
LRLRLR x 40m x 2

Hurdle Hops 5x5 (lower hurdles) make sure minimal ground contact time is attained.
Jump Roping 3x50.

ON Week 2: slightly higher intensity, lower volume

Monday: Weights,

Dynamic Warmup
Clean 5,3,2 moderate/heavy weight
10-12" Barbell Box Step-Up, 2x6, moderate/heavy weight
Barbell Calf Raise, 2x10, heavy weight
Jump Squats with minimal knee bend and ground time , 2x12, 55-65lb
Stretching
Recovery Methods

Tuesday: Plyometrics

Dynamic Warmup
Bounding: Full Recovery Between Sets
LRLRLR x 30m
LLRR x 30m
LLLRRR x 30m
LLLL x 30m
RRRR x 30m
LRLRLR x 50m x 2

Hurdle Hops: 5x4 over higher hurdles

3x50 Jumproping

Wednesday: slow jog/stretch/recover

Thursday: Weights

Dynamic Warmup
Snatch or Jerk/Push Press. 4,3,2 moderate.heavy weight (80-85% 1RM)
1/2 Squat. 2x6 heavy weight
Single Leg Calf Raise. 2x10 with weight
Jump Squats like Monday. 2x15, 55-65lb

Friday: Plyometrics

Bounding with 8-16lb weight vest
LRLRLR x 25m
LLRR x 25m
LLLRRR x 25m
LLLL x 25m
RRRR x 25m
LRLRLR x 40m x 1

Hurdle Hops 5x5 (lower hurdles) make sure minimal ground contact time is attained.
Jump Roping 3x50.

Week 3: Off/Easy

Monday: dynamic warmup
3x30m low skips
3x30m high skips
3x30m skip for distance

Tuesday: play game/light training

Wednesday: weights
2x4 cleans light
2x4 snatch light
2x10 squat very light

Thursday: play game/jog/light train

Friday:
3x100m accelerations
test single and double leg jumping
4x50 jumprope

Repeat this cycle until you don't gain anymore. You can switch exercises, sets and reps, but try and keep the general scheme the same. Week 1: volume, Week 2: intensity, Week 3 rest! Repeat. Realize, there is a ton of volume in this program, and you ARE going to be pretty tired during the two weeks, but you will gain a lot in the off weeks.

Merry Christmas!

Joel Smith, MS, CSCS
Assistant Track and Field Coach
Wilmington College

Something a little different

2008-09-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

Normally I just tend to post regarding either strength training, jumping, or jumping events in track and field, but I decided to use this post to discuss something that I noticed at the 2008 olympics, particularly in the men's decathlon javelin throw. What I am about to post is something I actually discovered my first year throwing the javelin, and have confirmed through the years of watching athletes throw the javelin.

Now what I saw in the olympic javelin throw.......is that two of the farthest throwers in the competition were the Cuban athletes. The farthest throw of the competition was produced by Leonel Suarez at 73.98 meters, which is over 240 feet. At just around 5'10 and 170 pounds, this is a big throw.

The future of the decathlon

So what is the big deal about this? Well, if you watched the decathlon javelin throw on nbcolympics, you might realize that the majority of the decathletes would take relatively long run-ups in their throws, probably around 12-14 steps. The two Cubans however took relatively short run-ups, probably around 7-8 steps, yet they produced the number 1 and 6 throws of the 26 man competition.

What I am trying to say through all of this, is that any field event in track and field is about maximal controllable speed. Javelin seems to be the one event in particular where this philosophy gets thrown out the window, and I am not sure why. In Javelin, an effective block with the lead leg followed by the "reverse C" is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult position to get into in track and field. As with anything, the more speed that is added, the more difficult it is to get an effective block and then subsequently get into the "reverse C". Why does it seem like every athlete then thinks that they need a huge run-up that they can't control? Is it from watching the olympic athletes and think that we need to do what they do right off the bat? Do hammer throwers do a 4-turn in their first practice? Do vaulters jump off of a 16' 200lb pole their first month of practice? So why do we think that we can take such a technical event and teach our throwers to keep blowing through their block with way too much speed in the throw?

Correct Javelin Positioning

Here is a quick story from my first year of throwing javelin: It was my junior year of college, and I had always had a good arm, but never really thought of throwing the javelin. Anyways, I learned pretty quickly and went through the first part of the season with a 10 step or so run-up and was throwing somewhere in the 50 meter range for the first part of the season. Usually in warmups, I would throw a standing throw or two, and then a few 4-step throws. Anyways, one meet, the NCCAA championships, I took a 4 step warmup throw and managed 170 feet off of it....which was only a foot or two under my PR at the time. I decided to stick with the 4 step thing and just throw that for the competition. Anyways, it turned out I threw 58 meters in the competition, which is 188'9" to be exact, a 15 foot+ PR off the last few meets. After the meet I was looking at the pictures of me throwing, and my positions and block were great! They were much better than my throwing position when I would go off of the full run-up.

So what I am I trying to say.......don't do big run-ups for beginning/intermediate javelin throwers? Well, I do believe in a holistic philosophy of track and field, i.e., I don't believe in a lot of drills, and I believe the full or shortened movement of any event should be emphasized above a bunch of drills. With javelin, however, the event needs to be built from the block outwards, rather than the throw inwards (funny how almost all guides on javelin throw start with the preliminary steps in the run-up). As far as the run-up for individual throwers, it should be as long as the thrower can still utilize an effective block, which for most high-school and college throwers will be less than 10 steps. Just ask the Cubans.

On a closing note, next time you watch an olympic level javelin thrower come in at 7.5 meters per second and launch a monster throw, please realize that they have been throwing javelin from a very young age and are from a country that has a much better physical education system than ours. Thus they have mastered the right throwing positions and can handle the extra speed.

A Balanced Training Plan

2008-07-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I have updated this blog, as life has been busy for me lately, but perhaps another reason has just been a short psychological break of mine from reading and writing about athletics and human performance related activities (when you live and breathe this material for months and even years on end, sometimes you just need a little break). Anyways, I am back at it, and hope to string together a few good articles, as well as some high quality videos on my youtube site.

Don't tell anyone, but I think Bolt is going to take the 100m in Beijing....

For some time I have wanted to relay the idea of a balanced training program in athletics. In recent years, several authors who specialize in sport performance, and perhaps more notably, vertical jumping, have stressed heavily the importance of tackling your weaknesses as an athlete as the first priority in any training program. For example.....if you are 6' and 160lbs, and have standing jump of 30", while your running jump is in the high 30's, but you only can squat around 200, most coaches with this philosophy will make bringing your squat up the number one priority. Now if your game is a standing vertical jump or a electronic 10 yard dash, then go right ahead, but if your sport requires any higher motor functions than this, you need to always remember balance in your program.

Not what I mean by balance (or masculinity for that matter)

So what do I mean by balance? Well, there are several qualities which make up the necessary requirements to succeed in each sport. Let's look at a couple of examples. The first is that of an olympic weightlifter. Here are the foundational qualities of olympic weightlifting and the ways that they can be improved specifically to lifting weights:

Absolute Strength: Improved by maximal or near maximal lifts, and possibly a base of hypertrophy, or auxilliary sessions designed for hypertrophy.

Explosive Strength: Improved by olympic lifts (the sport specific exercise) as well as a variety of jumps and similar plyometric/shock work

Quickness: Improved by practicing olympic lifts; important for dropping under the bar quickly.

Work Capacity: Improved by gradually increasing the volume of lifts done year to year in the range of 5-10% Supplementary lifting sessions with reps of 8-10 in single joint or other simple lifts can also be useful.

Flexibility: Improved by the olympic lifts done with full catch variations as well as stretching exercises.

So there we have balance in weightlifting, now let's move on to something a little more complex, say the triple jump in track and field.

Here are the important qualities for this demanding event.

Maximal Speed: Improved by speed work on the track, particularly flying sprints and bounding in excess of 20 meters.

Reactive Power: Improved by plyometrics, such as bounding and depth jumps.

Coordination: Improved by the sport specific exercise, triple jumping and other bounding variants.

Explosive Strength: Improved by olympic weightlifting and plyometrics.

Absolute Strength: Improved by heavy squats, step-ups and similar exercises.

Elasticity: Improved by jumping, running, and any other sort of dynamic exercise which relies on the elastic power of the tendons to provide human locomotion.

Work Capacity: Improved by gradually increasing the number of jumps/bounds taken in practice per year, as well as general capacity means such as long sprints, and circuit training.

Now in something such as triple jump, one could say, well I am pretty good in everything, but my strength needs work! So I had better spend most of my time in the weightroom this coming season, and then I will be in good shape for jumping farther in the spring. Although this is not a bad idea, one really needs to look at the framework of an entire season to understand well, what will happen if one would seek to improve one area of their event at the expense of others.

Firstly, it should be considered that it is unwise to dramatically increase the training load from cycle to cycle. The load should only be increased about 5% from week to week, in order to optimize the bodies adaptive resources. Now if an athlete decides that they are really going to start getting after it in the weight room, then there is going to have to be a sacrifice somewhere else in the program, unless the 5% rule is planning on being broken. Of course, this is NOT to say that we shouldn't go around combating weaknesses in training, as we certainly should. The goal, however, is not to go overboard, and focus the training program around one weakness. I would say that if there are weak points in an athlete, say for example our triple jumper (weak in absolute and somewhat explosive strength) we could change their yearly training program from this:

Maximal Speed: 25%

Reactive Power: 25%

Coordination: we will take this variable out for this example:

Explosive Strength: 25%

Absolute Strength: 15%

Elasticity: 10%

Work Capacity: This is always trying to be improved....so this is out for this example

to this:

Maximal Speed: 20%

Reactive Power: 25%

Explosive Strength: 30%

Absolute Strength: 20%

Elasticity: 10%

I suppose this is fairly common knowledge for most coaches and a lot of athletes, but I felt it may be good to reiterate it in a way that might be from a new or unique perspective. It is also extremely important to realize that although sometimes the only way to improve is to get stronger, it is important to remember the ways that we want to get stronger. In the majority of cases, explosive athletes can make good improvements in the weight room when lifting is used secondary to sprints, plyometrics and the like. Even lifting in volumes as low as 2-3 sets of 8-10 in one or two exercises done twice a week will yield good results in strength improvement (when plyometrics, throws, sprints and jumps are composing the primary portion of your program). I did not lift much in high school, probably around once or twice a week doing one exercise for basketball in season, but yet I gained a good amount of strength and was almost as strong relative to bodyweight as I have ever been. I also combined this with very good leaping ability (able to get my head up to the rim at 6' tall). As I went to college, I probably doubled or even tripled the time I spent in the weight room, but I found that those periods where I did not balance weight room activity with elastic, speed and plyometric work, my jumping ability really took a dive, especially my leaping ability from a longer run-up (my speed got very bad as well). It was not until my junior year of college that I had a truly balanced program which allowed me to achieve record leaping ability.

So as far as this story goes, here are some practical reccommendations for balance in training.

Always keep the primary sport exercise as the top priority, whatever that might be (high jumping, discus throwing, playing basketball, etc...)

Take a look at your weaknesses and where you want to be regarding those weaknesses by the start of your season. What do you need to do to get there without sacrificing the other important elements of your training?

Always work on improving work capacity. Once you get to a certain point in your training, work capacity is everything, because you can get to the point where you are squatting double your bodyweight and start hitting big PR's in different jumps and suddenly crash for 2 weeks if you haven't been watching your volumes and rest/recovery ratios. A powerful CNS demands great responsibility! (If you have come a long way to get there, some of the elite athletes in the world have always had high-powered CNS and fast twitch muscles and can just take more training, period.)

As always, hope this is helpful to you, and feel free to shoot any questions my way,

Joel, CSCS, USATF level 1 (boooooo, level 1!)

joel.smith.7@gmail.com

Desire to Train

2008-05-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

This year's track season will soon be over, and a new season of training will soon begin. I always enjoyed the prospect of "starting over" in training, just because you no longer had to worry about what you felt like on meet day, you can just go train and that is the end of it. After nationals/state meets, most athletes take between 2 weeks and a month off before they get back to training again. This a pretty good idea, and the rule of thumb that I typically use in a transition period is just to go until I can't stand not training.

When you think about it though, the desire to train is often a great gauge regarding overtraining and fatigue. Aren't your best workouts typically on those days when you just wake up and all you can think about it getting to the weightroom or track? This is your body's system which is telling you that, yes, you are really ready for today's workout. Desire to train is definitely a good thing to keep track of when you are working out through the training year, and ESPECIALLY in the competitive season. If you go into a heavy jumping or plyometric session without really feeling enthusiastic about the workout, I GUARANTEE you are going to pay for it in a good week or two of dead legs. I have seen this in myself and also the jumpers which I coach. Now in coaching frameworks where a structured and unwavering microcycle is king, this can be a hard thing to deal with, but this is the "art" portion of the art and science of coaching. You need to know when to back off and let your athletes (or yourself) regain a strong desire to train.

A general rule of thumb with this, is that the more CNS intensive the activity, such as plyometrics, the more not being physically and mentally fresh into the workout is going to hurt you. (by plyometrics I am talking about depth jumps and heavy plyos) You can get away with being a little dull in activities such as 3 week blocks of lifting around 60-75% 1RM, because this is a little easier on the CNS and will allow fast recovery once you back off, while the training effect of depth jumps and heavy plyos can be monstrous if you dont allow enough recovery.

Joel

A short/medium length rant

2008-05-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

If you have been following my youtube videos lately, you might have noticed that I have had a fairly decent depth jumping and two footed jumping session recently. Based on this, I figured that I would at least have a DECENT high jumping performance at my latest meet, which was yesterday at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. As much as I would have liked to do well, I did not, and I no-heighted at 6'4.25". The cause of this was only partly technical, but was mostly due to just a lack of single leg jumping ability (couldn't even scissor 5'8 in warmups).

Now my training has been excellent up to this point, I have been having fairly good high jump practices.......almost as good as I ever have had, but it seems like every time I get to a meet, I am just flat. Now compare this to my record season where I had good practices, but then GREAT competitions. The big difference between these two seasons is really just one thing.

Volume.

I don't train as much as I used to, partly because of work, and other factors, but I feel that when I hit the gym or the track, I really take care of business. Regardless, my adaptation rate and work capacity are down (over 2 weeks for the same depth jumping session that took me only 3-4 days to recover from), and this really hurts when you have competitions to take care of. I do, however, have a running 2 leg vertical that is just as good or better than ever. So what is the point of all this................

Research has shown that in order to improve from year to year, training volume must increase. I know there are special situations where this is not true, such as Jonathan Edwards WR triple jump, but as far as my personal experience goes, this is definitely the case. Every time I look back at my training log from my record breaking season.......I am surprised by how much volume I had, and how in the world I was able to tolerate it. Here is a typical fall training week from my PR year back in 2004-2005.

Monday:

Warmup
Forward Overhead Med Ball Throws x50 total
4 step high-jumps: x8 reps, work up to 6'2
standing triple jumps x6, around 28' (note: not the greatest distance!)
1x30m alternate leg bounding
Hang Snatch, 4x95lb, 4x115lb, 4x125lb
Cleans from Floor, 4x135lb, 4x175lb, 3x195lb, 3x195lb
Jerks, 3x6, 115lb
Overhead Lunge, 2x6, 95lb

Tuesday:

8x200m sprints: around 30-32s each, 3 minute recovery

Wednesday:

Hurdle Drills
Forward Overhead Med-ball throws x50
3 Step-Javelin Throws
17" squat (about 3/4 squat) 225x6, 275x4, 300x3, 300x3
Incline Bench Press, 125x6, 135x4, 145x3
Deadlift: 225x6, 275x4, 295x3
Reverse Hypers 2x10, 25lb+band
Abs

Thursday:

5x300m at 48-50sec with 3min recovery

Friday:

2x33" double leg hurdle hops w/30m acceleration
1x30" single leg hurdle hops
1x33" single leg hurdle hops
2x36" single leg hurdle hops
Incline pullovers 5x40,50,60lb
Hurdle stretch goodmornings: 65x2
abs

Saturday or Sunday: 1-2 mile easy jog and stretch

(Note: I never really felt great on any of these training days, and I worked on a 3:1 cycle or hard weeks to easy weeks. I think I just kept pushing through the volume and adapted.......something that is hard to do when you are training by yourself.)

Well, there you have it, nothing special, and certainly not anything to write home about regarding the weights or distances, although the hurdle hops weren't bad. I feel that part of what may have made that specific season successful was just the large volume of training in the fall, and then the largely reduced training in the winter/spring. Regardless, it is annoying when you know way more about training than you did 4 years ago and still cannot produce jumps in the region that you used to be able to.

My advice to you would be this..........if you are a track athlete, it is hard to sacrafice volume, because every year I have had a low volume season, I have failed! My work capacity and adaptability rates were just too low. Of course, not everyone is like this, but I feel that the majority of athletes will fall into this category.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

Post Workout Recovery

2008-04-14T18:26:00.001-07:00

Let face it folks, nutrition is extremely important to your success as an athlete and your recovery between workout sessions. Almost as important though, as what you put into your body, is how you time your nutrition. The most important time to facilitate nutrition, and particularly supplements is directly before and after your workout. This window has been referred to by some as the anabolic window, and demonstrates the amount of time your body has to switch itself from catabolic (breakdown) mode into anabolic (buildup) mode.

So how do you optimize your anabolic window? First of all, try a liquid solution which is fairly high in carbohyrates/or creatine right before and during your workout. Secondly, and most importantly, within 45 minutes of finishing your workout, you need to give your body what it needs in order to begin the important rebuilding process. In order to do this, you can buy an overpriced (4$ a serving on average) post-workout recovery drink..............OR, you can make this cheap and effective alternative yourself.

Post Workout Recovery Drink:

16fl oz chocolate milk
5g creatine powder
vitamins A,C and E. (take with drink)

Thats it!

Features: 3:1 ratio of carbs to protein, you will notice this ratio on other recovery drinks. Creatine helps faciliate rebuilding of ATP stores, and the ACE vitamins are anti-oxidants which help combat free-radicals and other muscle deterioration activities. You will find this as a cheap and effective post workout recovery. Try it!

Joel

The Fastest Way to Improve!!!! New Secret Training!!!

2008-04-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

Do I have your attention now? Ok, so here goes........and lets just use running vertical jump and dunking ability as an example today. So you want to jump higher and dunk better right? What is the FASTEST way to get better. Here are two options:

Option A:

Get your backsquat up to 1.5-2x bodyweight
then
Do plyometrics: bounding, depth jumps and the like
also
Stretch daily, do functional analysis on posture and gait, determine posterior chain vs. anterior chain strength and design a program combating these weaknesses.

Option B:

Get in a competitive environment and practice your jumping and dunking until your legs are sore. Repeat every few days.

Guess which option the 'top level' dunkers you see on youtube, etc.. use?

here's a hint.......it's not 'A'.

Ok, ok, ok.......so I understand your potential backlash and perhaps misunderstanding. I also realize that the youtube jumpers such as teamflightbrothers are genetic freaks and will be awesome no matter what type of training they do (which for them is just playing basketball and dunking). I am not saying here, that if you want to realize your ultimate athletic potential that you can get away with just practicing say, dunking, if throwing down nasty dunks is your goal. I am saying though, that you will never become the dunker/jumper you can potentially be if you get so caught up in weights/plyos/etc... that you forget the raw art form of the primary sport movement. This holds true more, the more dynamic the movement. Here is a continuum of sport movements which have increasing importance of practicing the actual sport movement.

Least Important:
Squat Jump
Standing Vertical Jump
Acceleration<10 meters
Running Vertical Jump (2 legs)
Running Vertical Jump (1 leg)
Top End Speed (flying 10 meter)
Top End Speed Endurance (300yd shuttle or 400m dash)
Most Important:

Take a look at some of the greatest athletes in sport: sprinters, jumpers, dunkers, even distance runners. What do they all have in common? They make their activity look fluid....effortless. Yet what do we do when we neglect our primary sport movement in favor of other movements. We get back to our sport specific movement and "muscle it" or "force it". Because we neglect it, it is less natural. We no longer use the SPECIFIC muscular and neural firing patterns for that activity and substitute it with other firing patterns.

Ok, so the number one way to improve any activity is what? To practice that activity, simple enough. What is the number 2 way to improve then? Depth jumps? Squats? Turkish Get-ups?
Not really, the second best way to improve is just doing a weighted version of the original. Practice dunking with a weight vest on, or sprint with a light resistance such as a parachute.

The third thing to do to max out your neural pathways is to overload the eccentric portion of whatever movement your sport is based on. This is accomplished by an exercise known as depth jumps. Research has shown that the more energy which is stored in the eccentric phase of a movement, the more energy will be released in the concentric phase. The final key to maximizing your efficiency in a specific event is by doing depth jumps and similar plyometrics.

In simple words, what do these three things do, practicing the original sport movement, weighted versions and then plyometrics? They max out your efficiency in that given activity. Once your efficiency is maxed out, or close to maxed out, only then will weightlifting really be the only way to improve. Of course weightlifting is handy before you max out your efficiency, but the closer you get to 100% efficiency, the more it will help you. Basically, practicing your movement and plyometrics will allow you to recruit the majority of your available motor units (except emergency motor units only recruitable by life/death situations), while lifting weights will increase the total motor pool available. It is as simple as that.

Here is a sample program which could help an intermediate athlete (1.25-1.5xbw squat, 26-30" VJ) get better based on the things I have just outlined.

2 Day per Week System:

Day 1:
PRIMARY
Practice Dunking/Jumping until noticable decrease in height jumped.
SECONDARY
3x8 Deadlift, with weight that you could do 10x with moderate/difficult effort

Day 2:
Practice Dunking/Jumping with weighted vest about 5-8% of bodyweight until noticable decrease in height jumped.
OR (if no weight vest)
Practice Dunking/Jumping off 18" box (depth jumps) until noticable decrease in height jumped occurs.

It really can be that simple folks.....this type of program will yield excellent short term results.

For good results over a long term, you might want to use a cycle like this alternated with weightlifting oriented cycles.

Joel

Go Getta Syndrome

2008-03-10T17:56:00.001-07:00

For some reason, I can't stop naming my posts by rap songs......

There are some athletes, including myself that are great to coach. They are the hard workers, the highly motivated, "go-getter" type of athletes. Most of them are intrinsically motivated by nature, i.e., they don't do what they do for the external rewards. They don't do it for the roar of the crowd, the medals or trophies, or the swoon of the ladies. No, they train and compete because of the deep inner drive that is within themselves to become the best that they can be. This type of athlete is not only well motivated, but also fiercely competitive. This type of athlete can be great to coach, except for one thing, which is the possibility of overtraining. The following is a list of good ways to overtrain in a speed-power related event, and are ways in my opinion, that hard working athletes fall more prone to.

References in Parenthesis:

Do plyometrics for more than a 3-4 week time period without a "rest week".
(Bompa, Myself)

Lift weights at greater than 90% of ones 1RM for an extended period of time (4-5 weeks).
(Siff, Verkhoshansky)

Do "partial" lifts at over 90% of 1RM for a short period of time (2-3 weeks)
(Myself)

Don't do enough light work between heavy workouts, and only do CNS intensive work when one does work out. (Vern Gambetta)

Lose their fitness level at the expense of CNS intensive work early in the training year. (Verkhoshanski)

Not take rest or transition periods when appropriate, which is often after 3-4 month blocks of training. (Kraemer)

Now there are a few helpful solutions to making your training program a little more nervous system friendly. The main one is just to make a plan and stick to it. Don't do more than you gave for yourself or your athletes to do on that given day, either in the weightroom or out on the track. Some of my best workouts I have had, my body crashed the days after, because I wore my nervous system out too much. A maximal competitive effort can wear the nervous system out for days to weeks, depending on the event. A prime example of this is olympic weightlifting, where after a peak competition, 6 meet lifts can keep an athlete from competition shape for up to a month.

Another helpful solution is to not get over-psyched in the weight room. This is a serious problem for a lot of athletes. We all love to watch the powerlifting and olympic weightlifting videos of lifters getting psyched and hitting a huge lift. This may be an effective strategy if the ultimate outcome of our sport was to lift X-amount of weight. As it stands, it is not, and thus we must take care in the weight room not to over-extend ourselves. It can be a valuable practice to check your heart rate immediately before performing sets in the weight room. If your heart rate is noticable higher for a big set, then you are likely over-exerting yourself, and the training effect of your set is going to be fairly large (it will take a long time to recover from). If you think about it, isn't this what we tend to do though.......we go through a period of weight training which starts fairly easy, and we don't have to exert ourselves too much, and then comes a day where we really start having to psyche ourselves up to get after it and hit the set we wanted, and then we find ourselves lacking progress from that point on. Now some people can get away with this, but all too often, it leads to CNS fatigue, especially in highly motivated athletes who don't have the resiliant, high work capacity systems that some elite athletes do. We can also get away with this once in a while, as the human body does go through various rhythms. It is not a good idea to always push through though. As the textbooks say, 75-80% is the magic bracket that most olympic lifters work in during the majority of their training sets over the training year. When you do decide to push it, you might want to stick to a 3 or 5 rep max lift, rather than a 1 or 2 rep max.

Finally, in order to keep from overtraining, rest and recovery periods should be woven into each aspect of the training cycle. Recovery sessions are often tacked into the nano-cycle (training day) of each athlete in a world-class training system. These recovery sessions are often in the form of aerobic work, stretching, massage, hydrotherapy, EMS and other methods. Recovery periods should also be integrated regularly into the meso and macrocycle format of training.

On a final note, don't rush your training program. We all want 6 inches of vertical or .2 seconds on our 40 right away, but the best athletes are built over a long period of time. It is a good idea to shoot for a gradual increase in weight room strength from year to year, instead of giant leaps. Research has shown that gradual year to year increase in volume is the best way to maintain progress.

Joel

Bar Clearance in High Jumping

2008-02-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

I have decided that it is about time for me to get back to a technical article of some sort. Most of what I have written recently has been about training theory in general, and not so much about the great sport of high-jumping. In my "technical high jump manifesto" I conclude that in most cases, the body will automatically respond to the bar in order to clear it. In most cases this is true, at least after a certain amount of hours spent in practice. I have realized, however, that there are some people that really have a gift to contort their body over the bar, while others struggle to control their body in the air at all. I would consider myself a holistic coach. I don't mess around with a lot of drills (I will write more on this later) because I feel that actually high jumping with accurate cues and feedback is much better than the sum of its parts.

One drill that I do like to use, however, is the standing backover. I often see many mistakes in the performance of this drill, which lead to bad habits. Before I get to those, here is a video of a standing backover in high-jump.

Now this is a great standing high jump, and the bar clearance is excellent. Notice the timing of the arch through the hips and the drawing in off the feet towards the buttocks. There are times, however, when this drill can lead to bad habits. One variation of this drill that leads to bad habits is standing too close to the bar when it is performed. When this happens, the dynamic chain which leads to successful bar clearance is compromised. This happens because the parabolic curve which the bodies center of mass is much more straight up-and-down then a typical high jump where there is far more horizontal displacement. Standing too close when performing this drill will lead to improper timing in throwing the head back, and bringing the hips and knees up. Here is a video of a good jumper with tremendous leaping ability who stands just a little too close to the bar when performing this drill:

My recommendation for a standing back-over would be to have your feet a distance from the bar that is simliar to where you actually take off from in high jump. Athletes who take off from very far away can move this mark in a few inches or even a foot if they take off from over a meter away. I would also advise those athletes whose best standing jump is less than 1.60m to use a booster box (6-12 inches) when doing this drill. This will help create more similarity between the backover and the bar clearance encountered in the actual jump.

The second aspect I would like to cover when addressing bar clearance is that of rotation. Rotation over the bar is primarily determined by the forces at take-off but can also be influenced by the shortening of the bodies levers over the bar. Proper rotation can be determined by a simple analysis. When the jumper is at their apex over the bar, their total body alignment (if they were to straighten their body) would be around parallel to the ground. Many jumpers who jump with inadequate lean at takeoff, or long levers will be at an angle to the ground, here is a helpful illustration.

This jumper is demonstrating proper bar clearance, and is in a good setup for the hips to clear easiler. This position comes from proper rotation and not just throwing the head back and arching. The next picture demonstrates an improper bar clearance/rotation.

Now here is a very common clearance position for a lot of jumpers who either have not developed their curve and takeoff properly, or just don't have coaches who know better. In this jump, the hips have not reached the high point that the upper back has, because of a lack of rotation. Now rotation can be achieved in two ways. The first is to learn the proper way to run a curve, and not come out of it on the last two steps. It is a common fault to see a jumper come "straight up" on the last two steps of their curve. Once a jumper has effectively learned a curve, they must learn to have short and effective levers in the air. Here is a picture of a jumper who has very short and effective levers in bar clearance.

Linus Thornblad

Here is another picture of a jumper who demonstrates good rotation and bar clearance.

Blanca Vlasic

Notice how she is actually rotated past parallel when she is clearing the bar. I have noticed that in jumpers with longer limbs, sometimes, more rotation is necessary than those with shorter limbs. This makes is possible for jumpers with longer legs to clear the bar more effectively. In closing, here are some tips for helping you or your jumpers clear the bar more effectively.

1. Backovers are an effective drill, but do not focus the marjority of your practice on them
2. The transition from a standing backover to a full high jump can be made easier by doing "running" 2-footed high jumps following standing backover work.
3. Cues such as bringing the feet tighter to the buttocks, spreading the knees apart, throwing the head back, and getting the hips up can all be used in standing and running 2 foot backover drills.
4. A drill that I like is a short approach high jump off of one leg where the coach stands behind the pit and holds up 1-5 fingers with his/her hand. The jumper must then look backwards during the jump and tell the coach how many fingers they held up. This is an advanced variation of the standing drill with holding fingers up.
5. Standing and running high jumps are different motor skills, always keep that in mind. Just because someone can do standing backovers well, does not automatically mean they will be good at the full jump, and don't let a jumper focus on standing backovers just because they are good at them and their standing backover jump makes them feel good about themselves. Focus on their weaknesses.
6. Perfect form in a full-high jump will be clearing the bar by simliar amounts with the shoulders, back, and hips, keep this in mind when a jumper comments on how far their back was over the bar in a given jump.

Finally, on a closing note, realize that sometimes when a jumper rotates too fast, or is not used to their speed of rotation, they may start kicking the bar off with their feet. This happens more often in taller, longer jumpers who need to compensate for the increased rotation with a more powerful foot kick. Work on a good extension of the legs as well as the other factors with these jumpers.

Good luck,

Joel

Rubber-Band Man Retraction

2008-02-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

Well, I went and did it. I have thrown some ideas out in my last post that were not entirely correct. You see most of my last post was based off of research that I had looked at in a comprehensive review of around 50 scholarly-articles. A large amount of what I wrote was correct, but what is still up in the air, so to speak in the scholarly realm is if increasing tendon compliance is truly effective for increasing sport movement. Research by Keitaro Kubo shows that, yes, compliant tendons are more effective for stretch-shortening cycle movement, but, compliant tendons can also cause problems with force transmission from muscle to bone. After an email exchange with Dr. Kubo, he has concluded that it is still unknown if increased compliance or (increased stiffness) in tendon is truly useful for improving sport effectiveness. So basically, don't worry about specifics on improving your tendons. My advice is simply to put an emphasis on your primary sport movement, and the optimal tendon configuration should take care of itself.

I still do think my last article has some value in the relation of slow and fast twitch dominant athletes and sport performance. If nothing else, it is a valuable analytical tool. Finally, I would like to thank Roger "RJ" Nelson for his notes on my original article which led to this retraction. Sport science is something that is dynamic and evolving, and I try my best to stay on top of it. If anything is wrong, I will always let you know, and it is my utmost intention to keep everyone on the right track in the sport science world.

Joel

The Rubber-Band Man

2008-01-31T20:13:00.000-08:00

So how many of you out there are rap fans? (If you aren't, please keep reading anyway) I am for sure, well I was...... A lot of what they play on the radio these days just doesn't cut it for me you know? Anyways, there is one rapper that is still active to my knowledge who I do like very much. His name is T.I. and he came out with a pretty dope rhyme back a few years ago called "The Rubber-Band Man".

So what does rubber bands have to do with anything? Well here is why they are so great........they are very effective modulators (or altering agents) of force applied to them. Think about it, say you want to shoot a folded paper bullet across the room at a classmate, co-worker, or even your boss. You can't throw the paper wad, because you will never be able to impart enough force mechanically to get it to fly fast or straight enough to do any sort of damage. So what do you do? You whip out your rubber band that was holding your notecards together and use that to shoot the paper projectile. But how does that work? It works because a rubber band is a SPEED amplifier. The rubber band cannot produce force on its own, correct? But once you put force into it, it will give you a massive return in terms of speed.

The human body is the same way! Your muscles are simply not capable of producing the speed required for the incredible dynamic movement that the human body is capable of on their own. They need a little help from their friends so to speak.

Now let me give you a quick evolution of my thoughts on the importance of tendons over the years. My senior year in college was my first year that I began to realize the importance of tendons through reading some of the works of inno-sport. The majority of their preaching was on "stiffness" (yes, I know, "That's what she said"). Anyways, their basic tenant was that muscles that could produce large amounts of force without stiff tendons were not functioning well, because the slack would weaken the movement significantly. I maintained this view until my first year of graduate school a year later. In my first research class, I wrote a lengthy paper on human elastic structures. Once I really began to dig into the research I found several interesting findings. Perhaps the most important was that in many cases, it is not how stiff a tendon is that is important, but how "compliant". Compliance is basically the ability of a tendon to stretch under stress and then return to its original position. Studies have proven that the fastest 100m sprinters have vastus lateralus (quadricep) tendons which are more compliant than slower runners. Although these specific studies seemed to suggest that compliance is the most important facet of tendons, common sense would say that the optimal compliance of a tendon is based on its use. Anthony Blazevich, PhD, has stated that joints that have small ranges of motion (ankle) will benefit from tendons that are stiffer, while joints that go through larger ranges of motion (hip) will benefit more from tendons which are more compliant. I think that this makes good sense.

Now before you go and start working on your ability to do the splits, here are a few quick definitions and ideas.

PEC: Parallel Elastic Component of Muscle. This refers to the section of connective tissue which surrounds muscle. This includes the fascial sheath of the muscle, as well as the sarcolemma surrounding the muscle fibers. This component is brought into play when the muscle is stretched beyond its normal length, aka, static or dynamic stretching.

SEC: Series Elastic Component of Muscle: This refers to the tendons, and elastic elements within the muscle, such as titin. This component is brought into play when the muscle is producing force, aka. sprinting or jumping.

Idea: Fast twitch muscle is by nature, more flexible than the collagen-heavy slow twitch muscle.

Idea: Slow twitch muscle is able to hold its cross-bridge attachments for a longer period of time than fast twitch muscles, which can still allow for explosive movement by use of tendons, it just takes longer.

Idea: Research has shown that sustained amounts of heavy weightlifting can result in increased tendon stiffness.

Idea: Research has also shown that although heavy weightlifting can stiffen up tendons, extended time under tension in weightlifting can lead to more compliant tendons, particularly the SEC (the important part of the tendon).

Now here is what it all comes down to: Tendons are extremely important in human movement. They are very specific when it comes to their job description. This is why it is vital in any sport to make the Primary Sporting Movement the main object of affection. This is also probably why anyone who has lifted weights for an extended period of time without doing adequate elastic work (sprints, bounds, depth jumps, multi-jumps) will notice a severe strain on their running vertical ability, particularly in the single leg category. I am not bashing weightlifting though! It is very important to reach the ultimate genetic potential of any athlete, but whenever weightlifting becomes the #1 training means of an athlete for too long of a period (I would say 2-3 months, it starts to bring with it some negative effects on dynamic movement). Also, the more "fast twitch" the movement, the more "weightlifting only" may have a detrimental effect on the movement. In other words, sprinting will take a bigger hit than a standing vertical off two feet.

Secondly, people who are "slow twitch" dominant can still "get up". Anyone can make big increases in vertical by getting stronger and gaining jumping efficiency. However, slow-twitch dominant individuals are going to spend more time on the ground when jumping, and thus won't be quite as good shot blockers or high jumpers than the more fast twitch dominant individuals. As the "idea" above stated, slow twitch muscles can still produce large force output, but they need the tendons to do it, and they take longer to get it done. I beleive a study done on volleyball national team whose average standing vertical jump was in the high 30's demonstrated a fast twitch ratio of 55%. This is only slightly above average. Volleyball players have been proven, however, to spend significantly longer times on the ground when preparing to jump compared to say, track and field athletes.

My third point is based on the fact that extended time periods of weightlifting sets can lead to more compliant tendons. New and exiting research has been coming out which show that sets of around 10 can be better than sets of 3-5 regarding the development of sprint speed. (Obviously you would not use one set-rep scheme exclusively) Perhaps this has something to do with the tendons? Also, if you have ever wondered about the principle of Joe DeFranco's 50-rep rhythm squats, this might be a good answer.

Finally, another direct and applicable message of this post is to spend some time training in the stretch range of movement. An exercise that I really like for sprinting is the osciallatory isometric hip flexion movement as perscribed by inno-sport. Here is a link

http://www.inno-sport.net/Strength-Endurance.htm

The exercise is OI HF squat. Let me confirm here, that just stretching alone will not significantly increase the power output of the tendons. You need to be specific in their training, and that means loaded training in the stretch range.

Good luck!

Joel Smith, CSCS (at least until my CEU's are due)

THE ORIGINAL RUBBER BAND MAN! Dick Hartzell

Work Capacity: The Final Frontier

2008-01-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

As long as I am on this space kick with my titles, I would like to briefly discuss probably the number one key to becoming an elite athlete and fulfilling your genetic potential. This key factor is work capacity, and in particular, specific work capacity. It seems like the focus of so many programs out today, and especially beginner programs really focus on regulating fatigue in order to achieve the optimal results, at least in the short term. Now restoration is an extremely important facet of training, and in some cases, more important than the training itself, after all, any idiot can beat the crap out of themselves with plyometrics and heavy weightlifting.

Let me start with saying, there is a time to rest, and then there is a time to concentrate the heck out of your program. I used to look at some track coaches reccommendations of doing lifting three days a week and plyos on the other two days of a 5-day week and laugh. "They are going to drive their athletes into the ground", I thought. And of course, if you did a program like this with a beginner, yeah, you certainly would annihilate them. The point of a high-volume program like this, however, is to create a high work capacity in the athlete. High-level track coaches would probably not prescribe programs like this if they didn't work, or pay off later in the season. The best way to look at this would be to understand the concept of what is referred to by Dr. Yuri Verkhoshanski as "concentrated" strength loading. Here is a chart with an example of what happens in concentrated loading.
The easiest way to think of this type of unit is as a week in a standard program, but extended. Here is why. In your average "program", what is the goal? To fatigue yourself enough to be sore for a day or two, but then come back and be stonger the next time you lift or jump. This setup is like that..........but instead of three days, it is three weeks you are sore, or three months. Numerous studies have confirmed the effectiveness of this type of set-up, and it is especially useful for sports which have a demanding competitive season either physically, or technically.

Now, I will say that I am afraid of this system, because of the patience that it requires, as well as the trust in the program. That is why I typically like to work in 2-3 week variations of this system. There are a few key ingredients that are needed to make concentrated loading work.

(Above: The Glory Days for me)

1. Pump up the volume! OK, that was a really lame title, but yeah, you want to really increase the volume of your loading during this time period. This could mean 3-4 strength training days per week, or 2-3 repetitive jump days.
2. Keep the training means CNS friendly, don't do depth jumps or 100% effort repeated sprints or anything like that. With the high volume, you want to really keep an eye on the intensity.
3. The decrement in performance should be linear. You don't want to have a spike in your performance drop. It should be smooth from week to week. You should have pre-set indicators such as vertical jump, standing 3-hops, or another type of explosive indicator to measure your condition.
4. During the "Recovery" period, your body will not tolerate volume well, but will respond wonderfully to intense training means. Think of the frequency and fatigue types of cycles for those of you familiar with inno-sport.
5. During the recovery period, you don't just stop training (obviously), you just turn the volume way down and start to gradually implement more intense means.

I will end with the statement that different coaches will tolerate different levels of drop-off in their jumpers. Some coaches will only allow 3% decrement at the maximum, which means their concentrated blocks are extremely short, while others will allow up to 20%, which is massive. I typically hover around 5-10% in my blocks, and losses further than this make me slightly uncomfortable, although maybe someday, I will trust myself with higher loads.

Any questions: email me at smith.joel@students.uwlax.edu

or

read articles about it here: www.athleticscoaching.ca
or here: www.verkhoshansky.com

On a final note with work capacity, a quick reminder from "Science and Practice of Strength Training". Elite athletes have work capacities that are up to 10x what a beginner can tolerate, pretty amazing huh?

Living Inside of a Parallel Universe

2008-01-04T20:55:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased a book written in 1985 by Dr. Yuri Verkhoshanski on periodization and training organization. So far it has been pretty good, a lot of concepts in it were touched on in "Supertraining", but some things have stuck out to me enough to start thinking about them again. One of the studies which the book notes is that of Khodykin (couldn't find the date). Basically this study compares periodized training against parallel training with intermediate athletes in one study.

A quick definition of terms.

Periodized or "conjugate" training: The gradual, month-by-month replacement of weaker training methods with stronger ones through the course of a macrocycle (training year). An example would be to start out doing an "air alert" style training scheme for a few months, and then replace it with weightlifting as the primary exercise for a few months, then replace the weightlifting with depth jumping. Here is a helpful visual:As you can see, the training program starts out using repeated jumps (air alert style work) and after that training modality begins to plateau, a new, stronger training modality begins to replace it, in this case weightlifting. The program is finalized by the introduction of the most powerful stimulus of all, depth jumping.

Parallel Training: This is the type of training which is the most common amongst many internet trainees and internet training programs. Several "jump" programs are periodized for the 12-16 weeks for which the user is instructed to complete them, but rarely longer. In essence, parallel training involves combining many training modalities and using them in the same micro and meso-cycles throughout the yearly training plan. Basically this means that someone on a parallel training plan will use plyometrics, weights, and submaximal jumps/sprints all in the same training week for the majority of the year. It has been suggested that this type of training is effective for relative beginners but advanced athletes require periodization. I will later explain why this may be a faulty suggestion.

The study by Khodykin investigated the effects of two, three month training blocks on intermediate level high jumpers. The first group did a 3-month block of barbell exercises, followed by a 3-month block of plyometrics. The second group completed a 3-month block of plyometrics and then did a 3-month block of weightlifting, basically, group 1 in reverse. The third group did one 6 month program with both weightlifting and plyometrics in parallel. At the end of the study, the only group which improved their explosive strength was the first group. A negative training effect was found in groups 2 and 3 (they actually decreased in explosiveness). Reasoning for this is that in group 2, the ordering of periodization is faulty (too high of training effect too early) and in group 3, since the program extended so long, the training effect of each modality wore off and plateued, producing staleness. The moral of this study is that, in advanced athletes, it is important not to use a single modality for too great of a period of time.

Personally, I beleive that this is true to an extent, but in the practical world, I would make a few changes. I feel that weightlifting certainly does reach a point of plateu, and as I have stated in my earlier blogs, this is around 3-4 months time. From my own experience, however, I feel that one can lift weights as an exclusive modality longer than they can do plyometrics. Plyometrics are just very demanding on the nervous system, and it is easy to hit a roadblock with them. That said, I feel that one can lift weights for the majority of the training year, I just think that there are definite points in the year when the volume should be high, and then there are points when it should be miniscule or nonexistant. In my own experience a few concentrated blocks of 3 lower body days per week in the fall and early winter are helpful, but in-season, one to two days a week is best. As far as points in the year when weightlifting should be eliminated, I would say that after a 3 month period of weightlifting, most coaches would do well to have a 2 week "washout" of the barbell training effect. Of course, in a periodized program when the focus is, say, depth jumping, weight lifting should still be done, just in small amounts, enough to maintain previous strength and hypertrophy in the primary muscle groups. In periods of peaking, it depends on the athlete whether or not weights should be eliminated. I have known high-jumpers who have set lifetime records after not lifting for 3-4 months, and I know other high-jumpers who just plain lose it after stopping weights for too long.

I am in the latter group for sure. The best track meet of my life was at an interesting point in my training schedule. I had done a good concentrated strength block right before indoor started, and then shaved down to 2 lifting days a week for the first three meets. I had also lifted weights regularly for the preceding 6 months, although the percentages and focuses were very different in each phase. I also took various weeks off of heavy lifting to delay the plateau of the lifting effect. My fourth meet of the season I did depth jumps, bounding and no weights and set a high jump PR at 2.09 meters. The following week, I did not lift weights except for 3 sets of 3 "2/3" squats with very heavy weight. I did a lot of plyometrics, however, and I ended up high jumping 2.08m easily and almost making 2.14m (the height was there, the form was not). I also went on to set an incredible 1.1 meter PR in the triple jump that day. This is where it is important to know your athletes.....I do lean towards thinking that the taller, leaner, and lankier high jumpers who have more of a natural build for the event can do better without weights for a longer period of time than their "power" counterparts. This is just an opinion though based on my jumpers ,acquaintances, and competitors.....and may not entirely reflect reality.

Anti-Periodization Commentary:

Like any good sport scientist, it is important to look at both sides of the issue from people who actually know what they are talking about....

Now for a quick counter-point on periodization from the man who supported it all these years, Dr. V: In 1998, Verkhoshanksy published a short article on the reasons why traditional periodization was an outdated method.

This article can be found here:
http://www.athleticscoaching.ca/UserFiles/File/Sport%20Science/Planning%20&%20Periodization/General%20Concepts/Verhoshansky%20The%20End%20of%20Periodization.pdf

A large complaint of Verkhoshansky is that traditional periodization is not a realistic form of training because the fact that it creates several problems. A big problem that he had with it (and that I have with it, and many other coaches) is that an extensive and exhaustive amount of preparation work is done, and then the competitive period is just used to work on form, and the specific strength conditioning level of the athlete is neglected. This can be even more harmful with international athletes where the competitive periods are very, very long. Obviously, most modern coaches have adapted a form of periodization which brings heavier training loads into early competitions and "peaks" at the end, but this style of work still may be able to be improved upon.

Another problem that Verkhoshansky had with traditional periodization, and most likely the main one, is that the yearly process of periodization is somewhat unsubstantiated by long term research. There are the shorter-term studies of a preparation period type setup such as the one I listed at the beginning, but apparantly, there is little to no research saying that periodization is the ultimate method of adaptation. Here I am not just talking about doing training in blocks (which is still a good method) but the idea of doing a "familiarization phase" and then a "general strength phase" and so on. Perhaps that absolute anti-thesis of this type of training is Brad Nuttal's "modern" setup at the now "dead" inno-sport, in which only the training modalities which directly aid the athlete in their specific strength requirement are emphasized. Verkhoshanski does also say that a large problem of periodization was that the specific exercises which are needed to provoke adaptation were often, not involved. Of course one might say that those exercises are indeed important for building a "base", but on the grounds of how effective that base truly is, is not substantiated. I am certainly a strong beleiver in a large work-capacity for high-level athletes, but I think that there is a better way to accomplish this than a 2 month "junk-volume" session in the early part of the season.

With that out of the way, here is an example of a more modern Soviet adaptation of periodization, keeping the good peices (conjugation of exercises) while dropping some of the un-needed peices. (un-necessary phases and volumes)

Cyclic Blocks System for Jumping Events: Taranov, Mironenko and Sergejev, 1994.
(I apologize for the poor copy!)

The scribbled section after "restoration" is "limited load" in case you were curious. Some interesting points about this setup is that is works in 3 week blocks, with the tail end of each block being a rehabilitation week with a decreased training load. Only 2 weeks are spent in what you would really call "basework" and functional adaptation is started right away. An interesting point here though, is that the preparation period before competitions begin is only around four months, where in a college system, it is around 7 months! I think that quite often, we don't realize that some of these big-time international level programs don't have to deal with staleness in the prep-period as much as us college guys do, simply because we have a much larger period between our competitive seasons. This cyclic blocks system also is unique in the fact that it starts with specific adaptation work early in the year (it is still important to be sensitive to the intensity this early).

So what is the moral of this story? I would say that if you are not already doing so, be willing to try organizing your training in a manner that weightlifting is not always the primary focus. Even if you are "weak" you still may want to install phases of training which focus on repetitive jumps or sprints. This doesn't mean that you can't lift, just don't focus on it. This will allow you not to plataeu as soon and hopefully have a better and more explosive season. These periods don't have to be long, but they should be in there. Simply put, vary your training emphasis from time to time. You can work training qualities in parallel, just don't do it for more than 3 months! Finally, there are 1,000,000 ways to skin a cat, especially in this profession. I am certainly not trying to tell you exactly how to do things, just some principles which you should always be aware of. Stay tuned for more on this exiting subject.......

GOOD LUCK! Sport scientists have been debating these issues from the beginning of sport-sciencedom.

A Matter of Tempo

2007-12-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

Tempo in lifting is somewhat of an interesting topic. When I first saw some of the tempo prescriptions that some elite strength coaches were recommending, I was amazed. Whenever I am in the weight room, all I ever want to do is push heavy weight as fast as possible, and tempo is usually the last thing on my mind. It would probably take somebody pointing a loaded gun at me to get me to perform a 4:1:2 tempo set-up. Aside from my personal preference, the literature, both scientific and practical shows several "positive" effects of using tempo in lifting.

1. An increased safety factor, reduces bouncing in lifts.

2. Along with increased safety, tempo makes the muscles do the work rather than tendons, ligaments, or joint capsules.

3. Varying lifting tempos in a yearly plan causes an extension of the trianing effect of lifting, which in turn, should lead to higher levels of strength at the end of the strength phase of training.

4. Tempo allows a greater time under tension, which will change the metabolic effect of the training, as well as increase hypertrophy (if this causes time under tension to rise into the 30-70 second range, which is proven the most effective for hypertrophy)

5. Since lifting will never exactly replicate dynamic sport movement, it should be performed safely and for the purpose of increasing the available, useable muscle tissue for sporting movement (at least the HIT camp would say this).

The college which I coach at makes a good deal of use of tempo for training our sprinters (at least in the pre-season phase). Our sprinters have been very, very successful over the years (national champions and olympians) and apparantly I would say that tempo in lifting certainly is not hurting them. A typical tempo reccomendation in the fall might be a 3:0:2 tempo, or a 5:0:3 tempo for squats.

Now that I have that out of the way, I will state what I personally hate about tempo in training. There are always two sides to the coin of any argument of course!

1. De-emphasis on explosiveness in training. I have never seen the use of tempo in any elite/international track coaches training plan (of course, I haven't come close to looking at all training programs).

2. Submaximal recruitment of motor units in lifting. When was the last time you ever saw a olympic lifter doing squats with any sort of tempo? Olympic lifters are athletes we sometimes or often model our training after, and they demonstrate no appearance of tempo on their squats, they even bounce! (say it ain't so!) It is just about the same story with powerlifters...powerlifters have two primary types of lifting days, dynamic and maximal effort days. You certainly won't see any sort of tempo except for all-out speed on the dynamic day, and the max effort day is full-blast of the concentric portion of the lift as well. If your desire is to increase the maximal amount of available motor units (your CNS pool) the concentric portion of the lift must be performed as fast as possible!

3. Time under tension can also be achieved by increasing the reps of the lift. In the preparatory period of the season, which do you think would be a better way of increasing hypertrophy in the fast twitch muscles: doing 3 reps of an exercise as an extremely slow tempo with 150lb, the set taking 30 seconds or doing 15 reps of the same exercise with 150lb in 30 seconds. I would put my money on the 15rep/30 second set. Think of JoeDeFranco's "50rep rhythm squats" on this one. In addition to the muscle factor, the higher reps in this case may also be a positive factor in explosive tendon development.

4. Some athletes do not need anymore hypertrophy development! In this case, tempo would probably not be a good idea, even if it is superior to higher reps at the same set-time window for hypertrophy (which doub't it would be, at least for functional hypertrophy).

5. Instead of trying to prolong the training effect of lifting, why not just switch to explosive/ballistic methods outside of weights instead of messing around with tempo?

6. Other methods of increasing the time-under-tension in a given set exist, including one of my favorites, the pause-explode method. I will get into this more in just a bit.

The dichotomy:

Here is the problem....research is somewhat mixed on this issue, and perhaps even favors HIT style tempo training. While the idea of HIT (1 set, slower tempo trianing for failure) makes many coaches cringe, it does work for a lot of people. The only thing about HIT that makes me want to cause bodily harm to Arthur Jones is the fact that you don't have to be "smart" to implement it effectively. You can be the dreaded "weight room nazi" style strength coach, who stomps and yells incessantly and appears to have ridden the "short bus" as a kid (Not that these coaches are all bad!) and still get a decent training effect out of your workout (or at least make people feel tired when they are done).

Some studies have shown that lifting at high speed will bring about the same increase in vertical jump as lifting with a slower tempo. The only difference between the two is that the faster lifting will bring about a higher peak torque in loaded conditions. Basically, lift weights fast, and you will become good at lifting weights fast, and not necessarily jumping higher, due to the amount of processes that go on in vertical jumping which bring tendon elasticity and static-spring proficiency into play.

Personally, I don't like a lot of research studies, and most of the subjects are un-trained athletes who will respond well to any kind of training. There are a few studies which make me cry "uncle" though, and these are typically the type of study as listed above. So what is the bottom line then? Well, tempo might be good because it is safe, and can extend the training effect of lifting out if it is varied, BUT, at the very best, it is no better than fast, heavy and explosive lifting. With that in mind, here is my official, mostly anecdotal opinion on lifting tempos.

1. If you are a speed-athlete, don't bother with lifting tempo. I would recommend keeping the eccentric phase of the lift controlled, but besides that, the concentric portion should be fast.

2. For the same set-time, 15 fast reps are better than 5 slow ones with the same weight. Tudor Bompa's classic book, periodization trianing for sports also takes this view.

3. If you want to prolong the training-effect-window of your strength trianing, try the pause-explode method! Lower yourself to parallel in a squat or similar lift for 2-10 seconds and then explode up. Repeat up to desired set-time. Jay Shroeder over at Evo-sport does lifting like this, and it is very effective in improving explosive power. Isometrics as a training method kind of go in and out, but this is a variant that you certainly can't go wrong with. Mel Siff also talks about this as a great training method in his "Supertraining" text.

4. A fast-tempo in lifting is only really dangerous is you are a new lifter, and haven't learned how to keep your core tight and aligned during the lift. I would say the more back-oriented the lift, the more I would use a controlled tempo, but not to the point where you would have to count. As with everything there is a learning curve. Tempo is something which is built to "injury-proof" the lifting process for the inexperienced.

Well, thats all for now, I will say that I am not completely bashing tempo work through this article, I am just saying that there are probably better ways of doing things than tempo work, especially in light of olympic lifters and powerlifters. Good luck, and happy training,

Joel

The Weightlifting Addiction

2007-11-26T20:46:00.001-08:00

You know what I am talking about......or maybe not, but I would say that most people reading this know what I am talking about.

Weightlifting Addiction, How to tell if you are a "lifting addict":

1. Your standing vertical has increased over the past few years, but your running jump hasn't, and your running one leg jump DEFINITELY hasn't!

2. You get anxious to get to the gym the day of your lifting workout.....as soon as you wake up, it is the first thing on your mind.

3. You have gained 10+ pounds in the first year you started lifting.

4. You have this inevitable urge to go heavy in the weightroom.......especially when there are a large amount of people watching.....

5. You have dreams about power-cleaning 2x your bodyweight

6. You find yourself watching olympic lifting competitions when you are bored

7. You haven't improved your 30m dash or slam-dunking ability in 2 years, but who cares! You can squat 150lb more!

8. You feel that if you can't squat 2x bodyweight, you are a failure as an athlete

OK, well those are a few signs I guess......and I will say that this post is primarily geared towards you unilaterals out there, aka track and field jumpers and anyone else who wants to get up off 1 leg. I will say that being a "lifting addict" isn't all that bad, but if you are a jumper or sprinter it can eventually hurt you! For the most part, a killer standing vertical requires a HUGE squat, and a good 2 leg running vertical requires a pretty good squat, but more complex movements such as running and jumping off 1 leg take a little more plyometric persuasion.

I am certainly not bashing lifting at all, but in order to be a good unilateral jumper, there comes a point in a yearly training cycle when you have to take a break from lifting. This usually comes in the form of plyometric shock work. Beleive it or not, taking a break from lifting to do a few depth jump cycles might actually increase your squat. After all, you will be dramatically increasing the output of your nervous system through the myotatic reflex, as well as doing some intensive work specific to bi-lateral power production.

Russian science has shown that the training effect of weightlifting regarding the improvement of speed-strength diminishes within 14 weeks. This scenario has happened to many of us......we start lifting again after taking some time off and gain a lot, but then suddenly we stop gaining, and instead of switching over to another stimulus, aka, plyometrics, we just try to keep tweaking out our lifting programs, adding cluster sets, drop sets, isometrics, partial reps and the like. As some famous authors say regarding periodization, "why do most coaches feed their athletes crap for workouts up until the big meets and then finally back off the weights and do what the athlete needed in the first place?". Of course the athlete will feel refreshed, but he/she could be at a much higher state of sport mastry if they had gotten what they needed earlier in the season.

I will say that the training effect of lifting can be extended by adding variation, but all lifting is in essence the same in the fact that it offers a training effect of neurological duration, and is not necessarily specific to jumping or running. I think the fear that many people have is that they will lose their hard-earned weightroom strength when they switch to plyos, or that they haven't hit that "magic number" in the weightroom yet. Alternating cycles will not kill you though, as long as they are planned out with the long term goal in mind! The key is to be patient. Yes, those elite jumpers can clean over 1.5 times their bodyweight, and squat 2.5x, but they didn't get there by spending the majority of their traning time in the weightroom. I will bet you that for the most part, they are naturally explosive, as well as have gained explosiveness through jumping, which contributes to their weight room numbers.

A quick, second to last note.....most Western track coaches develop the different strength qualities in parallel throughout the season....which works, but according to Eastern sport science, not as well as well-planned blocks with specific goals.

I will end on a note from Tudor Bompa's famous text of periodization for sports which says that athletes who have seemed to reach a plateu after a high training age can benefit by altering cycles of plyometrics and maximal strength. Seems to make sense to me. The two methods build on each other, and are powerful stimuli. FINALLY, to those two would say, "well I have great reactive strength, I just need to get stronger now right?". For a standing vertical jump, yes you need to get stonger, for high jumping, yes, but not to the point that you would for standing vertical. The ground contact time must remain low! I will get to this more another day, but for now, the moral of the story is, stick with what works, which is not using a specific training stiumuls for longer than you need to.

The Internet Age of Training

2007-11-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

I have been in the iron/plyometric game for quite a while, I first started reading about training when I was 12 years old, and was always fascinated with anything having to do with lifting or jumping higher, it was all new and fresh material to me. I dunked for the first time at age 14 at 5'11" without reading a single bit of internet training advice. My primary training method at the time was wall sits, leg extensions and playing basketball, very archaic according to todays standards. When I was about 16 years old (year 2000) I started searching the internet for training information. Of course, back then there weren't the forums that there are today, or hardly any of the information that you can find on some internet resources such as T-nation (was just getting started then) Now days, I see high-schoolers on these forums who are light-years ahead of where I was at the same age (knowledge wise), but here is something that I also see............their gains are similar or less than mine when I was their age. I think that maybe I just got lucky with the science of jumping program that I did, but I really improved a lot, without knowing an awful lot.

These days, I learn a lot off the internet, I have some great text books and reference guides here at home, but I probably get most of my knowledge off the internet. (I guess I had a few master's classes here and there as well......but who really cares about action potentials and cell membranes anyways?) Here is a fact though, that very few of us internet training junkies are willing to accept........how much have you improved since you found all this great training info on the net? I am not talking about how much have you put on your squat or clean or single leg BOSU squat while simultaneously playing ping pong.. How much has your vertical jump or sprint speed improved.?? Now I am sure for some, yes, it has increased, but I would make a fair bet that, for a lot of people out there, NO, I have not improved much at all in the last 2-3 years, even though I am learning all these new training programs/ideas on the web. (I am talking for the most part about people who have stopped developing physically, because you will gain speed no matter what if you are still physically maturing, From what I have seen I think that physical abilities (speed strength) no longer on their own develop due to physical growth around age 15-19, however, this does not account for "old man strength" which I am starting to develop.)

So what is the point of this entry? It is just this........practical experience in training trumps anything you hear on the internet regarding training, EVEN MY ENTRIES, hahaha.

Here is my recommendation for evaluating your training program and what you read online....

1. NEVER build a training program around 1 article that you read. Read many articles by different authors, and find the good things they have to say about certain methods and what the authors agree on as sound training methods.

2. STICK to your training program. Don't go for a month and say, oh, well this program really isn't working, I think I'll check (insert website here) to look for another program and see how that works for me. An exception can be made here if you made a terrible mistake in your program selection, but if you follow step 1, you shouldn't come across this. (note: of course, you are supposed to make changes in your program every 2-4 weeks if you are intermediate/adv, but I am talking about the basic structure of the program in regards to long term goals)

3. DESIGN your program with the long term goal in mind. If you have been training for 5 years, your goal should not be to put 4 inches on your vertical in a month. This is probably not going to happen, and if it does, it will be the most unstable 4 inches you ever put on your vertical (quickly gained/quickly lost principle). Try and find resources regarding long term training methods. www.athleticscoaching.ca has loads of GREAT free sport science articles, especially regarding periodization.

4. REMEMBER what has worked for you in the past, and try not to get far away from it in your own training. It is important to vary training procedures from year to year, but you need to know what works for you and what doesn't.

I hope these simple tips can help you in your quest for your athletic goal

Joel

Add 20lb to your clean/snatch INSTANTLY!!!

2007-10-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

I know this probably sounds like a cheap marketing tactic, but since I am not selling anything, I guess it isn't. Most athletes use olympic lifts to enhance their athletic ability. Something that I notice with many videos of athletes doing olympic lifts, however, is that they are missing one important peice of the puzzle..........lifting straps.

What are lifting straps? They happen to be handy peices of leather/nylon that allow to have a rock solid grip on the barbell while you are lifting.

Wrist Wraps

Of course you might ask, Joel, on what basis do you make the claim that wraps will help so much. Well for one thing, they are banned from olympic lifting competitions, why?, because if they were legal it would be immensely easier to maintain a good grip on the weight (This is why olympic lifters must learn the 'hook' grip in order to deal with their force output on the bar)

So why is it important to have a good grip on the bar? Well if you don't have a good grip on a bar when you are performing say, a hang clean, a few things will happen.

1. You will prolong the coupling time between the eccentric and concentric portions of the lift due to 'give' in your hands at the explosive-isometric portion of the lift. Essentially you will teach yourself to be slower in converting your eccentric force into concentric. This is not something that you want as an athlete.

2. The loss of bar speed in an olympic lift will be proportional to the give in your hands during the lift, and by the way, even with a hook grip, it is still difficult to allow no give in a bar in a high speed hang snatch/clean.

3. Wraps help especially in snatches, where your hands are placed wider on the bar, which causes your hands with an even worse mechanical advantage than normal.

4. Finally, wraps teach you to use your legs/hips more, because you no longer have to worry about your grip much, therefore you have less cues to worry about over the course of the lift.

5. I will say that wraps will have a greater effect in doing lifts from the hang than lifts from the floor, just due to the rapid reversal that happens in a lift from the hang.

So..........use wrist wraps if you are planning on creating a greater force output in the olympic lifts!!!

A Tale of Two Years

2007-10-14T11:26:00.001-07:00

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.

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

Depth Jump Guide

2007-09-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since my last post, I moved back to LaCrosse Wisconsin a few weeks ago, and have been pretty busy working on getting the paperwork for my master's thesis taken care of amongst other things. Since my literature review for my master's thesis happens to be on plyometrics, and I have read a few good articles about depth jumping off the Canadian Athletics Coaching website lately, I will write some of my thoughts on depth jumping and plyometrics.

Firstly, what is a depth jump? A depth jump is a training movement where one starts by standing on a box which can be 12" to 50+" tall and then steps (not jumps) off, free-falling towards the ground. As soon as contact is made with the ground, the athlete rebounds into a vertical jump. This should be done in one fluid motion. Depth jumping is the exercise origin of what we know here in the USA as 'plyometrics'.

This picture is sort of what goes down in a depth jump

The Rules of Depth Jumping According to Joel Smith:

1. Depth jumps have an extremely high training effect. Full recovery from a true depth jumping session can take anywhere from 4 days to 2 weeks depending on the training load and the work capacity of the athlete.

2. Depth jumps should have the number 1 priority in whatever training cycle they are used in. My standard practice when I was in college, as well as is the standard practice in many Eastern Bloc programs is to use plyometrics in a 1 week microcycle where no heavy weightlifting is used, aside from use as a priming exercise. An example of this type of training week would be performing 4 sets of 10 depth jumps from a 35" box on monday and friday mornings. A light weightlifting workout could be administered on monday and friday nights. No workouts with any significant training effects would be used on tuesday, wednesday or thursday.

3. Depth jumps increase your leaping ability in proportion to your strength levels prior to performing them. The prerequisite of having a 2 to 2.5x bodyweight squat before performing plyometrics was NOT a safety issue. I did 1.5 years of true depth jumps barely being able to squat my own body weight and still increased my vertical a significant amount with no injury. The 2.5x bodyweight recommendation is there to maximize the effectiveness of depth jumps in a training cycle. For example, someone who weighs 150lb, has a standing vertical of 27" and can squat 300lb will gain a lot more out of plyometrics than somebody who weighs 150lb, has a 27" standing vertical and can squat 165lb. Many people are aware of this concept.

4. Depth jumps should be performed with some sort of target in mind. Research has shown that jumping towards a target will increase vertical jump heights, as well as change the biomechanics of the jump. If you play basketball, you should do your depth jumps trying to grab the rim, or dunk a basketball on the rebound. If you are a high-jumper, you should also have some sort of target in mind, but this could also include jumping over something, such as a hurdle on the rebound (this is actually what my master's thesis is on). If you play football, have someone toss a football high in the air during the drop and try to catch it on the rebound, etc......

5. Depth jumps, contrary to popular beleif, do not HAVE to be performed on a soft surface (just don't do them on asphalt, at least not for an extended period of time). It really depends on your sport and this is a point where I will be specific to track and field. The softer the surface involved, the longer the coupling time between eccentric and concentric contractions is going to be. If your sport is sand volleyball, well go ahead and do your plyometrics in the sand or on grass. If you are a long jumper or high jumper, however, you should probably be doing your plyometrics on some type of track surface, or even a wooden basketball court (I am speaking for qualified athletes here who don't have biomechanical abnormalities, especially in the feet). If you have 'bad feet', you probably wan't to be more careful of your plyometric surfaces.

6. Effective depth jumping (if you don't want to be waiting 1 week between workouts) should be preceded by few months of GPP work, as well as weightlifting, olympic lifting, submaximal plyometrics, hill running, sprinting, and the like. The year of track and field where I jumped 7', I didn't do any depth jumps until mid-competitive indoor season. (It is interesting to note, I went from a PR of 6'9 to 6'10.25 to almost clearing 7'0.25 within a 3 week period of true plyometric work after having done some great prep work earlier in the year).

7. The optimal height of the box for 2 foot vertical jumping is the maximum height of the box before your vertical starts to decrease. The optimal height of the box to improve one-legged jumping is the maximal height of the box before the vertical starts to decrease PLUS 4-8 inches. These are for 2 leg box jumps. (Note, don't ask me for a reference on this one.......it's a blend of what I have read and what I have experienced over the years) Higher boxes will build reactive strength while lower boxes will build explosive strength. A recommendation for elite jumpers in russia is .75m (30") for explosive strength and 1.1m (44") for reactive strength, but has also been as low as 6" in some american studies with recreation athletes, so the ability of the athlete is a critical factor.

8. Horizontal falling distance should be accounted for in depth jumping. Your vertical target should be placed about 1.5-1.75x the distance of the height of your box away from the bottom of the box. If you were jumping off of a 36" box, your target should be at least 48" away from the bottom of the box. If you dont put your target far enough away, biomechanically, you will be jumping backwards. Unless you play basketball and are used to getting posterized all the time and want to work on your dunk-blocking ability while players are attempting to posterize you, you don't want to work on jumping backwards.

regards,

Joel
(the ultimate self proclaimed vertical jump expert internet guru of the next millenium!) joking!

Speed Continuum

2007-08-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

I felt like posting this because of some things I have heard lately about the Olympic lifters and powerlifters having such great verticals, and how all athletes should use these techniques to increase their athletic ability in their respective sport. Before I get into this further, I would like to point something out....

The number 1 way to improve your sport movement is to practice that movement. If you want to dunk better, practice dunking.....if you want to throw farther, practice throwing, if you want to pass a test, study the material on the test. Have you ever watched And1 streetball and wondered to yourself how these guys got their leaping ability? Guess what, 3/4 of these guys probably haven't even touched a weight in their life. (Although it can be said that genetic freaks will be awesome at what they do, regardless of training method) Now you can bring up the common argument of, well the average football player has a 37" vertical jump, while the average basketball player only has a 30" vertical jump. You know what the big difference here is though? How much higher than their standing jumps, can these football players reach with a running start? The answer is, not a whole lot.

Now if you are a track and field athlete and you compete in the jumping events, what good does it do you if you have a 33" standing vertical, but can only get up 35" off of one foot with a full run-up. The fact is, the majority of elite high jumpers have standing verticals in the 26-33" range. Occasionally you will get a Charles Austin type jumper with a 38" legit (no combine tricks) standing vert, but this is not common. So why is it that an olympic level high jumper can have such a poor standing vertical but skyrocket off 1 leg. There are several reasons for that answer that I will list:

1. Antropometrics, i.e. build. High-jumpers have long legs, and thin builds which rely heavily on elastic elements (tendon spring) rather than frictional elements (muscle contraction).

2. Bilateral Deficit, It is not uncommon for skill position players in American Football to out-lunge the linemen, even though the linemen have a much better squat than the skill players. Why? Because the linemen don't have to develop power unilaterally nearly as often as the skill players, their power comes from a 2-foot base. High-jumpers are this way also, in that they primarily express power off 1 leg, and their 2 leg activities will suffer. Of course, jumpers trained in the weightroom will quickly make this deficit up, to a degree.

3. Energy Accumulation vs. Dissipation; In high jumping, the ground-contact time is less than .2 seconds. In a standing vertical jump, the ground contact time from initiation of the jump is around .45 seconds. Enough said.

4. Training programs; most high jumpers who include some form of power training in a year round program, will often maintain a lower vertical jump and keep a higher running jump. The only way for someone with a true high jump build to fall behind in their running jump is to exclusively lift weights for an extended period of time. This can be dangerous to a jumper, as it will lengthen their ground contact time and really hurt their ability to effectively display a fast rate of force development off the ground, as well as maintain an effective ratio of frictional to elastic strength.

So, how much should T&F jumpers lift weights in ratio to plyometrics, sprinting, and other activities? Well, the answer will be different for everyone...The jumper who can fly off a 3-step approach, but can't jump well off of a full approach should probably only really have 1 day a week devoted to devleoping explosive or limit strength, while the jumper who can really get up with a 12 step approach, but has nothing off 3 steps may do better to have 2-3 days of good lifting workouts a week, especially in the preseason. I have found that with a balanced type jumper, such as myself, 1 day a week of explosive lifting and 1 day a week of limit strength lifting is quite effective in the special prep period. The main thing to remember is to always be doing some form of speed or jump training at all times in the season, because that is the basis of your event.

Well thats all for now, happy training

Joel, CSCS, USATF level 85 Jumps Coach

Squat Depth

2007-07-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note on my thoughts on squat depth and jumping. First I want to say that most sports probably shouldn't exclusively emphasize one type of squat or squat depth. Different movements should by cycled in and out to prevent staleness and work different muscle groups and motor patterns.

That aside,

For most sports, the majority of squats should be done to parallel or lower at a controlled tempo on the eccentric and a quicker tempo on the way up. For jumps, squats should be done full and deep in the offseason, and also in the pre-season, although box squats can be cycled in pre-season. Once the competitive season is in swing, however, full squats should be avoided within 2 weeks of a big meet and used sparingly.

The only reason for that, in my experience, is that deeper squats are nice for increasing muscular power, and 2 leg jumping, but they can have a slightly negative effect on full approach high jumping in the short term. I feel this is because of the long duration that the muscles must contract for each rep, teaching the body to "accumulate" energy rather than release it.

This is not to say at all that full squats are bad for high jumping, because the body is very plastic, in that, a few weeks after a full squat session, the body will supercompensate with an increase in strength, and when speed based training stimuli are introduced, the results can be spectacular. Case in point, my record high jump performance was 2 weeks out of a full-squat minicycle, followed by 2 weeks of plyo's only (no weights).

Regards,

Joel

p.s. Although different squat variations have a place, I wouldn't advocate an unsupported leg press like that of Ed Zercher as shown here.

My Technical High Jump Manifesto- as of July, 2007

2007-07-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I am at work right now sitting in front of my computer with little to do at the moment, so I would like to take this time to describe my current high jump technical philosophy. I will try to keep this short and understandable.

Here are the points that I will cover,

1. Efficiency
2. Takeoff Angle
3. Bar Clearance
4. Approach Speed

(I put a visual of high jump approach terminology at the end of this post)

In simple terms, the principle behind what I consider effective jumping technique lies in efficiency. I tend to judge jumping efficiency based on the differential between a jumper's best scissor jump and their best traditional full-run jump in competition. Depending on the athlete and their leg length, in an elite jumper with good technique, this difference will be anywhere from 9 to 14 inches. I would consider anything over 12 inches to be very good jumping efficiency. In my own jumping, I reached a maximal scissor jump of 5'11, while jumping 7 feet, and I feel that I reached a very efficient method in my own jumping.

That said, as a coach, until your athlete is reaching 8-12 inches over their best scissors, there are still some technical issues that need to be resolved in your jumper. Once the jumper is over 10-12 inches of difference (unless there is still something obviously wrong, which I would doubt their would be), then the emphasis can simply shift to speed of run-up and explosion in the take-off.

My second point which I beleive is very important is that of individuality in an approach. Many coaches seem to forget that the big approaches that are 15-18 feet out from the standard and start 75 feet back are reserved for those athletes that are running over 7.5-8 meters a second on their approach and are taking off up to a foot before the first standard. I prefer most jumpers in the 2 meter range to have takeoff marks of 9' to 12' away from the standard and 55-65' out from the first mark. Jumpers in the 5'-6' foot range can be even closer, 8'-11' from the standard and 45-60' out from the bar. The variance in approach charactaristics for a given height can be appropriated based on whether the jumper is a power jumper (narrower approach) or speed jumper (wider approach).

Many coaches get frustrated with their jumper for "not holding their arch long enough" or something to that nature. What very few seem to realize is that the body naturally tends to contort itself over the bar in order to clear it, according to the parabolic flight pattern given to it upon launch. If you watch some jump videos in slow motion carefully where a jumper "came down on the bar and should have held their arch", you will see that even if the jumper held their arch, their center of gravity would still be coming down on the bar, and no amount of holding the arch could prevent it.

The key to successful high jumping is finding an approach that minimizes an athletes time over the bar, while still allowing maximal force at the takeoff, and enough rotation to allow the center of gravity to rise as high as possible over the apex of the jump.

Allow me to clarify.

A approach with a big, wide radius will allow for an "easier" plant with less collapse of the takeoff leg and less stress on the ankle. It is also good for jumpers who are taller and lankier, and are unable to cope with the forces of a tight turn and plant, however, it also creates a shallower takeoff angle. What is the takeoff angle? If you drew a line between the last 2 steps of the jumper and kept drawing that line through the pit, and then connected that line with the plane of the standard, that would be your takeoff angle. Most good male jumpers are somewhere in the 40-50 degree range, while most good female jumpers are in the 35-45 range. The problem is, many coaches scheme an approach which causes this angle to fall well below 35 degrees. If your plant angle is less than 35 degrees, well......you won't be jumping too high today, junior.

This is the reason that I beleive, once a jumper knows how to run a curve well, that the radius should be as tight as possible, while still allowing inward lean, and good rotation at takeoff. If the jumper's knee is collapsing and they aren't jumping "up" then the approach can be widened a little bit (that is until they get more isometric strength and I make them go back to a narrow approach!).

Just a quick note on my view of the takeoff.....I don't have much of one, not yet at least, simply because I feel that the takeoff is a pure function of the unconscious mind. Giving the jumper too many things to think about when taking off can be a bad idea, the setup before the takeoff is a lot more important. A lot of coaches tell the jumper to "drive the knee" when taking off. This is probably the only acceptable cue when actually taking off, although it is probably not needed unless the thigh is not reaching 90 degrees when taking off. If the cue to drive the knee is causing MORE than 90 degrees of knee drive, this is a BAD thing, because when the knee is driven beyond this point, it cannot deliver its maximal block, due to a shorter moment arm when the knee drive stops. (I could also see keeping the eyes focused on the back corner of the bar and the standard as a takeoff cue, but that doesn't really have a lot to do with the takeoff).

On to bar clearance.

I beleive bar clearance comes naturally in most jumpers. What doesn't come naturally is the idea that you have to rotate in the air around the bar enough to the point that you don't have to arch and "snap" so much as arch and just extend your legs. So how does this happen, well if the takeoff angle is good (35-55 degrees) and the jumper is landing fairly far back into the pit, then the only factor left is rotation around the bar. Essentially good rotation will, at the apex of a jump, leave a jumpers body in a position that, if they lied completely flat, they would be parallell with the ground, or rotating 90 degrees after takeoff (actaully, 80-90 degrees, there is a little leniency). You will see some jumpers rotate so much at the elite level, they will keep going and almost land on their head. When good rotation is attained, often the jumper will not feel like they had to "force the arch" it just happened.

Often on the high school level and sometimes on the college level, you will hear a jumper say "I was 8 inches over the bar, but then my butt hit it". The 8 inches they are referring to is often their back, which is because the body has only rotated about 45 degrees. Their center of gravity is never more than an inch or two over the bar, and because of poor rotation, they won't make it, no matter how hard they try to arch.

Finally, approach speed. I beleive that the approach speed in high jump should be as fast as humanly possible without collapse of the takeoff leg. The takeoff speed without collapse of the takeoff will (usually) be faster in competition than in practice in the majority of cases, because of the increased competition adrenaline, more motor units are recruited in the knee and hip extensors, take advantage of this.

Well, thats all for now, I may update this in the future, or post ramblings about one aspect or another of technical prowess in the high jump. Most of my future posts will likely take into account physiology moreso than technical issues, however.

Regards,

Joel

Here is a high jump visual that I made, probably not to scale, but hopefully it clarifies any confusing terminology.

First Entry

2007-07-16T04:16:00.000-07:00

Greetings,

As my first post, I would like to share a little bit about myself and what the purpose of this blog is. I have been involved in some form of physical training for sports for the past 12 years, the primary expression of which is an increased ability to defy gravity. I have always been gifted with an above average leaping ability, or perhaps it was just the fact that I was tall when I was younger and my primary goal seemed to be to jump and touch things in the school rooms that no-body else could reach, developing my motor pathways at a young age. Regardless, with just playing basketball, running stairs and doing wall sits and other primitive weightlifting, I acheived my first dunk at the height of 5'11, 3 weeks out of 8th grade.

Throughout high school, I tried various jump improvement programs, until I discovered solid gold in "The Science of Jumping". I improved my 1 and 2 leg jumps about 5 inches in 3 months with this program, which was far above air alert, or anything else at the time was able to bring about. I was now able to pull off most dunks (except between the legs) at a height of 6'0". By my senior year, with some intelligent training, and more strength training, I had increased my leaping ability enough to allow me to bring my head within 1 inch of a basketball goal and touch 2 inches above the top of the square of a basketball hoop.

It was also during high school that I started high-jumping. Going into track with the intention of running the 400m and staying in shape for basketball, I was met with a pleasant surprise with our school's recent investment, high jump mats. My first practice I did 5'2 off a dusty elementary school floor, and reached 6' by the end of my freshman year of high school. Coaching myself, I took this up to 6'8.5" my senior year. (I did not grow in height at all between those 4 years, just gained 20 lb) In college, I increased my best jump to 7'.25" or 2.14m. I also took my triple jump from 42'0 (12.75m) to 46' (14.01m) within the course of a year.

Entering college, I had very high hopes for my track and field performances. During my first two years, I struggled due to other commitments in my academic major (athletic training/sports medicine) because I was not always able to practice with the team. My best high jump over these two years was 2.05m, or 6'8.75. Although this jump probably marks an average improvement of a high school jumper (high school high jumpers don't always improve much their first year or two, or at all!) I switched majors to exercise science my junior year, and in the process, pushed my high jump up over 7 feet and my triple jump over 14 meters.

Now at the age of 23 and post-collegiate, I hope to go above and beyond the 7 foot barrier this coming training season. I also hope to have a job coaching track someday, and I really feel like this is the thing that I have been called to do in this lifetime. Along with the coaching portion, most of what I will be posting will be related to the biomechanics or physiological aspects of training for either high jump, or a great vertical leap in general. I am currently pursuing my masters degree in human performance at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, in hopes of advancing my knowledge as well as improving my chances of securing a collegiate coaching position in the future.

Well, thats about it for now, I'll shortly be posting my philosophy of high jump technique, which is quite far from your traditional ten step-15 feet from the crossbar ideology.

Joel, BA, CSCS