John's BLOG
Coaching, jumps, sprints & more
Everything about jumping and sprinting and how to improve your performance
In today’s YouTube channel video I answer some of the questions which resulted from the video before this (https://youtu.be/ivFQMrT3m6Q) one which looked at how downhill sprints and drills can improve on flat sprinting.
In response to that video I got quite a few comments and questions. The first question: What you can do in a competition environment if you don’t have a down grade to use. In answer to this I explain and detail how you can use plyometrics and weights to create a simialr effect. Plyos would be the obvious choice as they can be done with nothng but yourself! I explain what loadings and reps work best. The second question references what happens if you regularly do downhill sprinting. I talk about the pros and cons and note that all traning sessions should be potentiating. If you’ve any specific questons on this video or any others then do leave them in the section below.
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It’s great coaching jumpers and sprinters. I’ve been doing this for over 15 years and I’ve had quite a bit of success. I’ve coached a European Junior Champion, had athletes go to the European indoor and soon outdoor championships. I have even produced age group British record holders and numerous internationals across all age ranges. I’ve coached athletes onto UKA funding programmes.
On social media - something that’s often neglected by coaches - I’ve close to 60,000 subscribers. My youtube channel gets thousands of views everyday … yet financially I can struggle to do what I appear to be pretty good at! I’m probably one of the few “professional” coaches in the UK who’s not working for a governing body. Most of us coaches do so for little financial reward. Yes, I have worked for the England, Welsh, Great Britain and Irish federations (and others), but this work is occasional. I therefore make the majority of my money from the athletes I coach and from my social media (and the odd bit of writing … my most recent “proper” job!). Athletics is a sport some say that is in decline … yes, compared to when I was an international long jumper in the eighties and nineties the sport has declined in terms of its global presence on sports top table and also at senior level domestically in terms of strength in depth. However, it is still probably after football the most practised sport in the world. Access to running and jumping and to a degree throwing and vaulting does not require huge financial outlay for most and facilities are often to be found. What’s not to be found in many countries are truly qualified, professional and experienced coaches to coach these athletes. Nearly everyday I get messages from athletes at home and abroad asking me to coach them. Obviously I can’t … and then many will expect this to be for free if I did. It’s hard to fathom how people can expect athletics’ coaches to work for nothing. And coaching can be work. You have training programmes to write, athletes to manage, coaching sessions to supervise often 2-4 times a day. The requirements go on and on. Like many coaches in our sport I will often go out of my way to help those I coach. I feel “responsible”. We don’t want to see talent wasted. Yet, often this is a one way flow. The coach despite being central to the sport often sits on the periphery. I coach Jahisha Thomas in the UK with Clive Thomas her US based coach. Jahisha recently got selected for the European Championships in Munich this August. This is great and I’m proud to have contributed to her development. However, when asked if I could go and support her I got anxious. Stressed, as I will have to find the money to go to Germany myself. And I don’t have the £1000 that’s needed to get there. There is no funding to help coaches go and even when (and if) there I’ll have to buy tickets to the arena in hope that I can help her. The latter factors are understood, British Athletics can’t have accreditation for 100 odd coaches (due to team size). However, perhaps support via other mechanisms should be in place. Perhaps there should be a fund set up to help coaches get to championships … grants perhaps. Something and not nothing. However, there is a fundamental further issue here. We have a professional sport at the elite level that relies largely on amateur coaches at this and all other levels. The “do it for nothing” cohort of coaches of my generation won’t be around forever and younger coaches won’t enter the “profession” if they can’t support themselves. I feel awkward, odd, worried writing this… however, perhaps the hidden (majority) voice should not remain so. There are many coaches who moan particularly about the establishment and the “poaching” of athletes. I’m not one of them … that’s a rather stuck record. Rather I want athletics coaches to be valued to be able to do what they are good at for a living wage. We can’t just think - as many old school coaches do - that charging for our services is wrong. I’m actually guilty here to a degree … I have undervalued myself. How do I know? People have offered me more than I have wanted to charge them and have suggested that I need to if not charge the big bucks at least truly value what a lifetime of knowledge and success has provided me with. (My accountant will be happy I’ve come to this realisation albeit a little late!). One last point: I do coach thousands for free via my social media. At athletics meetings invariably I now get recognised and thanked for the work I do. This also happens virtually from messages received on-line from home and abroad. There is a dearth of accessible on-line coaching material for coaches working at the “real” level of our sport - club and below elite level. What’s the point of knowing how an elite athlete trains and how they improved by a tenth, for example, when a club coach wants to know how to teach a sprinter with no training how to run efficiently! It’s not just athletes who reach out to me for help. If you’d like to help me get to Munich then follow this link: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=N6SSLEXAQMGGU What did you thinks of the Oregon World Champs? There were of course some great, great performances ... but for me as a jumps coach Pablo Pichardo stood out for a number of reasons - although perhaps (in the UK at least) his winning leap and gold was not celebrated as much as it should probably have been. Pichardo's world-leading leap of 17.95 metres saw off Burkina Faso's Hugues Fabrice Zango and China's Yaming Zhu. Technical comment Pichardo is very much of the Cuban triple jump school with his approach run rhythm and his jumping style and "bounce". Do recall that Pichardo was born and developed his triple jump craft before switching to Portugal (see more below). Cuban jumpers are very explosive and have great "bounce". For reference other styles of jump are power, speed and strength. There is also what's known as the Polish style (flat trajectory and fast) and the Russian style which uses higher trajectories and greater strength. Pichardo is also pretty unique in that he sets his hop phase up in a way not to dissimilar to a long jumper. As you can see in the video below he drops his hips and drives into the hop. This will enable more vertical velocity to be achieved for the hop ... most advice is to keep that to a minimum and to run flat through the take-off, keeping the take-off angle very slow circa 16%. Some of my jumpers adopted the Pichardo set, but they are not springy enough nor fast enough to profit from it at this stage in their jumping. So, I encourage them to run fast and flat through the hop take-off - with control of course. Setting up the hop is vital to a long triple jump and great confidence and technique is required to perform it optimally. The free thigh must drive forward and then drop down long as the hop leg is pulled through is a large arc. Lifting the arms and chest at take-off can aid the performance of a good hop. It takes time and practise to do this and initially it may be necessary to under hop and slow the approach down a little when developing the triple jumping craft. There are plenty of videos on my channel looking at triple jump and the hop so do check these out. You can view one below. World Triple Jump Final Event Report courtesy of RedBull Pichardo came into the championship with the 2021 Diamond League triple jump crown and a 2022 World Indoor Championships silver medal to his name following his winning Olympic leap in Japan last August. Before his switch to Portuguese nationality in December 2017 and competitive outings from August 2019, Pichardo earned two world outdoor silver medals and one world indoor silver medal for Cuba. Pichardo led qualification with 17.16m. In the final, Pichardo jumped 17.95m on his first attempt to claim the top spot on the podium from Zango's season's best of 17.55m for silver and Zhu's season's best of 17.31m for bronze . Significantly Pichardo also landed jumps of 17.92m, 17.57m and 17.51m to underline his superiority over the rest of the field, In this week’s Friday video on my YouTube channel (Fri 1 2022) we take a look at what is known as potentiation. Potentiation involves the specific combination of drills, activities and conditioning methods in a way which is deigned to boost the power output of muscles.
Put simply the combination of dynamic activities is seen to increase neural excitement and enable the body to recruit more amounts of fast twitch muscle fibre and the motor units which recruit them. Fast twitch fibre is “difficult” to fully recruit under “normal” circumstances, it needs large amounts of neural energy to provide the stimulation. Potentiating training is seen as a way to provide this stimulation. There are various protocols and ideas as to how to potentiate training. You can combine related weights exercises with related plyometric/jump exercises - for example, heavy load jump squats and drop jumps. Another option could be weighted sled pulls and/or lighter sled and unresisted runs. It’s also possible to potentiate competitive and technical jump training. You could, for example, include rebound jumps or jump squats between jumps and there is research on this. There is a considerable amount of research that indicates that potentiating training works and works well at that. There are, however, some caveats - for example, some research indicates that those jumpers and sprinters with a higher level of strength will respond more to potentiation. In the video I focus on potentiating sprinting and jumping directly. The jump enhancing research I eluded to above - which involved national level decathletes - showed that when long jumping vertical velocity was improved after plyometric activity. Improvements of over 20cm were attributed to the potentiating activity. The research included a control group who jumped without performing the potentiating plyometrics and they did not improve their vertical take-off velocity and resultant distance in the same way. THIS GOT ME THINKING “I’LL DO MY OWN EXPERIMENTING” I decided to start my own research. I want to see how I can potentiate jump training. This would obviously seem to be the most important potentiating transference for me as a jumps coach and I’d assume for many of you reading this. (Note: I do include lots of other potentiating activity in my day to day training - more on this in another post/video). However, I have never - until this point - actually directly tried to potentiate actual jumping. So, we started with u20 Ruby (best of 6.09m). I decided to start with Ruby as despite her 6m jump she’s not able to generate as much vertical velocity as I might have thought she could. I have identified this from eccentric overload take-off work in the past. We have been working on developing this quality over the last training phase. Protocol: Loaded jump squats (concentric emphasis) 3x3 @ 16kg circa 20% of her bodyweight Eccentric emphasis take-offs from 10 steps with a 3cm mat placed on the pen step (You’ll have probably seen these take-off developing jumps in my videos - I am a very firm believe in them), Rationale: I wanted to see whether the jump squats would lead to the potentiation of the eccentric long jump take-offs and specifically an increase in height from the take-off I chose concentric jump squats as a large amount of neural energy is needed to lift up from the weight and due to the jumps being paused between each rep, the landing has an eccentric (blocking) emphasis. Session protocol: Ruby did one jump before implementing the potentially potentiating jump squats. She then did a take-off (mat on penultimate step. 10 step approach as noted) 90sec later. There was slightly more vertical lift at take-off compared to the first jump (this could of course have been a response to the first jump … it’s always going to take some time to get into a session). Then 90sec later 3 more jump squats were taken and then 90sec later a further jump (take-off) was made. This time I could see more power on the run-up and also at take-off via more height. Obviously I’m going on my coach’s eye here and no high-tech kit was used. However, Ruby corroborated what I saw with how she “felt” when jumping. Ruby then did a further jump without the jump squats and this one was not do good - note there are so many reasons why a jump may not be as good as the previous or subsequent one … less proficient take-off, less proficient approach and so on. We did a further 3 jumps squats and another couple of jumps - keeping so similar rest intervals. Interestingly Ruby’s performance of the jump squats was better (consider that potentiation works in both directions) and that on one of the jumps the take-off was really good. Conclusions It would seem that the potentiating loaded jump squats may have assisted with gaining height and therefore increased vertical velocity at take-off. This was evident on 2-3 take-offs from the 6 in particular. I will continue to experiment with Ruby and some of the senior jumpers. I will stick with loaded jump squats initially but in time may also try rebound/drop jumps. It’ll be interesting to see what happens and whether certain jumpers respond more than others. Potentiation should occur and even if it didn’t the training design will specifically help with developing jump power. With my knowledge of jump training and potentiation it would appear very unlikely that no potentiating benefits would not occur. Look our for more updates and finding and head over to the YouTube channel for more too. Why not become a channel member of my YouTube site and find out through exclusive videos information which will directly improve you as a coach or athlete. |
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