Congrats to THP athlete @dillan_mccarthy on setting a new world record vertical jump of 52 inches!
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Deficit training is a low hanging fruit for jumping higher. Often times athletes will heavily bias their strengths during training, but by doing so, create a larger gap between strengths and weaknesses that ends up stalling results (i.e. you developed a bigger engine but donât have the chassis to support it).
Remember, there are multiple qualities that need to be developed over time to peak performance.
A comprehensive program should be addressing the important qualities all year round but dosing them in different volumes while intensifying training to maximize adaptation. Individual athletes may spend more time in certain phases than others.
While we do want to get your strengths stronger, itâs much easier to pick low hanging fruits that have a lot of remaining potential.
Often times youâll see much larger improvements in limited areas of performance in the same time period of training vs if you were just hammering your strengths, ultimately leading to a better improvement in jump height.
These are very baseline numbers, but are a useful guide nonetheless for jumpers not yet at a high level.
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One way to think about sprint speed is by analyzing contact length and contact time.
Contact length is the distance your COM travels during ground contact while contact time is the duration of that ground contact.
Contact length divided by contact time = contact velocity, which is analogous to your running velocity.
If you want to maximize sprint speed, you want to optimize contact length and minimize contact time.
Elite sprinters land in about 161 degrees of knee extension (poor sprinters 145), flex to 149 at maximum flexion (poor sprinters 133), and takeoff at 151 (poor sprinters 167).
As you can see, all sprinters will âloadâ the leg for about 12deg but poor sprinters will âreboundâ 34deg (elite sprinters only 2deg). This not only decreases contact length (because the leg is more flexed), but also increases contact time, leading to lower velocities.
Higher knee extension at touchdown is a result of more aggressive extension during terminal swing, usually as a byproduct of higher knee position at maximum thigh flexion during swing, which gives the leg more room to accelerate downward into the proper position.
Given adequate stiffness, this will spike the GRF during the first half of ground contact.
Less knee extension at toe off minimizes ground contact time (the force produced here is only about 15lbs).
As far as upper leg extension goes at takeoff (Ralph Mannâs proxy for hip extension), elite sprinters will be in the middle ground (156deg). Poor sprinters will under extend the thigh (163deg) in an attempt to recover the thigh too soon & over extend (149)
Even though Bolt was a genetic specimen, he wouldnât have ran 9.58 just by sitting on the couch eating potato chips
Genetics only determine about half of the battle, the other half is TRAINING â¨Just like anyone else, if a freak athlete doesnât put in the work, he wonât reach his true genetic potential.
You can have a high amount of fast twitch fibers or very stiff tendons, but you still need to put in the REPS to develop the necessary intra and inter muscular coordination to actualize your neuromuscular potential.
You also need to get in shape so you can develop the work capacity in order to HANDLE the training volumes necessary to become an elite sprinter or athlete.
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Elite jumpers extend their hips before they extend their knees.
By extending their hips just before the knees, they are able to send more energy down the kinetic chain to increase distal joint angular velocities and drive powerful lower limb extension. Some bio-mechanicists may refer to this as a âthrow likeâ or âsequentialâ extension movement pattern.
đChiu et al 2014 found that a longer relative time delay between pelvis/hip extension and knee extension was highly correlated with higher CMJ heights
đFuchs et al. 2019 also found proximal to distal sequencing during spike jumps in male volleyball players (higher jump heights) but not females.
In the males, the glute max achieved maximal activation before the distal musculature whereas in females the rec fem & VL reached full activation first on the plant leg with delayed gluteal activation.
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One interesting thing hearing experts in 40yd dash talk about is how much of it can be modeled and what KPIs athletes need to hit
You can use split times to figure out if an athlete is more early vs late acceleration or max velocity deficient by comparing it to normative data (note: these were note Worthyâs splits, these are the calculated average splits to run a 4.20).
This makes it easier to design training programs to bring up weaknesses and work on mechanical deficiencies.
Another simple way is to count the steps.
It has been traditionally observed that athletes will increase their stride frequency at fast speeds while stride length remains rather constant
But this is merely a representation of what an athlete does to increase their velocity with their CURRENT force production capabilities and may not actually be the strategy to getting them faster.
Cueing athletes to increase their stride frequency without an idea of the actual force expression required for faster sprinting just leads to shorter GCTs with less force production, smaller stride lengths, and slower velocities.
Ultimately, you want to get 5 yards in 5 steps (really 4.5 steps, your 5 step should be beyond the 5yd line), 10 yards in 7 steps (6.5 steps) and run the whole 40 in less than 20 steps (Worthy ran it in just 19 steps).
One key sprint position Ralph Mann talked about extensively is knee to knee separation at touchdown.
Elite sprinters at top speed (in the 100m) have the knees in line or the swing leg slightly in front at touchdown. This indicates the sprinter is achieving proper timing in the sprint and is able to sprint with front side mechanics.
Poor sprinters have a much wider gap between the knees at touchdown OR are even recovering the leg TOO soon to where the swing leg knee is far out in front (this can be the case if the figure 4 position is over-emphasized).
Having a large gap between the knees (sprinting with backside mechanics) can lead to a cascade of issues.
The swing leg will not be able to get to a high front side position in time, giving little room for the thigh to accelerate downward to create fast foot tangential velocities to spike the GRF, as well as lead to early touchdown and larger touchdown distances (and thus braking), which then leads to longer contact times, slower stride frequencies, and wasted energy.
But itâs IMPORTANT to also realize thereâs context here.
For instance, some athletes may attempt to make for slow recovery by folding the lower leg more during swing, but this can decrease contact length, lead to unwanted increases in air time, or increase forward foot speed at TD (more braking)
Knee to knee separation at touchdown will also be larger in the longer sprints (like the 400), fatigued scenarios, team sport athletes, and younger or weaker athletes.
Part 1 of how to turn your Achilles into a spring
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Outside of actual sprinting, single leg RSI is one of the largest indicators of an athleteâs speed potential.
Hops and bounding variations build âelasticâ reserves by exposing the athlete to higher forces than they would experience in sprinting, making it easier to tolerate the forces in sprinting to decrease ground contact time (which is the ultimate limiter to speed) by generating the vertical impulse needs for stride length in less time.
These single leg variants also improve dynamic control of the entire chain and quickly expose weaknesses more so than their double leg variations (though DL RSI can still be a good indicator of elastic capacities). You canât hide when you hop.
Notice how easily Linford Christie is able to manage these contacts and how far he displaces with each hop & clears the hurdles with ease. This is indicative of true power and someone who is capable of running very fast.
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As the story goes, it was too cold during the Soviet Union winters to train outside, so Verkhoshansky had to train his athletes indoors. But there wasnât enough space to run, all he had was an old barbell.
At first, Verkhoshansky utilized heavy half squats as a more âspecificâ means to increase his athleteâs explosive strength. He got good results, but he soon realized two things:
1. After doing very heavy loads on a back squat (160kg+), his athleteâs got back pain and couldnât continue training.
2. The back squat wasnât even remotely close to exposing the athletes to the forces they see in triple jump (which he measured to be 300kg+ in only a 120ms GCT).
So from this, he developed the depth jump (as well as other plyometric exercises), which used the kinetic energy of a falling mass to create a âshockâ to the system.
While the forces per leg are still less than you would see in a triple jump (imagine running 20mph and then trying to hop on one leg), it still served as a means to enhance the athleteâs reactive capacity and explosive strength (some athletes saw 20%+ level increases, including 10%+ max strength increases).
Through years of experimentation, Verkhoshansky found that 75cm was the most optimal height for the development of reactive abilities and 115cm for the development of maximal force in the takeoff when it came to depth jumps.
He found depth jumps were best used after periods of strength training and specific jumping exercises (usually towards the end of their winter prep period).
You can see some of this âconjugate sequence systemâ at play here in this old video.
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Power Clean 101. Your 3rd pull needs to be aggressive & hereâs why.
đDM me THP if want a FREE ebook on how to train to jump higher (plyos, jump technique, periodization models & more!)
Opening vid via @conor6758
