By Tom Kaberna

Last week I went into the how I get to my model for long jump.  This week I will talk about the common errors and corrections I deal with on a weekly basis.

First I would like to say that I film each and every meet.  I have not been able to find a better way for the athletes to buy into what they are doing wrong and the changes that need to be made for them to improve without it.  It is actually fun for me to watch the film and try to see what we need to work on the next week. 

Approach Length

One of the bigger errors I have seen is having an approach length that is too short.  Many times an athlete does not have enough time to get up to full speed with their approach length thus limiting their potential jump length.  One of the problems I see is a lot of high schools don’t have runways that can handle anything more than 16 steps total so that is the maximum steps I use for my fastest jumpers.  My younger jumpers are mostly on 14.

A lot of times when I see kids slowing down around the board I don’t feel as if it is that their approach length is too long.  Many times I believe it is their distribution of acceleration to max velocity and could also be they are preparing to jump way too early thus causing them to slow down too much at the end.    

Dropping Hips before Penultimate touches ground

This is one of the biggest problems I see with my own athletes.  Too many times athletes want to drop their hips a couple of steps out.  This leads to an excessive slowing down at the end of their run which negatively affects their jump.  It also leads to their penultimate step landing too far in front of their body because the previous step doesn’t have any bounce to it which doesn’t give that foot enough time to come around and underneath them. 

We start with 4 step long jumps focusing on pushing up on their 3^rd to last step as opposed to either pushing flat or not really pushing at all.  After we film and make sure the athlete is indeed pushing up on that step we move back to 6 step long jumps to introduce more speed.  The athlete is told to focus on that side and that step only.  This change can take months depending on how long they have been having this problem. 

Dropping hips too low during Penultimate

You can usually tell this error by the height the athlete gets off of the board.  A lot of times when my athlete goes much higher than usual it just tells me that they gave too much during their penultimate and thus their jump foot is too far in front of them so they pop up instead of out. 

During practice I cue them to not give in the knee just to land flat footed.  We film many repetitions from a shorter approach and make sure they have the feeling down before we lengthen it with more speed.  This can take a couple sessions to get out of their system.  Many athletes in their mind believe they need to dip low to jump far which is not true. 

Throwing chest/head back at takeoff

A lot of my younger jumpers must have been told to throw their head or chest back at takeoff because it is very common when they first start jumping.   Someone must have told them at one point to do this or they believe if they do they will get more height.

In practice we work on taking off with feeling your chest forward at takeoff.  I freeze frame the video at toe off and if we see both the shin angle and chest angle going in the same direction then that is all I am looking for.  I tell my athletes that if your chest or head is going back but the rest of your body is going forward then those are two parts of your body going in different directions and it will cause more harm than good.  This usually only takes a few sessions to fix if you focus on it. 

The list above doesn’t cover them all obviously but it is a good start to what I see and how I fix it.  To conclude the long jump next week I will share some questions that I get from people about the event and my answers.   If you have any questions for me that you would like answered in that blog post please email Mike Newman at [email protected] and he will put together the questions.