In the last few weeks I received various emails with
the same question; is speed approach the most important thing to achieve a good
jump? First
let me ask a question to all of you, if speed is the most important thing to
achieve a good jump, why there are so many triple jumpers out there capable of
running 10.05/10.40sg at 100m and yet they are still unable to jump even 16.00m?
There are many factors to achieve a good jump, and I
would to discuss what I think they are the most important for me. Naturally a
triple jumper needs to have good speed but he also needs coordination, rhythm,
a really good reaction on the ground and, the most difficult to achieve, the ability
to maintain or increase the speed between jumps. An athlete can even have a good ability in all these factors and yet still not be able to pass the barrier
of 16m, and this has to do with his ability to create time and space between
jumps.
Some coaches, when their athletes start to have
problems in improving his personal record, the first thing that they want to
improve is the speed approach. These coaches forget that in triple jump; you cannot
concentrate only in improving one technique, because as I always said,
everything has to be balanced. If you want to improve the speed, the athlete
also has to be prepared to handle that speed from take-off until the final jump.
To be clearer, if you work to improve the
speed, it also has to work with
plyometric exercises to improve the coordination between the arms and legs,
rhythm, power of reaction at the time of impact on the ground, posture and the
hip position during jumps. Then you have
to put all that work together to get the balance directed to develop a good
jump.
For an athlete to have the ability to create time
and space between jumps, he needs a combination of a good sense of rhythm, and
the ability to maintain or increase the speed between jumps. These two factors
have to work together to carrying a good jump. When an athlete has good speed approach,
of course it has an advantage, but the problem is, how to control that speed
for a good jump? To give you an example,
I have helped athletes who managed to jump 17.05m with 7 step approach and when
he performed jumps from 12 step approach, their jumps results were the same
distance or lower than 17m, therefore, speed
control plays a big role in these results.
Therefore to improve these issues, we started working
to control the approach, and work with plyometric exercises to improve the time
and space between jumps. I want to
clarify that these exercises should be performed with speed between obstacles,
for example cones or hurdles. It is very important that these exercises are
conducted under the supervision of your coach
That entire problem has to do with control of speed;
it is not how fast you run, but it having the ability to control the speed approach.
