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During practice my coach told me that I need to work on holding the drive and spacing between my legs, and to not swing until later. I started doing 3 and 4 step approaches holding at about 8 feet on a 12' 130 pole (I usually hold about 10'6). Doing this I was able to swing better and hold it off. However at the end of practice Ir everted to my 5 step from 58 holding at 10'6. Obviously I was running faster, but I was also tired and my step had been taken at the beginning of practice. I was essentially unable to accomplish any good aspects of the jump. I got almost no penetration and barely passed verticle and into the pits. I think it may have been that seeing as my legs were sore, I was having to take a long step as a last step and therefore was not able to push off and drive. Are there any other reasons that this could happen? I will try tommorrow when I am fresh and see if that has any differences. Also does anyone have good drills that would help with prolonging a drive and holding the seperation. I already do the drill where you jump onto the mat and hold your swing, then kick the mats. I also know of the one handed run and then do a good drive, but I find that very akward and it wont work until I am better at driving.

I forgot to mention, My coach says that I get my body in front of the pole too early, and need to hold it behind by pushing the pole. CAn anyone explain this more and give some stratagies.

It is hard to tell without seeing a video of your jump. But as far as holding your take off and delaying your swing, that is a highly debated topic. I like to use the term 'completing your take off' instead of delaying. A lot of vaulters, especially less experienced vaulters have a tendency to have the pole pick them up off the ground when they plant it, rather than really jumping and having a good chest drive. If the pole just yanks you off the ground without your really jumping and leading with your chest, this will also resort in you most likely having a bent trail leg and having to force yourself to vertical by just picking your legs up. So in a since, actually jumping and driving your chest up into the air with your hands up high will appear to the outside eye, and even feel like it to you, that your swing is delayed, however you still start the swing pretty much when you leave the ground.

The good jump and chest drive will also keep you 'behind' the pole as your coach mentioned and allow you to push the pole deeper into the pit.

Hello,

As VaultPurple said, it's quite hard to really help if we can't see what's going on so a video would be very beneficial.

I actually wanted to address something about the drills:

First off, about the swing. If your technique with the swing is very good you should actually be able to move the pole more when you swing compared to when you hold the swing back. A lot of people do funny things during the swing however such as pulling with the arms and clinching/rowing down hard through the shoulders to try and get upside down. There are other issues such as posture and body state (staying solid) which can adversely affect the swing if lacking or not done correctly. If you're noticing that the pole is not penetrating when you swing, there is a good chance you are making a mistake while swinging. When you swing, you *should* penetrate more provided your swing technique is good.

With regards to holding the drive, you really do not gain anything by doing that in terms of penetration in my opinion. All the energy that is used for the initial penetration of the pole (before the swing) is put into the system at take-off. No more energy can be used to penetrate the pole until the swing. I know it *looks* like you are really doing something and making the pole penetrate more by holding that position - and you are in a sense - but in actual fact all you can really do in terms of penetration is maintain the energy going into the system and you do that by maintaining a solid body. Think about it, once you leave the ground you have lost all connection with anything for you to push off of with your legs so therefore you cannot generate more energy - unless you make an acceleration with your center of mass somewhere (like swinging). Holding the position will not give you more penetration, it will only help to maintain your penetration. And maintaining the penetration is due to the body state - which holding the position will help you to do. Lastly, swinging (done correctly) will give you more penetration.

So what is the point of the whole drill of "holding the position" -
This is what we call an *emphasis/exaggeration drill* in which we will actually over-emphasize a movement to ensure that it is learned properly. It is a teaching technique rather than an absolute simulation of reality. The position is important because it is a critical phase that needs to be achieved after the vaulter leaves the ground. Ideally, we want the position to be achieved but we actually want it to be as short as possible. It is important to remember that in the whole sequence of pole vault you are NEVER waiting for something or not moving (like holding the position). Leave the waiting on the bench when it's not your turn to jump!

For the position, the coaches use that as a check to make sure that when you do leave the ground that:
A) You are in the right position indicating that your run, plant and take-off technique was good and
B) You can maintain that position indicating that you have taken off in alignment behind the pole and have done so with a solid body (you cannot maintain that position if you did not do both)
When you get the drill right you are doing all of the above very well. In effect, the purpose of the drill is to make sure that your technique is good and not directly to get more penetration. However, doing the drill well will result in more penetration not because you are holding anything but as a result of all the things you practiced for the drill - good run, plant, take off and solid body position. Now you will have to translate all of those good things into a real vault where you will have to try and swing as fast as possible after completing the take off. In other words, we *hold* to *emphasize* good things in the drill, not to directly achieve more penetration.

Now there is the issue with holding the position and completing a take off. Yes the two are related but they are not exactly the same thing. You can have a bad take off and thus have a bad position - but you can still hold it in the air (it will look ugly, your trailing leg will be bent considerably and your ankle will be dorsiflexed/pointing to the pad also your hips will probably be misplaced). As a result, just because you are holding a position does not mean you are accomplishing anything. The lack of penetration might be due to your run and take off as you have alluded to. Just be very vigilant and discerning at what you are observing.

As I see it there are several potential problems in what you've described.

Although I can't see 100% of what is going on by the sound of it I'm concerned that you guys may be misappropriating the drills.

Are you having problems penetrating? You need to work on the run, plant, take off and a good body position in the air. Do the holding drill, not to penetrate but to improve your technique. That will lead to better penetration. The point of a drill is to improve technique.

Is the pole slowing down considerably when you do swing? Then the quality of the swing technique is bad.

In the full vault, there is zero holding. The instant you achieve the good body position, you must pull the trigger on the swing. It should happen quite naturally because of all the stretching factors on your body provided everything else went well. If you are having difficulties with the swing timing, you need to practice the swing timing by itself - not by doing the holding drill. The holding drill has very little to do with swing timing. The only real correlation to swing timing is to finish the take off. You can argue that the holding drill may actually be detrimental to swing timing since you need to get the swing off as fast as possible. However, the holding drill is too valuable to drop because it has too many benefits for technique and because pulling the trigger on the swing should not be that arduous because of all the things done leading up to that point - again provided they are done well!

You can practice the timing on the high bar or from 1, 2 or 3 left approach (ideally from 1-2 lefts to correct technique - you need repetitions in huge volume to correct technique well and that's what 1-2 lefts provide among other things). Full stretch and swing - load and fire - no holding, no delaying. Holding the "drive" in an actual vault gets no extra penetration, it just delays your swing which is a bad thing.

Hope that helps out more than it confuses you! This is all my opinion, which is derived from a school of thought that comes from overseas so I'm not sure if your coach and I would see directly eye to eye on every degree. However I would still like to encourage you to put a video up so you can get others on the forum (including myself) to have a look. I will try to comment if I have time as this is my last week of vacation!

All the best!

-Andrew

With regards to holding the drive, you really do not gain anything by doing that in terms of penetration in my opinion. All the energy that is used for the initial penetration of the pole (before the swing) is put into the system at take-off. No more energy can be used to penetrate the pole until the swing. I know it *looks* like you are really doing something and making the pole penetrate more by holding that position - and you are in a sense - but in actual fact all you can really do in terms of penetration is maintain the energy going into the system and you do that by maintaining a solid body. Think about it, once you leave the ground you have lost all connection with anything for you to push off of with your legs so therefore you cannot generate more energy - unless you make an acceleration with your center of mass somewhere (like swinging). Holding the position will not give you more penetration, it will only help to maintain your penetration. And maintaining the penetration is due to the body state - which holding the position will help you to do. Lastly, swinging (done correctly) will give you more penetration.

Andy, I agree with pretty much every thing you said except for where you said holding your position (delaying your swing to vertical) will not increase penetration. Now understand I am not condoning any vaulting model that encourages a delayed swing. But the physics behind a delayed swing are sound and true. This is because when you are in the take off position and hanging under the pole, your bodies center of mass is lower than when you swing up. When you swing up you increase your bodies potential energy, and because of conservation of energy, when potential energy increases, kinetic energy must decrease, which causes your bodies forward velocity to slow down.

This is why you sometimes see tuck and shoot vaulters with a delayed swing. They delay it long enough so that the pole is rolled into the pit, so that when they tuck it is already to vertical and will shoot them up. If they were to just tuck earlier, they would not go near as deep.

This also works somewhat with a swing vaulter in a mental since but I do not know the exact amount of energy the swing puts into the vault in relation to the decrease in velocity caused by raising your center of mass. But a lot of people may have noticed that they can do a jogadan and land on the pit with a very large pole, but when they try to invert with this pole (usually with bad technique because they are getting used to the new pole) they find that they do not land near as deep in the pit.

I just vaulted again today. I acheived more bend then usual, and actually it was the first time the bend was significant. I had two major problems arise. First was that I was barely penetrating, I consistently wouldn't land on the flat mats that you should but the mats just behind the box. My second problem was getting my legs up. Although I was not fantastic, before I began bending I was able to get my legs decently inverted. Now I am having a lot of trouble. I would wault up and my head would be level with a 10' bungee but my head would be up and legs down. Is this a common problem with bending, becuase my friend has the same problem. Also what is a good way to insure penetration and getting inverted?

VaultPurple wrote:Andy, I agree with pretty much every thing you said except for where you said holding your position (delaying your swing to vertical) will not increase penetration. Now understand I am not condoning any vaulting model that encourages a delayed swing. But the physics behind a delayed swing are sound and true. This is because when you are in the take off position and hanging under the pole, your bodies center of mass is lower than when you swing up. When you swing up you increase your bodies potential energy, and because of conservation of energy, when potential energy increases, kinetic energy must decrease, which causes your bodies forward velocity to slow down.

This is why you sometimes see tuck and shoot vaulters with a delayed swing. They delay it long enough so that the pole is rolled into the pit, so that when they tuck it is already to vertical and will shoot them up. If they were to just tuck earlier, they would not go near as deep.

This also works somewhat with a swing vaulter in a mental since but I do not know the exact amount of energy the swing puts into the vault in relation to the decrease in velocity caused by raising your center of mass. But a lot of people may have noticed that they can do a jogadan and land on the pit with a very large pole, but when they try to invert with this pole (usually with bad technique because they are getting used to the new pole) they find that they do not land near as deep in the pit.

Hi VP,

Here's the way I see it.

Something always has to happen somewhere, no dead zones. When you swing, your trail leg will be swung down which will give you much more penetration than simply hanging down with your trail leg behind you. This is the main reason why people drop their front leg, doing so will drop the total center of mass down. When you go up, yes you will not be able todo much if you tuck and shoot! However if you have very good technique, the hip thrusting upwards will add more energy to the system.

Try and watch somebody with a very good swing on one of those fiberglass bars in gymnastics. You will see the bar bend quite noticeably, more compared to just hanging there. Just be careful not to break the bar! If the technique is extremely good, the bar will even bend upwards with the hip thrust. Most importantly for this discussion, there is more total pressure downward for a good portion of the swing compared to just hanging. One other important point that should not be overlooked is the displacement of the center of mass relative to the pole. When you swing, your body will move forward on the way up in a pendulum effect. You are still exerting pressure on the pole by swinging, it does not disappear once you leave the position. You will be achieving less by holding.

Yes I agree that there has to a a time to "deposit" the energy into the pole so to speak. The problem is that I think people often watch too many slow-mo videos. It's easy to describe if it's happening at 120 frames per second, but doing so may take the action out of context. Even when coaches talk about intricacies and break down the vault for an athlete, they often try to describe way too much. The vault, especially anything in the air, happens extremely quickly. Don't get me wrong, a coach will need to break it down. It must always be on the back of the coach and vaulter's mind that time is of the essence. By the time you have achieved that good stretching position, enough energy has already gone in - and more will go in by virtue of of momentum as long as you keep a solid body and don't let go. By the time you even get a thought off that you need to wait here and penetrate more, you're already too late with regards to the swing. If the swing is not fast enough, you cannot reach the good position on top of the pole - you run out of time and momentum. Considering how few people in history (maybe a very small handful of elites - ever) can reach this position, I think people should be more vigilant about the temporality of the pole vault. That is not to say, rush everything. Just do it, be definite, no waiting and do it swiftly. Everything in the air is a blur, go ask Bubka. His response to the question was actually quite comical if you can find it.

Finally, we use the stretch position as a *biomechanical marker* to indicate - ok, now swing. It is immediate and there is no thinking involved. There is no time for an arbitrary decision of - "ok, wait.. wait.. alright, go!" Especially with the coaches game plans during a meet "ok, in that jump it wasn't long enough, hold it a little longer." What amount of time qualifies as "a little longer?" Vaulters are not atomic clocks. This promotes inconsistency. You need something physical and definitive, "feel the stretch = pull the trigger" Zero thinking and immediate reaction. The athlete is a human being of course, but the vault must be executed with absolute machine-like precision. And that attitude is not only applicable in this part of the vault, but throughout the whole thing with other biomechanical markers in the run, plant and take off. The vaulter need to be a machine, and not just in the "aww, you're an animal bro!" sense.

Hope that clarifies my position.

-Andrew

When you are not landing deep enough in the pit, hold lower until you are. As your technique gets better you'll be able to raise it back up.