High Jump in High Schools

A COACH’S ADVICE FOR TEACHING HIGH JUMP IN SCHOOLS

Coaching High Jump in High Schools or at Clubs with a large number of participants, especially younger athletes with lower attention spans, can be a difficult challenge for coaches and teachers to overcome. The obvious difficulty is balancing the three main priorities of the coach – i) safety, ii) engagement of the entire group and iii) adequate practice for each individual to improve.

Traditionally, High Jump needs to be done one person at a time, which is obviously not a great way to engage a large group of participants and will result in long queues with lots of waiting time. Despite High Jump being one of the more enjoyable and exciting events for many students, you will notice that if kids are waiting several minutes for their next turn, they’re going to show a preference for activities that allow for greater engagement and participation.

The other challenge when it comes to engagement is that in a large group of participants you need to be able to cater to the skill level of the entire group. The coach wants to avoid letting those with some High Jump experience dominate the session. Often when you put the bar up higher, those with the most talent get the most practice and those that are at an earlier stage of their development receive less practice and attention. This exacerbates the gulf in skill between participants and leads to cases where less talented participants are less likely to want to participate in future sessions to develop their skills. This is especially problematic in young athletes where natural variation in developmental ages can result in large variation in performance and by discouraging late-developers, you may be putting someone off the event who could have developed into a talented jumper. Remember, several of the world’s best High Jumpers did not participate in competitive High Jump until they reached their late-teens. We don’t want to lose athletes to the sport while they are still in their teens and have not matured.

In a large group of participants, the coach will need to think of methods to engage everyone at once. So that usually means starting away from the bag because it is the landing on the bag that restricts how many people can be engaged at once. A great option is to begin with sprint training.

Sprint Training

The run up and take off are the important phases of the high jump, and if the athlete has a good run up and take off they can often get away with a flawed flight phase (at least at junior levels). A great place to start is to develop the athlete’s bend running ability. The coach should be looking for continual acceleration, a tall posture and how the athlete leans into the bend, because these are the major points that are going to translate well to the athlete’s high jump performance.

One of the main coaching points you should be looking for is that the athlete should lean from their ankles with their whole body leaning into the bend. Keep an eye out for athletes who collapse through the core and reinforce the desired tall posture. This may be caused by a lack of strength that will need to be developed for the athlete to benefit from the Fosbury Flop technique.

The coach should be looking to develop a consistent and accurate run up that takes the athlete to the same place at the same speed for take-off. For young athletes with an inconsistent stride pattern, this is a real challenge that needs to be practiced. Therefore, when we introduce high jump we encourage a shorter run-up, because it’s easier to have five consistent strides than eight consistent strides.

Another coaching point to consider is to ensure that the athletes are accelerating throughout the run-up and not decelerating at any point. This can be developed on the bend by getting the athlete habituated to a gradual acceleration over their desired run-up distance.

Finally, you need to ensure that athletes have the necessary strength in their legs and core to be able to run a J-Curve. If you notice athletes running a straight line at the bar or two straight lines (sarcastically referred to as an L-Curve), you may need to spend time developing their bend running ability first before moving on to the flop.

Moving to the Bag

Once there has been adequate time on the sprints training, we can move to the High Jump area and put the run up into practice. To keep things moving there is no need for the athletes to be jumping over a bar or even on to the mat, the coach should just be looking for the bend running skills that were developed on the track to be put into practice in front of the mat. Once the coach feels that athletes have had enough repetitions to get this right, you can then introduce the jumping component.

Starting off with scissors is recommended, possibly off a straight line and then onto the curve. Keep an eye out for the transferable skills from scissors to the flop. Encourage a tall running posture with an accelerating rhythm with a strong drive up. Like all jumps, we want to encourage athletes to hold the take-off position. In a large group of students, you could set up a simple figure-8 circuit where athletes scissor from both sides to keep people moving quickly.

A good strategy for groups of ~30 students is to break the group in half and have one group play a game such as ‘cross ball’, where they push pass the ball to each other up and down and see how many times they can complete the activity while the other half of the group complete their scissor figure-8 circuit. The two groups can then switch over. If you wish to make the alternate activity more specific to high jump skills, you could have the students complete skipping, cross-hop, 3-step run ups over some minihurdles or a different age appropriate plyometric activity. The coaching focus should be on students remaining tall and holding their take-off position in the air. In a situation where you have one Accredited Coach and one Teacher managing the group, the coach can focus on the group performing scissors onto the mat, while the teacher takes control of the alternative activity.

Progressing to the Flop

Once you are confident that the athletes have the strength and technique to be able to run through the curve and hold their take-off position in the drive phase, we would bring the group together to complete some back-overs. The purpose of this activity is to replicate the flight position and develop the athlete’s understanding of how it feels from a static position. When we teach these skills, we do want to start from a static position because once you add speed it becomes more complex. By keeping it static we can develop the movement pattern without any additional complexity.

Another method to replicate the flight position is to have all the athletes lie on the ground and have them push their feet underneath them. For the coach, this should be about developing the ‘soft knees’ the athlete’s ability to push their hips forward in the air. A good cue that you can use is that there is a string attached to your navel and is being pulled towards the sky.

Once we move onto the flop with a run up, we should start with a very short run up of five strides at maximum. There is a greaterchance of an accurate and consistent run up when the athlete can control their speed and effectively generate vertical velocity (take-off) from horizontal velocity (approach). As the coach, ask yourself if the athlete can accelerate the take-off rhythm and whether they are able to run through the curve while staying tall and leaning away from the bar. In the learning phase athletes tend to lean across the bar, so we should come back and think about we need to drive up.

• Maintain the take off position

• Toe pointed towards the far corner of the bag

• Triple flexion of the driving leg and triple extension of the take off leg.

• Holding the drive phase in the air and not rotating too quickly

If the athletes are struggling to maintain their take off position, it might be appropriate to go back to the scissors, which forces the athletes to drive up. The scissors are a good way to teach athletes to maintain a tall posture and drive up rather than sideways. The other advantage to the scissors is that it forces the athlete to drive their knee up well above the bar, as they also need to get their foot over the bar.