Scott Elliott and the wonderful world of pole vault!

[RawVeganAthletics]

Hi CoachEric, thanks for the reply. Last nights practice I was trying to work on your cues. I also was thinking about locking my heel under my butt. This seemed to help, but I still need to speed up my planting motion, and I also feel like I was hitting my take-off to tense in the shoulders and not extending up through the take off as well as I can/should(due to the slow planting motion and being under). I feel like this practice is heading in the right direction though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UarzjLFduBU

[CoachEric]

This looks like an incremental improvement with the arms. Good work.

The only thing you should be trying to figure out in your next practice is how to not throw your head back. The whole reason I gave you cues for the arms was to encourage good head position, and it doesn't seem to have worked. I also get the sense that you're trying to focus on 10 things at once. Next time, focus on 1 thing - head position. Even if the rest of the vault is crappy, get your head in the right place.

One way to do that is to put the bungee up at something like 16' - 17', and swing to invert and hold the postion as if you're doing a 6 step straight pole inversion drill. Don't pull and turn. Just get tight to the pole and look at the bungee, and just tap it with your feet. Watch your feet as they swing to that inverted position. If you see your feet, and then the bungee, you're doing it right. If you see nothing but a blur, you're doing it wrong. Try it with different runs and grips with a bias toward your longer runs.

[RawVeganAthletics]

So today I focused on not throwing my head back and it went really well. I am super excited to make "head"way with it =). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ6OKNgy4rs&feature=youtu.be

[CoachEric]

Nice!!!

Hopefully you were able to feel the difference. You should have noticed that in general, the pole wasn't spitting you out towards the bar as much, and you had more room for the hips to move towards verticle and line up with the pole. That's because your arms weren't closing the shoulder angle as a result of your head position. You also should have noticed that on the reps where you did an especially good job of keeping the head in control, the pole continued to rotate toward the back of the pit as you were coming off.

In your next practice, I'd recommend you do the same thing and focus on head position only. You're in the process of replacing a bad habit, which takes time. I can see how you were really fighting not to throw the head on some of those, so you haven't arrived quite yet. I'm assuming you have a meet this weekend. I'd treat it like a developmental opportunity and just keep the focus on the head.

After your head position is firmed up, then you can work on getting more elastic with the arms and then swinging from a hollow position - but not yet!

And your puns are terrible! You get a D- in wordsmithery.

[CoachEric]

And try the drill I mentioned earlier for a few reps. Swing to invert and hold without the pull and turn. Watching the bar from this position several feet above you can help reinforce good head position. If you are doing it well, you will beat the recoil and feel lots of pop from the pole while you hold the invert.