PoleVaultPower.com

i really love to vault, and i want to know what i should do between season to be better the next? ( i am now doing cross country, but i cant decide if i'll wrestle againt this year)

Use the search button. It's right under the 'College' tab on the red bar. There are dozens of posts on this.

along with what you find in the searches, some of the best drills to do on the off season to keep up your technique are "A-Skips", "B-Skips", "Fast-Leg", "High Knees", "Plyometric Hurdles", "Butt-Kicks", "Bounding" "3-Step drills", and "slide boxes".

Maybe not the sliding boxes... but those sprint drills are good to do. Lift, run, drill, repeat.

DO NOT DO CROSS COUNTRY!! IT WILL SCREW UP WHAT RUN YOU MAY HAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i couldn't agree more with the previous post. cross country will teach you to run flat, and will develop slow twitch muscles. thats completely opposite of what you want for polevault. if you have the resources, obviously the best thing you can do is to join a club where you can vault all year round, but if thats not a possibility, the drills mentioned above are good, also use a pole (or some type of pvc pipe if you dont have access to an actual pole) and do planting/high knee drills

plyos are the best thing to do to keep those fast twitch fibers firing.

True dat...

ladyvolspvcoach wrote:DO NOT DO CROSS COUNTRY!! IT WILL SCREW UP WHAT RUN YOU MAY HAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THAT IS NOT TRUE! saying that cross country messes up your run is complete bogus! that is just a myth. your slow twitch and fast twitch muscles have nothing to do with each other. if one gets stronger then the other will not get weaker. i actually thought the same thing up until high school when an extremely smart anatomy and physiology teacher corrected me. running cross country will only improve your stamina or even increase your speed.

If you like wrestling thats not a bad idea. Just avoid the long distance runs, tell them you will do sprints and plyos instead . But wrestling should keep you lean but strong going into track. Definitely dont lose the quickness in your legs though, keep up with explosive lifts like hang clean and pylos like standing triple jumps. It wouldn't hurt to get in to just do some 4-step vaulting every once in a while too. Taking months off from ever touching a pole can sometimes really screw up your progress when you get back into it.

It has nothing to do with fast twitch muscles it has to do with the type of runnng that cross country teaches.. It is diametrically opposite of the way that you need to run for speed on the runway. It takes my crosscountry athletes an entire season to alter the way they run to be able to begin to advance in the pole vault. But if you want to stay at heights less that 14 feet. Rock on dude do the two mile till you drop!

It just depends on what kind of program the cross country team has set up. I coach cross country and in our program, athletes such as my pole vaulters can join the team and do more of a cross-training program. They sometimes run with the distance group, but less mileage, and some days they are doing plyos/strength instead. We encourage all of the track kids not in football/volleyball/soccer to do cross country.

Cross Country made me a MUCH better pole vaulter. I started track as a junior with a gymnastics background and NO cardiovascular fitness and horrible running form. Cross county helped me get stronger for the next track season so that I was able to get more out of my track workouts.