Oklahoma Pole Vault Manifesto
Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 1:45 pm
At the outset, I want to say that I know this post will meet with some strong differences of opinion. I expect there will be extreme responses up to and including outright ridicule, and that's just fine. An idea that cannot stand up to criticism is not worth defending, and I have nothing but respect for anyone who will give me their considered opinion. My intention is only to describe something that I feel is inadequately understood. I have found that most people who argue against a drive vault don't understand it well. Despite good intentions and expertise in other models, they are mostly hacking apart straw-man versions of a jump that has never worked for anyone. This has led to the assumption that anything other than the Petrov model is nothing more than a patchwork of technical compromises, misguided guesswork, and outright ignorance. This has not been my experience, and I want to at least attempt to counter some of these negative assumptions.
The ability to explain a theory is no measure of its merit. A determination concerning what is bad, better, and best can only be made through accurate comparison, and this is beyond the scope and purpose of this post. I will make no claim concerning the overall superiority of the drive vault over any other technique. I do, however, believe that it may be best for the smaller and less powerful athlete. I believe this simply because it worked for me and because it relies on position, and timing more than on raw power and the ability to jump off the ground. This is why I call it a "drive" vault and not a "power" vault. In many respects, the larger athlete will find this jump difficult to execute for the same reason big people have trouble becoming world class gymnasts. Necessity is the mother of invention, and it is no coincidence that almost no male vaulters under 5'9" have used anything but a drive vault to attain world class status. Of this class of jumper, I was, and remain, the least physically gifted of all, which is why I will use myself and my experience as an example.
When I made the Indoor World Championship team in 1993, Dean Starkey came up to me after the meet and said, "You know the band geeks and computer nerds and the scrawny kids in P.E., the kind of kids I used to beat up in high school? You should be their god." At that time I was 5'8" , weighed 138 lbs., and was at the limit of my physical abilities. I was clearing 18' 4" consistently with a P.R. of 18'6 ½ '. Not much by today's standards, but not a bad achievement for that era in what is definitely a big, powerful person's sport. I was strong for my size and relatively fast, but my overall physical power was nothing compared to that of my peers. If I broke 4.8 in a 40 yard sprint it was a good day, and my max long jump was just a little over 20'. Where athleticism is lacking, something has to make up for it. In my case, it was position and timing.
Think of a golf swing. Ben Hogan was only 5'5" and weighed 137 lbs., yet he drove the ball enormous distances and dominated the game during his era. Despite his size, he was able to create tremendous club head speed through the position and timing of his swing. His club head simply traveled a longer distance in a shorter amount of time than any of his peers. This principle governs every athletic movement in which power is created through rotational velocity. The drive vault makes use of this principle in the swing phase more than any other model. The trail leg is driven back behind the hips as far as possible at the beginning of the vault. This forces it to cover a longer distance in a shorter amount of time during the swing than is possible with any other method.
The reason for this is that the drive vaulter takes a much lower angle of attack. Petrov vaulters jump up off of the ground and their trail matches up with their steeper attack angle. Double leg swing vaulters also jump up off of the ground while keeping their lead knee low. Their trail leg is further inhibited by the limited amplitude of their lead knee. If the lead knee does not come forward, the trail leg cannot go back. Drive vaulters, on the other hand, drive straight in, and this allows their trail leg to travel straight back till the resistance of the body will allow it to go no further.
I need to insert a note here about the arms. As in all good plants, the hands must be as high as possible at the instant of takeoff, and the step must be beneath or slightly outside the top hand. The arms, however, must not be pushing up on the pole or blocking out, even though, on a world class drive vault, they appear to be doing just that. Blocking will make it impossible to achieve the longest possible swing. The left elbow must be facing outward and not locked, and the shoulders must allow the arms to come back as far as possible. Even though the left arm appears to be pushing, it only puts pressure on the pole for the merest fraction of a second as it comes up and behind the shoulders. After this, it is actually pulling on the pole. The reason the left arm is straighter in the drive vault than in any other model is because this position allows the vaulter pull harder on the pole during the swing.
The other factor at work here is the stretch reflex. Muscles fire with more speed and power when rebounding out of a forced stretch. In the drive vault, this involves every major muscle group across the entire front side of the body as well as the big muscles of the upper back. From the fingers of the hands all the way through to the toes of the feet, the body is stretched taut, and all of these muscles fire at once to begin and maintain the speed of the swing. The vaulter initiates a pull with every ounce of explosive power they can muster. The harder and faster these stretched muscle groups fire, the faster the swing will move. I have been asked many times which direction I pull on the pole. Is it a rowing action, or more of a pull towards the box? My best answer is that the direction of the pull is determined by my awareness of the speed of the swing. I pull in the direction that will accelerate my trail leg the most. This stores tremendous energy into the vaulter-pole system. The vaulter is attached to the pole through their hands, and there is no slack in that connection. Every fraction of energy that the pull generates goes right into the moving pole and into the speed of the trail leg.
The drive vaulter's swing begins later in the jump than it does in any other model, but this is not because there is any deliberate delay. Waiting for even a fraction of a second will ruin a drive vault. There just isn't time. The reason there appears to be a delay is that it simply takes the trail leg longer to travel back so far. And it takes longer for the body to begin to rebound out of a stretch that is forced to such an extreme degree. For this reason, the active pull must begin as early as possible. Ideally, the vaulter will begin pulling just before the trail leg reaches the end of its backward drive. This way there is no delay, and the trail leg will have all the speed it needs to cover the greater distance required.
The reason all of this is a good thing is that speed equals energy and energy equals height. The kinetic energy of an object is proportional to the square of its speed. This means that if the speed of the trail leg doubles, it does not double the amount of energy it creates, it quadruples it. If the speed of the trail leg triples, its kinetic energy is amplified by a factor of nine, and so on. This energy has to go somewhere, and it has to take the path of least resistance. In this case, that path is the pole. The faster the swing, the more the pole moves, and the deeper the vaulter penetrates. One of the problems with this is that it helps create the mistaken idea that the drive vaulter is pushing with the left arm as the pole bends. The truth is that they are pulling hard with both arms, and the energy of the trail leg is flowing into the pole with such force that it is pulling the left arm out and up as the pole moves into the pit.
Now before we leave the regions of the takeoff and swing, I have to deal with a major point of possible misunderstanding. An obvious problem with what I have said so far relates to the action of the pole. If a vaulter drives straight through the takeoff with little or no jump and then pulls and swings as hard as possible, how are they to keep from over-bending the pole? The answer depends on the pole. For this technique to work, the pole has to be very stiff, and it has to be designed to match up with a lower angle of attack.
When I was a freshman in High School I was 5'2" and weighed under 100 Lbs. My school district had no interest in spending money on an individual athlete with no apparent talent, so they bought me a 12' 140 with the intention of it lasting me the rest of my life. I spent the next three months in an agony of frustration getting launched back down the runway. The first time I managed to drive in past the box, I pushed off above the end of the pole, something I had never imagined possible till that moment. I clearly remember a sense of weightless elation that lasted only the fraction of a second that it took me to land back on the pole. I remember thinking "I have to learn to push this thing away from me now" as I crashed off the side of the pile of hay that I used for a pit.
This changed everything. I realized that I could compete with athletes who were jumping on 14' poles without having to raise my grip. This one jump formed the foundation for the rest of my career. All I wanted to do from that moment on was to jump on big poles and push off a long way. Later, as I learned from Joe Dial and his father who were working along the same lines with astonishing results, I refined my jump and found capabilities beyond what appeared athletically possible. My biggest pole ended up being a 16'5" 190. It was 52 Lbs. above my weight at the time, and I won the Mt. Sac Relays by going to it in a desperation attempt to end a jump-off against Kory Tarpening (which I did).
When a pole's stiffness exceeds the weight of a vaulter to this degree, it is impossible to over-bend it, even with a very low attack angle. It will bend acutely at the instant of takeoff and then deflect the momentum of the vaulter up and around the stiffness at its base. For this reason, the dynamics of the pole movement in a drive vault are unique. The pole bends so much in the first few feet of penetration that the left arm is pulled out to a point almost a foot above the right and it stays there through most of the swing. These elements of pole movement are crucial to the ability to penetrate without having to jump off of the ground. Even with the low angle, the stiffness of the pole eventually takes over, and it rounds into a strong position in the middle of the jump. The pole design that works best for this is one that bends more in the top and less at the bottom.
Now we come to the dreaded tuck and shoot. Before I venture onto this shaky ground, I want to deal with some common misunderstandings. The error that has become universally known as the "tuck and shoot" has nothing to do with a drive vault. The drive vault does involve a tuck and then an active extension toward the bar (or more exactly, toward the empty space just above it) but not for the same reasons or in response to the same limitations that cause a vaulter to tuck and shoot. Most athletes who tuck do it unintentionally and almost always in response to some fundamental flaw in their vault. For whatever reason, their jump lacks the energy necessary for their hips to rise up the pole. This can be the caused by any number of problems, but the result is always the same: their rotation and pole speed come to a grinding halt, and they are forced to shorten the radius of their body in order to get any kind of attempt going at all. The result is an ugly jump, usually ending in a weak flag out towards the bar. I cannot emphasize enough that this has nothing to do with a drive vault. In all the aspects of the vault that are important, in the creation and exploitation of energy, the drive vault is the opposite of the tuck and shoot. Instead of having too little power to get anything going, there is so much energy and speed moving toward the bar that the vaulter is forced to tuck to catch up to it. This is why the drive vaulter's hips fly up the pole out of the tucked position instead of stalling and flagging out (sometimes to the amazement of coaches and athletes who do not fully grasp the dynamics involved).
Another difficulty is the idea that the tuck robs the swing of energy. This is simply not true. The law of conservation of angular momentum dictates that a rotating object does not lose energy when its radius is shortened. It merely gains speed as it swings around its axis. The swing reaches maximum speed at the instant a straight line can be drawn from the top hand through to the foot of the trail leg. At this point, the body is as long as it can possibly be and has attained all the speed of rotation it is going to. After this, nothing can be gained by attempting to keep a rigid body and a straight leg. Shortening the radius of the swing by pulling the trail leg in after this point does not lose energy. The radius of the swing is shortened, and the velocity of the rotation is increased, but the energy remains unchanged, except for what is lost to gravity and friction.
The tuck is necessary in a drive vault because of timing issues and nothing else. The length that the trail leg has to travel causes the moment of maximum speed to occur just before the pole reaches maximum bend. This places the vaulter's hips almost directly beneath their shoulders when the pole is about to unload. The vaulter's rotation must then be transferred from their hips to their shoulders, and this must happen in the fraction of a second before the pole stops bending. If this transfer happens even an instant too late, the vaulter will be left hopelessly behind the timing of the pole. The tuck is a positive move that allows the vaulter to stay in sync with the pole. And I am going to say it again - it does so without costing any energy. The vaulter simply shortens up and catches the force of the return of the pole.
The tucked position also allows the drive vaulter to use their body during the last half of the jump by driving their shoulders back and their hips up and using the arms actively all the way through to the push. This is another aspect of the drive vault that is not well understood. It takes precise position and timing to actively use the upper body during the turn and push. The rigid position and earlier extension of other models limit the use of the arms at the top of the jump. Because the drive vaulter is tucked and balanced beneath their hands early in the return, they can explode upward as the pole recoils. Imagine taking a dumbbell that is resting on the floor and throwing it as high as you can over your left shoulder. Instinctively, you know that you must crouch over it and throw it into the air with an explosive, driving action through the body and a powerful pull and push with the arms. To understand the top of a drive vault, all you have to do us take this image, replace the weight with the grip on a moving pole, and make the floor the sky. The power generated through the arms in a drive vault begins with the swing and does not end till the fingers of the right hand come off the pole. When this action is timed up with the speed of a huge pole rocketing towards the bar, the result is an explosive fly away that exceeds that which is possible with any other method.
In this case the proof is in the results. The longest push-off of all time belongs to Joe Dial who exploited this phase of the vault better than any other athlete in history. His 19'6 ½" American Record was accomplished with a 15'10" grip. That equals a 52 ½" pushoff. (And he had a lot of air on it.) He put so much force into the pole during his turn and push that he tore the big tendon that runs from the knuckle of the index finger to the wrist of his right hand.
I feel this has been a horribly incoherent and incomplete explanation of this technique. There are essential elements involving the run and plant that I have not even touched on. Even in the aspects I have dealt with, there is a lot more to explain, but it would take an entire book to do it justice. What I have tried to do in this short space is to shed some light on things that I feel are misunderstood and to provide at least some insight into the thought and imagination that went into the development of this method.
You can see these principles at work in my own jump that is posted on the media section of this site.
http://www.polevaultpower.com/media/video/
I am sure there are several of Joe's vaults out there somewhere. There are also many current vaulters using some version of this jump. Among them are Brad Walker, Toby Stevenson, and Paul Burgess. Burgess is probably the best modern example of a pure drive vaulter.
The ability to explain a theory is no measure of its merit. A determination concerning what is bad, better, and best can only be made through accurate comparison, and this is beyond the scope and purpose of this post. I will make no claim concerning the overall superiority of the drive vault over any other technique. I do, however, believe that it may be best for the smaller and less powerful athlete. I believe this simply because it worked for me and because it relies on position, and timing more than on raw power and the ability to jump off the ground. This is why I call it a "drive" vault and not a "power" vault. In many respects, the larger athlete will find this jump difficult to execute for the same reason big people have trouble becoming world class gymnasts. Necessity is the mother of invention, and it is no coincidence that almost no male vaulters under 5'9" have used anything but a drive vault to attain world class status. Of this class of jumper, I was, and remain, the least physically gifted of all, which is why I will use myself and my experience as an example.
When I made the Indoor World Championship team in 1993, Dean Starkey came up to me after the meet and said, "You know the band geeks and computer nerds and the scrawny kids in P.E., the kind of kids I used to beat up in high school? You should be their god." At that time I was 5'8" , weighed 138 lbs., and was at the limit of my physical abilities. I was clearing 18' 4" consistently with a P.R. of 18'6 ½ '. Not much by today's standards, but not a bad achievement for that era in what is definitely a big, powerful person's sport. I was strong for my size and relatively fast, but my overall physical power was nothing compared to that of my peers. If I broke 4.8 in a 40 yard sprint it was a good day, and my max long jump was just a little over 20'. Where athleticism is lacking, something has to make up for it. In my case, it was position and timing.
Think of a golf swing. Ben Hogan was only 5'5" and weighed 137 lbs., yet he drove the ball enormous distances and dominated the game during his era. Despite his size, he was able to create tremendous club head speed through the position and timing of his swing. His club head simply traveled a longer distance in a shorter amount of time than any of his peers. This principle governs every athletic movement in which power is created through rotational velocity. The drive vault makes use of this principle in the swing phase more than any other model. The trail leg is driven back behind the hips as far as possible at the beginning of the vault. This forces it to cover a longer distance in a shorter amount of time during the swing than is possible with any other method.
The reason for this is that the drive vaulter takes a much lower angle of attack. Petrov vaulters jump up off of the ground and their trail matches up with their steeper attack angle. Double leg swing vaulters also jump up off of the ground while keeping their lead knee low. Their trail leg is further inhibited by the limited amplitude of their lead knee. If the lead knee does not come forward, the trail leg cannot go back. Drive vaulters, on the other hand, drive straight in, and this allows their trail leg to travel straight back till the resistance of the body will allow it to go no further.
I need to insert a note here about the arms. As in all good plants, the hands must be as high as possible at the instant of takeoff, and the step must be beneath or slightly outside the top hand. The arms, however, must not be pushing up on the pole or blocking out, even though, on a world class drive vault, they appear to be doing just that. Blocking will make it impossible to achieve the longest possible swing. The left elbow must be facing outward and not locked, and the shoulders must allow the arms to come back as far as possible. Even though the left arm appears to be pushing, it only puts pressure on the pole for the merest fraction of a second as it comes up and behind the shoulders. After this, it is actually pulling on the pole. The reason the left arm is straighter in the drive vault than in any other model is because this position allows the vaulter pull harder on the pole during the swing.
The other factor at work here is the stretch reflex. Muscles fire with more speed and power when rebounding out of a forced stretch. In the drive vault, this involves every major muscle group across the entire front side of the body as well as the big muscles of the upper back. From the fingers of the hands all the way through to the toes of the feet, the body is stretched taut, and all of these muscles fire at once to begin and maintain the speed of the swing. The vaulter initiates a pull with every ounce of explosive power they can muster. The harder and faster these stretched muscle groups fire, the faster the swing will move. I have been asked many times which direction I pull on the pole. Is it a rowing action, or more of a pull towards the box? My best answer is that the direction of the pull is determined by my awareness of the speed of the swing. I pull in the direction that will accelerate my trail leg the most. This stores tremendous energy into the vaulter-pole system. The vaulter is attached to the pole through their hands, and there is no slack in that connection. Every fraction of energy that the pull generates goes right into the moving pole and into the speed of the trail leg.
The drive vaulter's swing begins later in the jump than it does in any other model, but this is not because there is any deliberate delay. Waiting for even a fraction of a second will ruin a drive vault. There just isn't time. The reason there appears to be a delay is that it simply takes the trail leg longer to travel back so far. And it takes longer for the body to begin to rebound out of a stretch that is forced to such an extreme degree. For this reason, the active pull must begin as early as possible. Ideally, the vaulter will begin pulling just before the trail leg reaches the end of its backward drive. This way there is no delay, and the trail leg will have all the speed it needs to cover the greater distance required.
The reason all of this is a good thing is that speed equals energy and energy equals height. The kinetic energy of an object is proportional to the square of its speed. This means that if the speed of the trail leg doubles, it does not double the amount of energy it creates, it quadruples it. If the speed of the trail leg triples, its kinetic energy is amplified by a factor of nine, and so on. This energy has to go somewhere, and it has to take the path of least resistance. In this case, that path is the pole. The faster the swing, the more the pole moves, and the deeper the vaulter penetrates. One of the problems with this is that it helps create the mistaken idea that the drive vaulter is pushing with the left arm as the pole bends. The truth is that they are pulling hard with both arms, and the energy of the trail leg is flowing into the pole with such force that it is pulling the left arm out and up as the pole moves into the pit.
Now before we leave the regions of the takeoff and swing, I have to deal with a major point of possible misunderstanding. An obvious problem with what I have said so far relates to the action of the pole. If a vaulter drives straight through the takeoff with little or no jump and then pulls and swings as hard as possible, how are they to keep from over-bending the pole? The answer depends on the pole. For this technique to work, the pole has to be very stiff, and it has to be designed to match up with a lower angle of attack.
When I was a freshman in High School I was 5'2" and weighed under 100 Lbs. My school district had no interest in spending money on an individual athlete with no apparent talent, so they bought me a 12' 140 with the intention of it lasting me the rest of my life. I spent the next three months in an agony of frustration getting launched back down the runway. The first time I managed to drive in past the box, I pushed off above the end of the pole, something I had never imagined possible till that moment. I clearly remember a sense of weightless elation that lasted only the fraction of a second that it took me to land back on the pole. I remember thinking "I have to learn to push this thing away from me now" as I crashed off the side of the pile of hay that I used for a pit.
This changed everything. I realized that I could compete with athletes who were jumping on 14' poles without having to raise my grip. This one jump formed the foundation for the rest of my career. All I wanted to do from that moment on was to jump on big poles and push off a long way. Later, as I learned from Joe Dial and his father who were working along the same lines with astonishing results, I refined my jump and found capabilities beyond what appeared athletically possible. My biggest pole ended up being a 16'5" 190. It was 52 Lbs. above my weight at the time, and I won the Mt. Sac Relays by going to it in a desperation attempt to end a jump-off against Kory Tarpening (which I did).
When a pole's stiffness exceeds the weight of a vaulter to this degree, it is impossible to over-bend it, even with a very low attack angle. It will bend acutely at the instant of takeoff and then deflect the momentum of the vaulter up and around the stiffness at its base. For this reason, the dynamics of the pole movement in a drive vault are unique. The pole bends so much in the first few feet of penetration that the left arm is pulled out to a point almost a foot above the right and it stays there through most of the swing. These elements of pole movement are crucial to the ability to penetrate without having to jump off of the ground. Even with the low angle, the stiffness of the pole eventually takes over, and it rounds into a strong position in the middle of the jump. The pole design that works best for this is one that bends more in the top and less at the bottom.
Now we come to the dreaded tuck and shoot. Before I venture onto this shaky ground, I want to deal with some common misunderstandings. The error that has become universally known as the "tuck and shoot" has nothing to do with a drive vault. The drive vault does involve a tuck and then an active extension toward the bar (or more exactly, toward the empty space just above it) but not for the same reasons or in response to the same limitations that cause a vaulter to tuck and shoot. Most athletes who tuck do it unintentionally and almost always in response to some fundamental flaw in their vault. For whatever reason, their jump lacks the energy necessary for their hips to rise up the pole. This can be the caused by any number of problems, but the result is always the same: their rotation and pole speed come to a grinding halt, and they are forced to shorten the radius of their body in order to get any kind of attempt going at all. The result is an ugly jump, usually ending in a weak flag out towards the bar. I cannot emphasize enough that this has nothing to do with a drive vault. In all the aspects of the vault that are important, in the creation and exploitation of energy, the drive vault is the opposite of the tuck and shoot. Instead of having too little power to get anything going, there is so much energy and speed moving toward the bar that the vaulter is forced to tuck to catch up to it. This is why the drive vaulter's hips fly up the pole out of the tucked position instead of stalling and flagging out (sometimes to the amazement of coaches and athletes who do not fully grasp the dynamics involved).
Another difficulty is the idea that the tuck robs the swing of energy. This is simply not true. The law of conservation of angular momentum dictates that a rotating object does not lose energy when its radius is shortened. It merely gains speed as it swings around its axis. The swing reaches maximum speed at the instant a straight line can be drawn from the top hand through to the foot of the trail leg. At this point, the body is as long as it can possibly be and has attained all the speed of rotation it is going to. After this, nothing can be gained by attempting to keep a rigid body and a straight leg. Shortening the radius of the swing by pulling the trail leg in after this point does not lose energy. The radius of the swing is shortened, and the velocity of the rotation is increased, but the energy remains unchanged, except for what is lost to gravity and friction.
The tuck is necessary in a drive vault because of timing issues and nothing else. The length that the trail leg has to travel causes the moment of maximum speed to occur just before the pole reaches maximum bend. This places the vaulter's hips almost directly beneath their shoulders when the pole is about to unload. The vaulter's rotation must then be transferred from their hips to their shoulders, and this must happen in the fraction of a second before the pole stops bending. If this transfer happens even an instant too late, the vaulter will be left hopelessly behind the timing of the pole. The tuck is a positive move that allows the vaulter to stay in sync with the pole. And I am going to say it again - it does so without costing any energy. The vaulter simply shortens up and catches the force of the return of the pole.
The tucked position also allows the drive vaulter to use their body during the last half of the jump by driving their shoulders back and their hips up and using the arms actively all the way through to the push. This is another aspect of the drive vault that is not well understood. It takes precise position and timing to actively use the upper body during the turn and push. The rigid position and earlier extension of other models limit the use of the arms at the top of the jump. Because the drive vaulter is tucked and balanced beneath their hands early in the return, they can explode upward as the pole recoils. Imagine taking a dumbbell that is resting on the floor and throwing it as high as you can over your left shoulder. Instinctively, you know that you must crouch over it and throw it into the air with an explosive, driving action through the body and a powerful pull and push with the arms. To understand the top of a drive vault, all you have to do us take this image, replace the weight with the grip on a moving pole, and make the floor the sky. The power generated through the arms in a drive vault begins with the swing and does not end till the fingers of the right hand come off the pole. When this action is timed up with the speed of a huge pole rocketing towards the bar, the result is an explosive fly away that exceeds that which is possible with any other method.
In this case the proof is in the results. The longest push-off of all time belongs to Joe Dial who exploited this phase of the vault better than any other athlete in history. His 19'6 ½" American Record was accomplished with a 15'10" grip. That equals a 52 ½" pushoff. (And he had a lot of air on it.) He put so much force into the pole during his turn and push that he tore the big tendon that runs from the knuckle of the index finger to the wrist of his right hand.
I feel this has been a horribly incoherent and incomplete explanation of this technique. There are essential elements involving the run and plant that I have not even touched on. Even in the aspects I have dealt with, there is a lot more to explain, but it would take an entire book to do it justice. What I have tried to do in this short space is to shed some light on things that I feel are misunderstood and to provide at least some insight into the thought and imagination that went into the development of this method.
You can see these principles at work in my own jump that is posted on the media section of this site.
http://www.polevaultpower.com/media/video/
I am sure there are several of Joe's vaults out there somewhere. There are also many current vaulters using some version of this jump. Among them are Brad Walker, Toby Stevenson, and Paul Burgess. Burgess is probably the best modern example of a pure drive vaulter.
