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It may be due to my ignorance, but when people talk about essential points to vaulting, especially in u.s.a, "speed is key." I never hear anyone talk about increasing vertical leap. With a huge take off height surely u could get away with being a "short arse" to be blunt. My only inkling is that the vault happens to quickly to have say a 100 cm jump. Im an ex high jumper and b'ball player so i can understand these concepts in these circumstances, and as im not in the know, i ask is it trully essential in your vault? what do others have to say about the actual "jumping" bit

Take a look at my posts this year. The critical importance of 100 speed is the great Amurican pole vault myth - just like the importance of the Bench press was to Amurican shot putters thirty years ago. It enables vaulters to explain average or poor results away as being - 'cause I dont have good speed' when what they really mean is "I am not prepared to work hard at the drills needed to develop MY TECHNIQUE".

To preempt the howls of abuse this statement will inevitably produce I will point out that I do understand that there is a relationship between speed and vault performance - but that correlation only comes into play when the vaulters overall technique is good and when their take off mechanics can handle the speed. As I point out in BTB, the faster you are going in a car when you lose control - the bigger the smash.

I would also point out that the emphasis on speed is based on the cannon notion of pole vaulting and not the four stage rocket I have proposed or the 'continuous chain method' agapit suggests.

im talking about leap here, like when you take off, the explosive height in take off, now i would be stupid to base my whole technique around this, as you said, but surely a huge jumping height would improve ur vault considerably, it means u wouldnt have to be amazingly fast surely?

After not working my legs out fo 2 years I have a 34in. standing vertical leap

altius wrote: As I point out in BTB, the faster you are going in a car when you lose control - the bigger the smash.

Eek. Thats what I need to work on...I'm the fastest vaulter at all my meets, and I need to learn to harness the speed.

Iduno, lately my coach has been emphasizing the upward jump, as too many people on my team just kind of run in to the jump.

mecham has your "34 inch vertical leap" resulted in good vaulting? heights arent everything but they can give a good reflection, have they increased in the those 2 years?

Like Altius says jumping is a key element in pole vaulting. Without it you are just reducing the power input you have into the whole PV equation. We all want more power in our vault right? It is incredibly neglected in the US as a whole and we need to rectify that as much as possible.

Too prove the point about the value of vertical input into the PV system I will relate a story from my high school days. I trained with Rick Baggett and many great athletes at CCC back in 99, 00. One of these people was David Lemen. He was/is an incredibly gifted athlete and went to Georgia on a full ride after CCC and was 2nd at the NCAA's in the decathalon although the year escapes me. Anyway, one day at practice Rick was rather frustrated with our preoccupation with our speed on the runway especially since we were running from only 6L. So he had David take his run from 6L-4L and told everyone to pay attention. We all watched anxiously as the bar went up to 16+ and sure enough David jumped like a gazelle and blew up 16+ easy from a 4L "run". Rick turned around to all of us and said "See you don't need speed to vault high so knock it off and start jumping at takeoff". We all looked very ashamed of ourselves and then put our energy into jumping at takeoff.

To frame the story I know speed is an important part of the vault. However, I think we in the US have gotten drunk on our speed in the pole vault. In doing so we've neglected other key elements in the vault like jumping at takeoff, swinging long, etc. We need to train and reinforce a more holistic approach to the event and not get stuck on one piece of the pie as an end all answer.