By Tom Kaberna

I want to touch upon the importance of having a set model in your head for any event on the track or in the field.  I strongly believe that before you can be good at what you coach, you need to develop a real solid understanding of what you want your kids to look like by the end of their careers with you.  It is very similar to the classroom.  If you don’t know what you are teaching the students will see it and not have buy in.  They will also struggle because you will be constantly changing what you are saying and how you are teaching the material. 

It will be a long journey, but if your model is sound then your athletes will develop over the long run and they will see great success.  Without having a model most of my best varsity jumpers were stuck between twenty and twenty one feet in long jump and forty one and forty three feet in triple jump. Once I figured out the model I wanted to use they didn’t plateau over time.  I always thought that training them correctly would be more important than technique but it isn’t.  I have a model for the jumpers showing what I want them to look like for acceleration and maximum velocity.  There is a separate model for each jumps event that I coach.

These models serve as a backbone for the athlete’s physical and psychological health.  If they are adhering to the model then they are following what is best biomechanically.  It can also be used as a fallback when athletes are not jumping well.  With the model you can find a specific reason and be able to point out where they are struggling as opposed to blaming it on other things that may or may not be relevant.  This helps the athletes know why they aren’t getting better and gives them a goal of what to work on during the next week. 

Today I will start with some initial thoughts on triple jump before I go into depth with the model I use. 

I often have a dialogue with my own jumpers about triple jump and talk about my approach holistically before I get into the specific technical model I employ.  I make a connection to skipping a rock because most of my athletes have done this in their lives.  They all know that if you throw the rock with too much vertical lift and not enough horizontal speed, the rock will not skip off of the water.  That is the analogy I use for the triple jump most often.  The first phase should be about carrying your speed from the approach and it should be lower than the other two phases.  The next phase is about striking straight up as their speed continues to push them forward.  The last phase is about pushing up and out because at this point the loss of speed is enough that they will need to push out as well as up.

The next thing I speak to their posture throughout the jump, specifically related to their hips.  I use the analogy of a bucket of water for their hips and how I don’t want to see the bucket pour out of the front during their jump.  Any athlete that has a butt out posture, with their lower back caved in, is setting themselves up for pushing flat on their second phase every time.  No matter how much knee lift these athletes get they will not be able to get any bounce because their hips will always be pointed down which will be the direction of their push. The mechanics follow that if your hips are tilted forward then your chest is leaned over slightly and your butt is behind you, therefore you can only push forward.  These same thoughts can be used for sprinting mechanics when you are in max velocity but the athlete always looks like he is about to fall over. 

If you can start your athletes going low off of the board with good posture you are on the right track for bigger things to come down the line.