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It’s a simple truth—injury is the nemesis of any elite athlete and training can cause injury. The coach’s dilemma is finding ways to train that improve game day performance while making sure game day actually happens.

Nowhere is this truer than in boxing. You may get one shot to put your career on a new level by fighting someone who far outranks you. You must endure rounds and rounds of sparring… with each sparring partner thinking it’s them who should be getting the big break. One cut, one concussion, one sprained hand or wrist, and it’s over.

The coach’s dilemma is finding ways to train that improve game day performance while making sure game day actually happens. Consider mittwork. Share on X

For team sports, there’s a depth chart for a reason—if your thumb needs healing, your teammates have you covered. Ask Drew Brees. But in individual sports like boxing, tennis, and golf, it’s just you. And in all the other individual sports, your training partners are not actively trying to put you on the injured reserve list. So, boxing trainers had to come up with a way to train and keep boxers sharp while at the same time minimizing injury risk.

Enter mittwork.

Simply put, mittwork is the presentation of punching targets and threats to a trainee in a given order, at a given speed, for a given duration of time. The word “given” here is important. The trainer controls all the variables: which combination of targets and threats, at what speed, and for what duration. And further, there is a divide in mittwork styles—either choreographed or what I call “fight style” mitts.

Choreographed mittwork is a scripted interaction. The trainer and the fighter agree in advance what will happen. The instruction is, “You are going to slip an oncoming right and counter with left hook, then throw a right cross, then roll out right and finish with a double jab to cover your tracks,” all starting on “Go!” Those choreographed combinations progress in complexity and duration as athletes get better and better at the boxing movements. You can start with an A-block of 2–4 punch/defensive combos, then add another block B, then C, then put them all together—ABC, BCA, AAC—until you fill an entire three-minute round with choreographed movement. There are literally thousands of combinations, blocks, and workouts that trainers can construct, limited only by their imagination and the gas in the athlete’s tank.

The other side of the mittwork spectrum is the “fight style” mitts. With this style, the fighter more or less treats you like an opponent. The bell rings, and you square off like opponents. The fighter does not know what the sequence will be: They have to react to what you present as you present it. The trainer presents the mitt in a certain way that means “throw a right uppercut” or a jab, or hook—they call for each punch either verbally (at the beginning) or by a unique position of the mitt, like a special sign language. The fighter/trainee has to use their eyes and ears to react and hit the targets as they are sequenced in front of them.

It’s the same with defensive moves. The trainer can force defensive moves by “throwing” punches, too, with the pad. Forcing defensive moves is the reason mittwork is a significant training upgrade over just hitting a heavy bag or a speed bag. A trainer with mitts fights back!

The choreographed mittwork is very suitable for beginners, elite athlete or not. The choreographed work is critical to establishing good boxing technique. With choreographed mittwork, you can slow down the speed to make sure feet, legs, core, and shoulders coordinate to deliver the most punch power with the minimum counterpunch exposure. Step by step, you can increase the speed of combinations as the trainee better understands the moves. I literally say, “Okay, we’re doing this one at 30% speed, then 60%, then 100%,” and see if the wheels fall off once we get to fight speed. If they do, we go back down the speed scale to try building up again.

Pro trainers who work with their pro fighters, especially for a long time, know the routines. They make choreographed work look exactly like fight-style because there’s no difference in speed or smoothness. But it takes years of practice to get that smooth, and it’s something to aspire to. Just google “mittwork” and “Canelo” to see some of the best mittwork there is to see.

Low Injury Risk – High-Intensity Cardio

So why should you train your elite athlete using mittwork? When is it a good idea?

At its core, mittwork is a full-body workout that is easy on the joints. Its intensity is up to the athlete and the trainer pushing. Typical fitness punching on a heavy bag burns 350–500 calories an hour. Sparring, on the other hand, can burn 800 calories an hour. Intensive mittwork that mimics sparring can get you closer to that 800/hour rate and certainly north of 500/hour.

At its core, mittwork is a full-body workout that’s easy on the joints. It can get you close to the calorie burn of sparring without the injury risk. Share on X

But what about injury risk? Certainly, you don’t want your elite athlete sparring, but mittwork can get you close to the calorie burn without that injury risk. Mittwork requires lots of movement with feet and hands, but the movements are quick and small relative to jumping 40” to dunk, running up the field, or making a diving catch. These smaller movements put emphasis on the muscular system to break and turn and drive, as opposed to the longer range of motion developed in other training regimens that puts more stress on joints and skeletal systems. Think of something like CrossFit with plyo box jump squats. We get wounded refugees from CrossFit programs in our gym often. They want all the cardio, but their joints are damaged, so mittwork is a great option.

Mittwork is especially helpful with larger, elite athletes whose bouncing body mass puts extraordinary stress on joints. How exactly do you build the cardio capacity of a 290-pound lineman without running him and tearing up his knees? You can put him on the elliptical, in the pool, on a bike, in a Pilates class…. There are low-impact options, but my argument is there are none as fun and engaging as mittwork.

It’s never the same thing over and over again (if the trainer does their job). And something different happens when intense cardio is the by-product of mittwork instead of the sole objective of these other types of workouts. People do more of it because the brain focuses on getting the combinations right and not on the pain from lactic acid build-up or burning lungs screaming for more oxygen. Everyone is surprised how fast the hour goes, even if they are completely gassed out.

One key element for ensuring that the intensity level improves is tracking punch count. Most punch counters are simple accelerometers strapped into the fighter’s gloves. This method only counts punches, and if you let this metric drive your workouts, defense goes out the window. I take it a step further and use a different metric of boxer work rate (BWR), which is a kind of punch count plus defensive blocks. Defensive moves can take as much energy as punches. I prefer the punch counter on the mitts the trainer uses, which then picks up the punches, the blocks, and parries, or the mitt “punches” that get through. As long as the mitt has an abrupt stop (quickly decelerates), that accelerometer reading peaks and a “punch” is counted.

A beginning boxer work rate is around 100 for a three-minute round, 200 counts is intermediate, and 300 and above is really moving. If you can string together five three-minute rounds with a work rate over 300, those lungs will scream for oxygen (for the trainer too!).

Improving Visual Reaction Time (VRT)

Did you ever wonder why, according to a CNN.com article, 85% of NBA players are gamers? Sure, it helps them relax after basketball games, but it also helps to keep them sharp. Video game play, especially fast-moving action games like Halo and Call of Duty, has been shown to improve cognitive function, including increasing visual processing speed and visual reaction times and sifting through task-irrelevant distractors. These improvements have been observed in non-game players who have undergone as little as 10 hours of training!^1,2

Think about what mittwork is. It’s a video game with consequences. In boxing, it takes .06 of a second to get hit in the face, at least by pro Chad Dawson. Mittwork coming from trainers may not have that top-end hand speed, but even at half that speed and in rapid succession, the athlete must decide what the threat is, react defensively, and then strike a target while it’s available before the next threat comes. Training an athlete to avoid that oncoming threat in such a way as to be able to respond with a counterpunch will tax and improve the motor skills of even the best athlete.

Here’s a case in point. A few years ago, a Maserati pulled up to the gym and out came a small but fit man inquiring about mittwork drills. I said, “Get dressed,” and in five minutes, this gentleman came back, clearly ripped. We slowly worked on the basics over the next hour. I knew the hand speed was there, but I had to get him to relax to find it. We finished that first day and I asked him his name. “Brandin, Brandin Cooks.” He explained he was a wide receiver, and he wanted boxing mittwork to help him parry the cornerback’s hand-checking that slows his release, and to gain more yards after the catch.

We worked for about a month before his training camp started. By the time he left, his boxing hand speed and visual reaction time were blistering. I don’t have a study to show what impact the mittwork had on his football skills, but he’s the starting deep-threat receiver for the Super Bowl-bound LA Rams and currently ranks #22 in total yards in the 2019–20 season.

Improved Agility

The #1 reason other coaches refer athletes to boxing coaches is to improve footwork. Footwork is everything in boxing. You may have the hardest punch or the fastest punch, but if you can’t get within range and position to throw those punches and then get back out, all your power and hand speed doesn’t matter. Furthermore, you won’t have the power or the hand speed in the first place unless your feet and body balance are correct and underneath you at all times. So, what does footwork have to do with mittwork? You guessed it. Everything.

You remember the scene from Rocky where the trainer put him in with a chicken and told him to catch it? Chasing a moving, random target is an excellent method for teaching agility. After your athlete has basic competency with punches, combos, and defensive maneuvers, add footwork. The trainer essentially becomes the chicken, with one addition—this chicken has teeth! In an instant, the hunter can become the hunted. The trainer can move in any direction to force the athlete to mirror those footwork moves, all the while keeping those jabs pumping and hands high, reacting to targets and threats. If the athlete is flat-footed with weight distributed to the heels, they’ll get caught by the trainer.

After your athlete has basic competency with punches, combos, and defensive maneuvers, add footwork for agility. Share on X

What does “caught” mean? The trainer will be able to get inside and land reminding taps to the body, and the athlete will try to respond to hit targets. However, because they are jammed up, their feet will fail to react quickly enough, and the punches will be off-balance with little power, speed, or effectiveness. All bad. The athlete will know they have been had, and they will work on better distribution of weight to the balls of the feet, better situational awareness, and better anticipation for quicker first-step movements.

Footwork then becomes progressively more complex. We have a sign in our gym that states, NO CAMPING! That means you don’t get to sit in front of your opponent and just swing away—MOVE.  The trainer trains the athlete to sit in the pocket for no more than 2–3 counts while unloading a combo. Once you deliver the payload, get out—step around, step back, come in and clinch, pivot and roll, slip and pivot, etc. These are all techniques your feet must drill and deliver on to open up the next scoring opportunities and/or defensive position.

There’s general agreement on what agility is: “a rapid whole-body movement and change of velocity or direction in response to stimulus.”³ There is, however, debate over the types of agility drills that have real value for improving game-time performance. In fact, there’s little to no evidence that common agility drills involving a closed course and pre-planned movements improve actual game-time agility.⁴ The reason is that game time agility is more complex than change of direction speed—it involves the cognitive ability to assess and react to unpredictable events. That’s why, according to sports performance director Nick DiMarco, “…agility has to involve the perceptual action component of it. OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act. If it doesn’t involve that, it’s not actually an agility drill.”⁵ True agility drills need an opponent. DiMarco recommends a balance of “mirror/dodge” or “chase” drills to improve game-time agility performance.

True agility drills need an opponent and good mittwork fits this perfect. The trainer moves themselves in an unpredictable manner and trains the athlete to respond. Share on X

Good mittwork fits this perfectly. The trainer moves themselves in an unpredictable manner and trains the athlete to respond. In fight-style mittwork, the athlete is continually forced to react to unknown stimulus and respond by managing distance, position, and angles to create offensive opportunities and defensive safety. Again, with real mittwork, there is no setting up camp and swinging away at targets like a heavy bag in a boxing class. With true mittwork, you push your fighter to move. If they do not react to you stepping inside by stepping back out or throwing an inside punch, then you can “encourage” them to move by gently throwing a body shot as a reminder of what could have been. If that doesn’t work, I always use push-ups or squats!

The point is that mittwork is a natural game of cat and mouse, with the slight complication that the species are swapped quite often. Think of the flow of a football game where a referee blows a whistle and the defense comes on the field. Pretty slow transition, right? Or basketball, where there’s a transition from offense to defense, faster, but still slow. In boxing, there’s a millisecond between being on offense and defense and back on offense again, and each of those actions requires the right foot movement and change of direction. You, as the trainer doing mittwork, can bring pressure at any time or back it off at any time and train your athlete to respond with the right footwork. They have to observe, orient, decide, and act—the perfect agility drill.

The More Subtle Benefits of Boxing Mittwork for Elite Athletes

Apart from the primary benefits of mittwork for conditioning without injury, improving visual reaction time, and increasing agility, there are more subtle benefits. If you’ve been playing football, basketball, and/or soccer your whole life, it’s likely you’ve seen every kind of drill and exercise to get you to become a better player. Sometimes burnout can occur doing the same thing over and over, season after season, or, more often, with the emotional pressure to excel.⁶ Sometimes elite athletes need to just go out and play and enjoy themselves, which may be hard to do in their primary sport. Trying something new that represents a challenge but with no external pressure to succeed can lift the fog of burnout. Just as I tell my boxers to go out and play soccer, pick up a mountain bike, or try surfing, these keep the athlete (and anyone, actually), much more engaged when they come back to their primary sport.

Elite athletes have likely seen every kind of drill and exercise to get them to become a better player. Mittwork is something new that they can enjoy, and it can help lift the fog of burnout. Share on X

Breathing is key to any physical activity. I see breathing issues a lot in competitive athletes who might be young and have not quite reached elite level yet. In particular, many competitive athletes hold their breath doing mittwork. With the exception of powerlifters doing the Valsalva maneuver, holding your breath during any training or performance is not good. Holding your breath can impede the return of blood to the heart and deprive you the oxygen you need to get the job done.

Watching the breathing patterns of your athletes while mitt training will alert you to whether they hold their breath under stress. If they do, you can work on breathing exercises and slowing things down so that continuous breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth becomes second nature. After five minutes of mittwork with one college lacrosse player, I told him, “You know you hold your breath when you feel under pressure.” He replied, “Yeah, my coaches have been telling me that for years.”

Just when his brain needed the oxygen to make good decisions, none was coming. It was something we worked on by slowing the mittwork down until his breathing was smooth and continuous, and then increasing the speed of mittwork each week. In a month, he was able to breathe smoothly through high-intensity workouts.

Related to breathing is energy management. No professional boxer goes 100% for 15 rounds. Learning how to find those moments of rest in a high-intensity training interval may sound like cheating, but in reality, these micro-rests can help you explode when the situation calls for it.

Finally, boxing mittwork can help you find your fight again. There’s a trainer challenging you to keep up with them and to not let your guard down as you make balanced, solid contact with every target presented. You are a warrior, and this is the training of warriors. It’s a rewarding feeling that if those were actual threats, you would have an excellent shot at coming out the victor.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Bavelier, D., Green, C.S., Pouget, A., and Schrater, P. “Brain Plasticity Through the Life Span: Learning to Learn and Action Video Games.” Annual Review of Neuroscience. 2012; 35:391–416.

2. Spence, I. and Feng, J. “Video Games and Spatial Cognition.” Review of General Psychology. 2010; 14(2):92­–104.

3. Sheppard, J.M. and Young, W.B. “Agility Literature Review: Classifications, Training and Testing.” Journal of Sports Sciences. 2006; 24:919–932.

4. Young, W.B, Dawson B., and Henry, G. “Agility and Change-of-Direction Speed are Independent Skills: Implications for Agility in Invasion Sports.” International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. 2015; 10:160–170.

5. Nick DiMarco on Integration of Perception-Reaction Agility Training in Sports Performance: Just Fly Performance Podcast #152, 2019.

6. Gustafsson, H. “Burnout in Competitive and Elite Athletes.” 2007, Orebro Studies in Sport Sciences I. Universitetsbiblioteket.

Sports science often gets bad press, with many experienced coaches criticizing certain aspects of the discipline regularly. It’s certainly fair to say that there are many issues within sports science, but the same is true for almost every science. There are many problems within medicine, for example, and yet almost all of us still visit the doctor when there is something wrong.

I was invited recently to give a presentation at Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour (Australia): “An Olympian’s Perspective on the Role of Sport Science and Psychology in Athlete Performance.” While preparing the presentation, I was forced to reflect both on how I used sports science during my career as well as how I now use sports science regularly in my current role.

Given the present discord with sports science in general, I thought it useful to write about these experiences and provide information on three specific areas in which sports science can be applied to help athletes reach an elite level—biomechanics, physiology, and psychology.

What Is Sports Science?

Trying to pin down the meaning of sports science is surprisingly difficult, as there is no set definition. For me, it’s the application of scientific principles to sport. Sports science is a relatively new discipline built on a foundation of other sciences, including biology (understanding how the human body works), physics and math (with equations relating to biomechanics), chemistry (recognizing a multitude of biochemical reactions), and psychology, along with small parts of other scientific fields, including sociology.

Sports science itself is a relatively fluid subject, and it’s continually evolving. We saw this perhaps five years ago with a strong shift in interest to skill acquisition research. And we’re seeing it now with an increased interest in data collection and analysis, meaning that more and more data scientists are transitioning to sport (and many sports scientists are working on upskilling in these areas).

The discipline’s on-going development can become increasingly complex with tools such as network analysis and other advanced modeling agents playing a role in our understanding of sport. These have trickle-down effects on how sports scientists work with coaches to improve performance.

This fluidity and ambiguity are demonstrated in the variety of job titles within the sports science sphere, including exercise physiologists, biomechanists, sports scientists, performance lifestyle advisors, strength and conditioning coaches, performance analysts, and sports medicine professionals. While there are people with the general job title of sports scientist, even their roles often focus on a specialty. Finally, it’s important to understand that sports science isn’t necessarily constrained to sport, with spillover into general exercise along with health and wellbeing.

#SportScience lets us understand what elite athletes do, how a developing athlete compares to them, & ways to bridge the gaps, says @craig100m. Share on X

Now that we have a working concept of what sports science is, the next step is to understand how it might help athletes achieve their potential. In discussing this, I will draw heavily from my career and experiences. My general process in using sports science to guide training is to understand what the best in the world do and where they are, where I am compared to them, and what I need to do to bridge the gaps.

Biomechanics

The first of the “big three” sports science disciplines that can help us is biomechanics, which I loosely define as the science of describing and explaining movement. Biomechanics allows us to delve deeper into what a world-class 100m performance looks like; the IAAF has released several studies that give us an idea of the kinetics and kinematics of elite sprinting, as have other researchers.

The table below includes some of the performance data from the 2009 World Championships, taken from the official IAAF report. It shows what a World Record 100m performance looks like in terms of split data and roughly what is required for a sub-10 performance. Perhaps the most useful data is the 0-30m split and the 30-60m split—which we can use as a proxy for a flying 30m run. Looking at athletes of different standards, we can get a reasonable idea of what it takes to perform at a given level.

As an athlete who was active in 2009, I could compare my performances directly to these benchmarks. At that time, we used an electronic block timing system that gave us 10m- and 30m-split data, in which my best was 3.98s. I also regularly collected flying 30m data, tested with a 30m roll-in. It was directly representative of the 30-60m split from the IAAF data, where my best time was 2.70s.

The data showed that I had a big gap in the 0-30m split. Allowing about 0.1s for competition, I was performing at the standard of a 10.20s runner, around 0.05s from a sub-10 runner, and about 0.1s from the WR performance.

Extrapolating my 2.70s training performance to 2.65s in competition, I was at the level of a sub-10 100m runner (even though my personal best was only 10.14s)—suggesting I should prioritize working on my first 30m. Other useful data is the 80-100m split, which offers insight into speed maintenance and endurance. Although I didn’t collect this data in training, I could have done so easily to see how my performances compared.

Building on our knowledge of what elite performance looks like in terms of split data—and how we might use this knowledge to compare our own performances—the next step is to understand the constituents of elite performance and how we compare.

Sprinting is primarily composed of step length and step frequency. We know from both the IAAF data and data reported elsewhere (including Ralph Mann’s excellent The Mechanics of Sprinting and Hurdling) that elite 100m runners have a typical step length of around 2.5 meters at maximum velocity, with a step frequency of around 4.5 Hz (i.e., they take around 4.5 steps per second).

As athletes, we can see how we compare to these values. During my career, we did this through a combination of in-competition biomechanical analysis and training analysis. The training analysis was typically done using OptoJump, a system of plastic blocks that join together and span either side of the lane in which you run. The OptoJump system sends out lasers across the track surface that are broken by your steps, giving you data on step length, step frequency, and ground contact time. The data allows you to see where you are in terms of performance in these variables and identifies areas for improvement.

Data from the 2008 British Olympic Trials 100m final, for example, showed that my step length in that race was 2.36m. I came third in that race, running 10.19s. The first two athletes ran 10.00s and 10.03s, respectively, with step lengths of 2.52m. Their step lengths were more indicative of world-class than mine, suggesting another potential area for improvement.

The next question, then, is how you might improve your step length? Once again, biomechanical analysis of the world’s best allows us to understand the components that feed into this. The best sprinters tend to achieve a greater thigh flexion angle, which means they’re better at getting their knee forward and through in front of the body. This action necessitates limiting the action of the leg behind the body, driving a focus on front side—as opposed to rear side—mechanics.

The increased thigh flexion angle increases the range of motion through which sprinters accelerate the foot toward the ground, increasing the speed and force at ground contact. These actions reduce ground contact time (which in world-class 100m runners is typically around 0.09s) and increase vertical force production—again, something that we know elite sprinters are very good at due to force plate analysis.

#Biomechanics helps us describe, explain, and achieve elite sprint performance, says @craig100m. #SportScience Share on X

As you can see, the sports science discipline of biomechanics is very useful in describing and explaining elite sprint performance, since we can:

• Use this information to compare ourselves to elite performance
• Identify specific areas for improvement
• Identify what an “optimal” technique looks like based on key performance factors

During my career, I also found biomechanists useful on a more day-to-day basis. For example, here is a video of me training in 2010:

Video 1. A clip of me training in 2010, allowing for biomechanical analysis.

The context behind this video is that I had changed coaches in September 2010, and my new coach had a different technical model. Because the model was primarily built around front side mechanics, the main technical changes were actively pulling my foot in off the ground to maintain my sprinting action in front of my body and focusing on achieving a 90-degree thigh flexion angle (for reasons explained above).

While these technical changes may sound simple, altering an ingrained running technique—one that I had developed over 23 years—was very difficult. One of my main challenges was building up the kinesthetic feel of the movement. What would it feel like when I was running properly by achieving the right positions versus running incorrectly? Developing this internal feel was important because it would enable me to self-maintain my new technique. Regular use of high-speed video, like the one above, was hugely useful. I could do a run, remember how it felt, and then check the video to see whether the running action was right or wrong.

High-speed video also helped me spot technique issues that might limit my performance. By slowing down a movement and providing more frames (i.e., images) per second than can be detected by the naked human eye, video lets us see our performance better—and does so from multiple angles.

We can also use high-speed video to check technique by exploring joint angles. For example, in the below photo, our biomechanist determined the joint angles at my front and rear knees in the set position. This is useful in many ways. Again, it allows me to compare myself to the optimum position and to see how stable my movement is.

If I do ten block starts, how often do I achieve these positions—am I consistent or highly variable? This is important because a more stable movement resists change when we’re stressed, fatigued, or nervous. If I always achieve these block angles in training, I know there’s a pretty good chance I’ll do it consistently in competition, too.

 

Physiology

Using physiology, we apply our knowledge of the human body to drive specific adaptations that can enhance performance. Within sprinting, we use this knowledge to optimize loading during resistance training, improving our capacity to produce the force required to sprint faster. We can also use physiology to develop our robustness and reduce the chances of injury.

#Physiology helps us optimize resistance training load so we can produce more force to sprint faster, says @craig100m. #SportScience Share on X

Hamstring Injuries

As a specific example, hamstring injuries are exceptionally common in all sports that require running, typically making up 25% of all non-contact injuries. We want to reduce the occurrence of hamstring injuries in athletes, especially when we know that missing training due to injury makes it much less likely to achieve your training goal.

Fortunately, a team of researchers from Australia has done some pioneering work in this area. We now know many of the risk factors associated with hamstring injuries, including reduced eccentric hamstring strength, shorter hamstring muscle fascicles, and previous hamstring injury. Based on this research, we also know that increasing eccentric hamstring muscle strength and muscle fascicle length can help reduce the risk and prevalence of hamstring injuries.

This has been well explored experimentally for exercises such as the Nordic hamstring exercise and the Yo-Yo hamstring curl. Both exercises have a large eccentric component and are effective at reducing the prevalence of hamstring injuries in athletes, likely by increasing eccentric strength and hamstring muscle fascicle length. With these results confirmed at the meta-analysis level (the highest possible level of scientific evidence), we know to include some form of eccentric hamstring exercise in our sprint training program.

Speaking from experience, I dealt with several hamstring injuries in my junior career, suffering from four separate hamstring injuries in my two years in the under-17 age group. Once I added the Romanian deadlift and Nordic hamstring exercises—both of which have a large eccentric component—my hamstring issues largely cleared up. As I progressed and grew more confident, these exercises gradually fell out of my program until 2008 when I suffered a very bad hamstring tear. At that point, I re-introduced them and no longer had any hamstring issues.

There are, however, potential issues with eccentric loading exercises in sport. Eccentric exercises cause a lot of soreness, especially when athletes first start doing them. While this soreness response is reduced and essentially disappears with repeated exposures (called the repeated bout effect), in many sports, athletes don’t like using eccentric loading exercises. And some researchers—although it’s important to mention not many—don’t necessarily believe that the hamstring muscles act eccentrically (or don’t primarily act eccentrically) during sprint running and instead act isometrically. This is quite hard to test experimentally.

We know many risk factors for hamstring injuries & how to reduce them with eccentric & isometric exercises because of #SportScience, says @craig100m. Share on X

Interestingly, isometric hamstring exercises also appear to reduce the risk of hamstring injuries in sport. More athletes may adhere to these exercises because post-exercise soreness will be lower, although the level of evidence is not as strong as for the Nordic hamstring and other eccentric exercises. And while they’re not “better” for improving eccentric muscle strength and muscle fascicle length, the isometric exercises might be more effective because they can be carried out more frequently and more widely.

This is a great example of two of my favorite things about sports science: the importance of context and the influence of nuance. While we might understand the biological mechanisms and other aspects of a certain intervention, we don’t know the true effects until it’s used in the real world. That’s when we get a better idea of its long-term implications and how athletes interact with the intervention—with aspects such as athlete belief impacting the effectiveness of any changes we might make.

Ice Baths

Other examples include the use of ice baths following exercise. The evidence now is pretty solid that post-exercise cold water immersion can enhance recovery, or at least reduce feelings of perceived soreness and fatigue. However, ice baths may be so good at improving recovery that they reduce the adaptations we get from exercise. This is because the improvements we see from exercise are partially driven by aspects such as muscle damage, oxidative stress, and inflammation—all things that cold water immersion may reduce.

As such, most sports scientists now recommend a time and a place for ice baths. When recovery is important—such as during the competitive season—perhaps we should use ice baths, especially if the athlete believes in them. However, when training adaptation is the main goal—primarily during the off-season—we should likely minimize ice bath use.

Antioxidant Supplements

Similar results are reported for antioxidant supplements. While antioxidants are a good thing in general, taking high-dose antioxidant supplements around training can blunt training adaptations. It’s a great example of how more of something that is good for you is not always better.

Psychology

I have a confession to make: I used to think that sports psychology was largely fluff, and at university, it was the sub-discipline I found least interesting. It was all very theoretical, as opposed to black and white, with right and wrong answers. However, I’ve experienced a complete 180-degree shift—I now find that sports psychology may make the biggest difference between athletes who win medals and those who don’t.

Sport psychology may make the biggest difference between athletes who win medals and those who don’t, says @craig100m. #SportPsychology Share on X

My journey toward better appreciating the true value of sports psychology started at the 2003 World Under-18 Championships, where I was selected in the 100m. This was my first true global competition, and I went in with reasonably low expectations, hoping to sneak into the final. From the heats, however, I was the fastest qualifier. And having run a personal best, I became a realistic medal prospect.

This caused a significant shift in my expectations, and as a result, I became much more anxious about my performance. In the semi-finals, this anxiety significantly hampered my performance, and I qualified for the finals in the last available “fastest loser” spot. Fortunately, one of the team coaches managed to turn me around, and in the final I ran much better, placing third.

Following these championships, I reflected on my performance and decided I’d better do something about my pre-race anxiety. As a result, I decided to work with a sports psychologist. In our first session, we talked about my pre-race nerves, and I discussed how negative they were and that being nervous pre-race was a bad thing.

The sports psychologist, however, had a different perspective. Feeling nervous was good, she said, because it meant that the race mattered, and the physiological effects of being anxious meant that my performance would improve. As stupid as this may sound, this piece of advice flicked a switch in my brain. By framing my pre-race anxiety as good rather than bad, I began to embrace the feeling—so much so that, as my career progressed, I needed to feel nervous and anxious to perform at my best.

At the World Under-18 Championships, I also learned the importance of representative practice—ensuring that your training accurately mimics the conditions in which you’ll compete. The World Under-18s were held in Sherbrooke, Canada, in July—typically a hot month. When we arrived, it was very warm, but on the day of my competition, I awoke to heavy rain showers and cold.

The weather was exactly what the long winters were like in the UK, so I was used to training in conditions like this. As a result, I performed very well. However, other athletes struggled with the conditions. The world number one that year was from Nigeria, and he was eliminated in the semi-finals. After that race, he told me he had never been as cold as he was during that race in his life. I’ve written more widely about representative practice in an earlier post, and it’s worth keeping in mind when designing your training sessions.

Other important psychological lessons I learned were the importance of not having it too easy. As a developing athlete, I was surrounded by other very successful athletes. And while I was consistently ranked very high on the all-time list as I progressed through the age groups, I often lost races. This meant that I was exposed to disappointment and failure, learned how to deal with both, and used them to spur me on to future success.

However, we often see talented youngsters who win easily and, as a result, they don’t learn how to deal with loss and disappointment. As they progress into the senior ranks—where losses are much more common—they haven’t developed the skills to deal with this.

Making things too easy for an athlete limits their development, yet many athlete development programs do just this, says @craig100m. #SportPsychology Share on X

It’s quite similar to the “rocky road” model of talent development, where talent often responds well to trauma. The key to athlete development programs, therefore, is to provide structured trauma in a way that encourages an athlete to grow and develop. Making things too easy for the athlete limits their development, and yet many athlete development programs are guilty of just this.

Final Suggestions

Hopefully, I’ve shown that sports science has the potential to impact an athlete’s performance significantly. As someone who competed to a high level, I found the application of sports science detailed here to be invaluable in assisting my performance development.

Alongside the big three disciplines of biomechanics, physiology, and psychology, other sub-disciplines, such as nutrition and skill acquisition, are emerging. Each has the potential to enhance athletic preparation further.

While much maligned, sports science can help athletes of all levels reach their potential when it’s used properly—with a full understanding of the individual nuances and contexts. I’m a strong believer in the power of sports science, and I’m excited to see how the field develops.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

In an increasingly impatient society that’s continually searching for instant gratification, it’s easy to chase results at the expense of the process. As it relates to youth soccer, this often means investing a disproportionate amount of time and energy into participating in a seemingly endless cycle of ID camps, college showcases, and random futsal tournaments while neglecting the underlying technical, tactical, and physical foundation that must be in place. With more attention now being paid to long-term athletic development (LTAD), most parents and athletes are aware of this, but feel pressured into keeping up with the Jones’. After all, development with no competition or exposure doesn’t put an athlete on a top college coach’s radar or get them a professional trial.

Admittedly, the risks of putting the cart before the horse or toiling in anonymity are both less than optimal. So, what’s best if development and results appear to be at odds with one another? I’m here to argue it’s not about putting your eggs in one basket or the other but distributing them accordingly at the appropriate time. For years as the strength and conditioning coach for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds Development Academy (RDA), I’ve witnessed time and again the power of a highly refined, nuanced approach that promotes development without devaluing competition and early success.

A thoughtful, structured approach for long-term development checks the appropriate boxes at the appropriate times. This is a critical distinction, as the timing is arguably the most important part of the process. The timing is far from one-size-fits-all either. When dealing with a young athlete’s maturity, personality and individual psychology are huge components. Some athletes are just ready to progress quicker than others and that’s great, but it’s very important to be aware that young athletes should dictate their own pace and not have it dictated to them by a coach.

A thoughtful, structured approach for LTAD checks the appropriate boxes at the appropriate times. The timing is arguably the most important part of the process, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

As a result, it’s necessary to foster an environment that can quickly adapt to progress or regress an individual athlete’s needs and still be able to express majority rule by doing what is best for a team. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s a constant work in progress. Truly, sometimes failure must come before success. The payoff in the end is well worth it and embracing the process, as opposed to fixating on results, has yielded tremendous success for our RDA athletes to the tune of multiple U.S. Club National titles, five All-Americans (four female, one male) in the past three years, and alumni at top programs across the ACC, Big Ten, Big East, and A-10.

More Strength, More Skill, Better Skill

Strength wins at all ages, but it is probably most evident at the earliest stages of development, as the disparity between those who have strength and those who don’t is most apparent. Whether through natural physiology or training adaptation, the difference between an early bloomer and a late bloomer can be glaring. Regardless of how strength is achieved, the strongest athlete is typically also the fastest and, in most cases, the most coordinated as well. This is most likely because, before adulthood, strength is more about inter- and intra-muscular coordination and proper motor unit recruitment than the size of a young athlete’s muscle.

Strength then provides an important motor link to desirable on-field attributes such as enhanced skill and speed by developing high levels of self-awareness and body control at lower velocities. At the youngest ages, the name of the game is relative strength. Mastery of body weight and expressions of that mastery through running, jumping, landing, twisting, and throwing are a must first, and only then, as young athletes mature and earn the right through proper progressions, can they train for load and more traditional absolute strength. Isometrics (holds) and eccentrics (slow stretches) are fantastic at giving real-time feedback to beginners and engraining proper positions and signaling pathways.

A subtle by-product of getting strong young is an increased affinity for actively doing more skill work. An energetic athlete is a motivated one, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

The link between strength and skill is relatively clear, but another more subtle by-product of getting strong young is an increased affinity for actively doing more skill work. Stronger muscles are more resilient and recover more quickly from prior training and competitions, so young athletes are more likely to demonstrate spontaneity and get on the ball just because they have more energy to do so. An energetic athlete is a motivated one, and the value of feeling good cannot be overlooked. Youth sports should be enjoyable, and the desire fades if soccer starts to resemble more of a chore than a game.

Let’s face it, if athletes are sore and tired, they are more likely to reach for the PS4 controller than get touches on the ball. Over the marathon that is long-term athletic development, a little bit truly goes a very long way. If one athlete organically does more quality skill work, speed work, and gym work, it will matter in the end. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard” may be a bit too simplistic of a cliché, but when comparing two athletes with similar skill sets, the athlete with the ability to handle more work over time will always be at an advantage.

Building a Better Athlete

To build a well-rounded athlete, you must dedicate time and energy to making speed, power, and fitness the primary focuses. In theory, it’s that simple. However, it requires effort to first make the commitment and then demonstrate the discipline and expertise required to follow through and put it into practice. This means devoting entire sessions specifically to developing athleticism away from the ball.

Due to the highly technical nature of soccer, it’s critical to be on the ball as much as possible, but it is still necessary at times to make sure physical development doesn’t become a watered-down afterthought. Warming up with laps around the field and finishing with haphazard sprints, push-ups, and crunches does not constitute building a better athlete. Stand-alone sessions with specific themes of speed, agility, power, and strength really allow young athletes to dedicate the adaptive reserve necessary to improving those skill sets.

This is protocol at the Riverhounds Development Academy. Our youth teams train with me a minimum of once a week throughout the year, and our older teams train twice a week. This is deeply embedded within the cultural fiber of our club, and the kids have really taken to it. With so much soccer all the time, this provides a nice change of pace for them both mentally and physically.

The success of those who have previously come through our system creates the initial buy-in, and from there it doesn’t take long for them to personally experience the benefits. These benefits are typically characterized by moments on the field in which the young athlete feels different physically, in a positive way, whether it be turning a corner, winning a 50/50 ball, or not fatiguing late in a game. These seemingly trivial, highly subjective moments on the field mean more to young athletes than running a faster 30 meters, posting a higher countermovement jump, or improving upon their max aerobic speed. These same moments breed high levels of confidence and demonstrate the value of prioritizing physical development, as actions truly speak louder than words at early ages.

The value of supplemental development and strengthening weaknesses is even greater, as the days of the multisport athlete are being jeopardized, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

Prioritizing physical preparedness also promotes healthy, sustainable, long-term development. Continually playing soccer and repeating the same movement patterns lends itself to overuse injuries, and injuries are the quickest way to disrupt the longevity of a young athlete’s career. Setting aside time specifically dedicated to addressing these concerns with general strengthening exercises to fill in the gaps will keep young players much healthier in the long run.

For vitality, it is best to be contrarian and avoid sport specificity by developing muscle groups typically underutilized in soccer like the glutes, hamstrings, and back. The value of supplemental development and strengthening weaknesses is even greater as the days of the multisport athlete are being jeopardized. Playing many sports naturally created a broader, more robust skill set, and the dawn of a new season brought about a new movement pattern and different substrate to perform on that naturally protected against overuse. With athletes now identifying with one sport and playing that sport year-round at a much earlier age, it is becoming increasingly necessary to have strategies in place to handle these concerns.

Don’t Worry About Conditioning

It is important for young soccer players to understand the value of fitness, but it is not necessary for it to be an actively developed focal point until the young athlete becomes a teenager. The organic rise of fitness should be the result of well-organized technical sessions that keep kids engaged and active throughout, as well as the acquisition of higher strength and skill levels pertaining to running and sprinting. Encouraging free play and staying as active as possible naturally builds volume when young, so the athletes have a nice aerobic base to build intensity on later as they mature.

It’s important for young soccer players to understand the value of fitness but not necessary to actively develop it until the young athlete becomes a teenager, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

Although I may not directly condition, I do find it beneficial to teach good habits that develop positive attitudes as it relates to conditioning. I am a firm believer that strong runners make good sprinters, so distinguishing between jogging, running, and sprinting is helpful. Having young athletes maintain skill and rhythm at different speeds and be able to efficiently switch gears as needed is very important for energy maintenance. Young athletes are typically all or nothing: walking when fatigued or away from the play or going like a bat out of hell once they think they have a chance to make a play.

Being able to assess when to cruise or step on it is a skill that I like to develop with very low-volume extensive tempo work and fartleks. I think the impact of treating conditioning more as a skill when young is just as important as the physiological changes that should occur later. A more skilled approach can create the perception that a young athlete is becoming fitter.

Compatibility with Other Sports

We now know that a broad athletic skill set with varied movement patterns is best for the longevity of a young athlete’s career. On the surface, it would then appear that participating in multiple sports at a young age is the answer, but is it the only answer? We have all heard the stories of legendary athletes and their prowess at multiple disciplines. Dave Winfield was drafted by the MLB, NBA, and NFL before finally settling on a Hall of Fame baseball career. Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders both played in the MLB and NFL, and it is well-documented that Michael Jordan did nothing but golf in his off-season.

Is this practical or even possible now, as the natural evolution of all sports has led to bigger, faster, stronger, better—in large part due to specializing at earlier ages? While playing many sports throughout the year might be ideal, long-term athletic development in 2019 may face a new reality. To that end, I believe it is our job collectively as a strength and conditioning community to solve this problem by providing the necessary physical balances a one-sport athlete may need while considering the depth that a multisport athlete may already possess. As with many things, there are many paths that can lead to the same destination.

It is our job collectively as an S&C community to provide the necessary physical balances a one-sport athlete may need while considering the depth that a multisport athlete may already possess. Share on X

Taking a supplemental approach in which we identify and address weaknesses will be of increasing value as young athletes continue to specify at younger ages. The diversity that playing multiple sports once addressed naturally will have to be replaced by well-thought-out and well-timed performance training. Building a broad athletic skill set that teaches athletes how to run, jump, land, cut, twist, push, pull, and hinge in all planes of motion at varying velocities and tastefully challenging with light loads as needed will optimize both health and performance.

Deliberate rest periods will also begin to take on greater significance. While #rest may not move the needle like #hustle or #grind, it’s just as important. Particularly at the youngest ages, rest is too quickly dismissed. Kids adapt, learn, and recover quicker from training stress, but they also require a lot of energy to grow and mature.

The Difference Between Burnout and Boredom

Striking the appropriate balance between competition and training at young ages is a very important task and we should not do it haphazardly. Competing too much can limit technical and physical progress, as well as burn a young athlete out physically, mentally, and emotionally. Conversely, not playing enough might lead to boredom, as a young soccer player might begin losing sight of the reason they train. Prioritizing training while integrating friendlies, tournaments, and ID camp attendance as barometers of progress is optimal.

Competition is subordinate to training during the critical early years of athletic development, and not the other way around, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

Hand-selecting events around training that can challenge at certain times and breed confidence at other times is an art. Success is more motivating to young athletes than failure, but they must learn how to fail. Never experiencing adversity at a young age will leave the athlete ill-prepared later. The trick is to simultaneously know the capabilities and personality of the player as an individual and collectively as a team, while never losing sight of the fact competition is subordinate to training, and not the other way around, during the critical early years of development.

Too often, parents and their young athletes fall prisoner to the moment and place too much stock in results, whether good or bad. It is highly unlikely both that the sky is falling, and the young athlete is destined to be the next Christian Pulisic or Alex Morgan. The answer lies somewhere in between, and there is something to be said for treating triumph or disaster as the imposters they are and focusing instead on the totality of a growing body of work.

You should build the foundation for the long-term success of a young soccer athlete on a broad technical base with a high volume of quality touches on the ball with all surfaces of the foot and various parts of the body. Specifically, the Riverhounds Development Academy utilizes a juggling log. It is simple, highly effective, and a great way to hold our athletes accountable to getting quality touches daily, as opposed to just smashing balls at a goal or wall. They must record their progress and are subject to spot checks during training at any time. The goal is 1,000 unbroken juggles, and then we have the kids progress to seated juggling.

There are regressions as well for the super young. Balloons and bounce juggles are effective at prepping for actual juggling. Building comfort on the ball while simultaneously building a broad general skill set is the key to longevity and success, particularly if an athlete identifies with just one sport. It’s simple, but it requires discipline and postponement of immediate gratification. Long-term athletic development is not a sprint; in fact, it’s not even a marathon. It’s an ultra-marathon with an Ironman thrown in for good measure, so stay patient.

Long-term athletic development is not a sprint; in fact, it’s not even a marathon. It’s an ultra-marathon with an Ironman thrown in for good measure, so stay patient, says @houndsspeed. Share on X

Start with the End in Mind

Development and success are not at odds with each other, but rather go hand-in-hand if done properly. Committing to establishing a firm foundation based on technical skill and general athletic enhancement will always be the best way to create winning results while sustaining longevity. An appropriate balance of training and competition that favors development and uses games primarily as a litmus test should always be the goal.

Chasing results and cutting corners might bring about more immediate rewards but be warned that it’s fool’s gold. Foresight and vision are necessary to grasp the 30,000-foot view that long-term athletic development requires. Stay the course, as it is the disciplined, conservative investments in training and physical development early that will yield the greatest dividends in the end.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

If you sneak into the warm-up area before a major championship race, you’ll most likely see eight different routines used by the finalists. That’s always been my favorite part of the sport to watch, because while the few seconds of the sprint race are frustratingly short, the warm-up extends to more than a couple of hours.

Admittedly, the pre-race activity of Usain Bolt has always been quite frustrating as well: physio and assisted stretching on a table, a few strides, and gone to the call room before the race. If you wanted to film drills and starting-blocks trials, the world’s fastest human was not the one to follow!

However, for the 200m competition at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, I chose to focus on him with my Casio Exilim camera. He had just broken his own 100m world record with an unbelievable 9.58, so he was expected to do the same at 200m. He did just that in 19.19, a record that still stands 10 years later. So, in 2019, I guess it’s about time to release the footage of what happened backstage in preparation for one of the greatest performances in history:

Video HERE

Quarter-Final

On the morning of August 18, 2009, Bolt won his heat in 20.70, a 93% effort compared to his personal best (19.30 at the 2008 Beijing Olympics). I came to the warm-up track in the afternoon to record his pre-quarter-final warm-up. Obviously, he was not going to do much exercise, as he would eventually jog through in 20.41, a 94% effort. What I wanted to do was record his running motion in a sagittal plane to observe how he gets faster and faster as the warm-up progresses, and compare this with his top-speed mechanics, as displayed during the 100m world record. At 65% speed (8 m/s), his step length is 2.44 vs. 2.77 during the 100m, and his step rate is 3.3 vs. 4.4 hz, but the major change was how fast the foot was striking the ground.

Semi-Final

The next day, (August 19), Bolt won his semi-final in 20.08. I decided to film him from behind and take close-ups of his foot. A top hurdler friend told me, “Hey, that’s not how you are going to find Bolt’s secret for speed.” I laughed. At least I would get beautiful pictures that would be used by physios regarding Bolt’s atypical alignments and foot sole action in acceleration phase.

Final

The final was scheduled the next evening (August 20), his eighth race of the championships. Although this was only going to be the second one at full effort, he was already tired, to judge from his attitude and complaints. It was completely understandable, with all the attention and duties around him during these championships. This was the shortest warm-up I’d seen him do.

Under the eyes of coach Glen Mills and manager Ricky Simms, he wore the spikes and only did two starts without blocks. He only took a few steps and almost false-started on the second one. I left the warm-up area feeling that he would be lucky to win with 19.7 and not get injured. But I was so wrong, as he would run 19.19 and win by 0.62, the greatest margin ever in a contemporary world-class 200m.

A Proper Warm-Up?

Was this warm-up routine effective for Usain Bolt? Should you copy it? Does it tick all the boxes of a proper warm-up? I’ll leave these questions open while you watch Bolt’s video. To accompany your reflection, here’s the definition of warm-up by my colleague Fabio Martins, a Portuguese physio in the Shanghai province who has spent some time at the Diamond Leagues this year with Team China: 

“For me, warm-ups should be athlete-dependent. If they feel more prepared from doing an in-depth one, we do it. If they like a more condensed variation, we choose that instead. However, there are always two major components I include when carrying out the preparation for athletic optimisation: movement and the mind. Transfer to sport is a critical factor when planning a training program and it should be no different when deciding on what to include within a warm-up. It could be seen as an additional opportunity to input motor skill development, remedial-based exercises, and visualisation strategies. Over time, good habits have the potential to not only improve movements, but can also instil confidence! Additionally, even further benefits can be gained via manual treatment from a therapist prior to the session/competition. With enough skill, the therapist should once again be able to potentiate the two major components: movement and the mind, to help create optimal performance outcomes!”

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Have you noticed that we see either the lowest introductory level jumping exercises or the holy grail of BIG BOX JUMPS? Do you ever wonder what happened to the medium intensity jumping sequences and where they fit into your program?

Let’s find a home for this stepchild of plyometric intensities—the middle-intensity jumps. WARNING: Your cool factor on social media might take a drastic hit because you’re not jumping onto a 50-inch stack of Olympic plates swaying back and forth as you go into your approach.

The Gap Between Beginner and Advanced Jumping Exercises

Recently I wrote a post on using very low boxes for training, 2-4 inches in height, to elicit a very reactive response to ground contacts. I shared how these lower level, yet extremely quick, actions could be used vertically, horizontally, and lateral specific. It was a pretty cool article if you want to check it out to gain perspective on low box training.

Although the strategies used in low box training stand on their own, they’re also great to use in the early stages of building a foundation of the foot, ankle, and lower leg strength, plus power and elasticity when preparing your athletes for higher-level plyometrics.

Logically, the next progression in the sequence of jumping is to add more intensity—let’s say more potential knee bending and a little less focus on elastic energy. To do so, we’re going to graduate our athletes up to more medium-height jumping, including medium-height boxes.

Keep in mind, as we go up in height, we slowly eliminate the lateral influence of change of direction type elastic work. But that’s perfectly fine. And it’s a good thing because the higher we go and the more intensity we drive, the less variability we want so we can safely produce force at appropriate angles—while protecting our joint systems.

Okay, what do I mean when I talk about medium jumping and medium boxes? Does this mean athletes are only using medium effort to execute all these medium jumps? Ah, no, not exactly. Let me talk about how high we jump and box height before I go into programming and various jumping strategies. Then I can draw some lines connecting the various jumping height strategies.

Before I go any further, this article is not about box heights. It’s about medium-level intensities of jumping or plyometric activities. I include boxes because it is a no-brainer strategy if they’re available. I want to make sure, though, that you don’t use the lack of boxes as an excuse to not participate in jumping and plyometric activities.

Take a look at the chart below. It outlines what a medium box means to different athletes. Please keep in mind that this is just a chart and not a commandment—it’s a starting point. You can adjust athletes to box height accordingly.

The heights outlined in the chart aren’t extremely high—hence the name medium box. A typical question people have is: How do we challenge our athletes enough to gain improvement if we are not jumping up to a maximum height box? The answer lies in the application of jumping strategies.

The strategies in the chart below are not just for jumping onto a medium box. They’re additional strategies to build eccentric capacities in the various areas of the body that contribute to jumping better, especially when referring to the reversibility of effort (when you must change the direction down to up quickly).

The chart above might seem elementary. You bet it is! Stop thinking that we have to create the next YouTube sensational drill series. Do things with great intent and purpose, keep them fundamental, add variation, and you’ll have one heck of a strategy to improve your athletes safely. And remember to live for another day and always come up and inch short versus a mile over. Your athletes will thank you.

In the next section, take a look at the video demonstrations of the five jumping strategies listed in the chart. Watching them will help drive home the message of why.

Building Eccentric Control with Fake Throws and Other Exercises

Posterior Chain Eccentric Control with Fake Throws

What are fake throws? They’re part of a strategy I developed decades ago to elicit a fast eccentric action through the kinetic chain. Basically, an athlete moves a light medicine ball very quickly as if throwing it, but suddenly stopping it to create immediate deceleration (you can use other weights as long as they are 4lb-10lbs).

When doing a fake throw, the muscles throughout the body quickly tense to stop all movements, from limbs to upper and lower body. This was my way of creating an innate stiffness in the body to control movement by building eccentric control. There are countless strategies to use the fake throw concept to increase eccentric control.

Video 1. I use a very basic landing skill with a high-to-low vertical fake throw to cause posterior loading overload.

Knee-Bending Eccentric Control with DB and Bar Loading

Athletes doing these exercises use DBs, a bar, or bodyweight to execute the movements. Knee-bending eccentrics are performed with the upper body simply dropping straight down with little to no hip flexion. The weight is delivered primarily to the knee and ankle joints as the primary spring loaders. These kinds of movements cause an important adaptation to higher speed loads. If the athlete quickly redirects the load back up, the movement aids the coordination of agonist and antagonist muscle functioning even though it’s highly focused on tendon resiliency when not going very deep.

Video 2. Knee-bending eccentric control using a dumbbell and a bar for loading.

Arm Lever Length and Speed from Tight to Extended

Arm action may be one of the most overlooked aspects of jumping. Depending on the type of jump, the arms can be kept closer to the body and never extend past 90 degrees at the elbow. Yet, in a sport like volleyball, outside hitters use a very long approach with relatively long ground contact time to execute a high vertical displacement. To achieve this, the athlete swings their arms much longer to coordinate the action of the approach jump footwork (the inside foot touches first followed by the outside foot).

Video 3. In some sports, the arms swing long to coordinate the approach jump footwork. In other sports, the arms stay close to the body to quicken the jump.

A middle blocker in volleyball will keep the arms close and vertical to the body, never getting too far out front until they reach the peak of the jump and attempt to block. This arm action lets them jump quicker to execute a block. A soccer goalie having to jump quickly to punch a ball coming high at the goal will also use a very tight quick arm action to get up quickly to time the speed of the ball.

Multiplanar Bilateral Jumping in All Planes

Video 4. Athletes learn to manage body control by performing jumps in various directions.

In this video, the jumps are performed in various directions. You can challenge an athlete with a lateral jump, a lateral jump with 90 degrees of rotation, a forward jump with transverse rotation at any degree, etc.

The athlete’s ability to effectively manage body control while performing multiplanar jumps is critical in overall athletic preparedness. In sport, athletes often land in awkward positions, and if they’ve never been challenged or experienced this before, their injury risk rises.

Multiplanar Unilateral Hops and Leaps in All Planes

Video 5. Medium intensity single-leg jumping exercises prepare athletes for sports often played on one leg.

Multiplanar hops and leaps follow the basic path as the multiplanar jumps. The obvious hurdle to overcome is making sure athletes are prepared to manage single-leg exercises with great control.

Performing medium intensity single-leg jumping exercises is valuable because sports are so often played on one leg, requiring an athlete to very quickly stabilize in the single-leg landing patterns.

It should be pretty clear that if you’re not addressing the “not so common” strategies to improve the jump, you’re leaving resources untapped.

Do not think I don’t know the fun stuff is what athletes keep coming back for. I totally agree you can have your cake and eat it too. What I mean is, if you want to make sure you do exercises that challenge the athletes and make it fun yet still focus on the appropriate intensities and safety parameters—as Sylvester Stallone says in Rocky, “GO-FOR-IT.”

Body-Only Exercises and Skills

I want to shift gears now to completely address jumping and plyometric type exercises with the use of ZERO equipment. Yep, just bodyweight strategies that can challenge the nervous system to elicit a coordinated response. These exercises bridge the gap between the reactive low box and low-level exercises and the monstrous big box and high hurdle training.

Bodyweight exercises bridge the gap between the reactive low box & low-level exercises and the monstrous big box & high hurdle training, says @leetaft. Share on X

Hey, wait! It’s a great time to define the difference between jumping and plyometrics. I know this is talked about to death, but I’d feel remiss if I don’t let you know what I think about these two strategies.

When I speak of jumping (leaping and hopping also fall into this category), I’m primarily concerned with the concentric effort of the jump. Meaning, the attention is on pushing through the floor to lift the body off the ground. My attention to how long it takes—I certainly don’t want it slow—isn’t as urgent as it is when focusing on plyometrics. Now, I do realize there will likely be an eccentric or loading phase to the jumping, leaping, or hopping, but the focus isn’t on that aspect of the movement—it’s on pushing up or concentrically driving the body up.

Plyometric exercises, on the other hand, are totally focused on the quick turnaround between landing and jumping. We call this the amortization phase, the loading phase—you know, the phase between going down and going up. We want it quick!

The difference between the jump and the plyo (plyometric) is that the jump relies a lot on the muscular system to provide the energy to jump. The plyo does need help from the muscle for sure, but it’s the tendon and its ability to store and release energy quickly that we want. Are we good?

Now I want to dig into some jumping and plyo strategies, using nothing but the ground and the weight of the body—gravity will jump in there too, so don’t even fight it.

Bodyweight Jump Strategies

To ensure my athletes have a great foundation of medium-intensity jumping, leaping, and hopping, I start with stationary exercises like those in the video below. The video also sets the standard of how to define jumps, leaps, and hops. Remember, these fall under jumps—not plyometrics—so there will be more emphasis on the concentric portion of the movement.

Video 6. To give athletes a great foundation of medium intensity jumps, leaps, and hops, start with these stationary exercises.

But what if I want to put a focus on more posterior dominant versus quad dominant exercises? What could I do? Of course, I’m going to allow the hips to flex forward much more. If my attention is on quad dominant, I won’t allow the hips to flex forward and will attempt to keep the upper body more upright. But this causes me to use more ankle dorsiflexion so I can downwardly load. Take a look at the video below showing examples of a posterior, or hip, dominant jump versus a quad, or knee, dominant jump.

Video 7. Example of a posterior-hip dominant jump vs. a quad-knee dominant jump.

One of the goals of a solid jumping program should be to challenge body and spatial awareness. Body awareness means where the limbs are in space during a movement. Basically, am I in control of hitting proper positions with arms, legs, and entire body? Spatial awareness lets us know where our bodies are in space. Meaning, am I tilting to the right, or leaning backward, or about to fall over? Kind of important to be good at if you want to be a successful jumper and mover.

Bodyweight Plyometric Strategies

In this section, I’ll pull your attention to using plyometric strategies to challenge athletes’ abilities to get off the ground much faster while still moving extremely efficiently—in other words, not sloppy while executing the exercises.

Earlier I discussed posterior versus quad dominant performances while jumping. It’s easy to focus on either/or when jumping. When performing medium-level plyometrics, we start leaning toward quad dominant and lower leg dominant emphasis.

Why? Well, if we’re not jumping from or at maximal heights and don’t need as much hip bending to help absorb forces, we typically can quickly return the energy using more tendinous structures and not require as much power from the muscles—as in a big hip flexion to load the posterior chain.

If my goal is to increase the speed I get back off the ground, I need to limit how low I go when I land. To do this, I rely on more ankle dorsiflexion and knee flexion and less hip flexion. But truthfully, I don’t want a ton of knee flexion either. If I have that, I end up losing the energy in the tendons in the form of heat. It comes down to landing and jumping back up as quickly as possible.

I didn’t mean to skate over an important aspect of stored energy in the tendon. Let me explain what I mean by the tendon losing heat. When an athlete lands and instantly goes back up, the energy built up in the tendon is used to “rebound” the tendon from its stretched state back to its shortened state very fast. This causes an elastic response, which is what makes athletes faster.

But if the athlete lands and pauses, the energy stored in the tendon during the stretch phase can’t hang around for very long. So, the tendon relaxes to the stretched state, and the energy that was built up gets released in the form of heat—meaning no more elastic response or fast movement. Kind of sucks when this happens. There’s more to it, but this gives a birds-eye view of what we want to accomplish with plyos.

Medium Intensity Lower Body Plyometric Exercises

When performing medium-level plyometrics, a coach must have a reason for going sub-maximal yet going higher than the reactive exercises performed with a low box or low-level reactive jumps. My answer to this falls in the realm of learning to manage more load than the very low-level exercises and before the high loads come with the maximal plyometric exercises, such as high load depth jumps.

In this section, I want to outline several of my favorite exercises to challenge an athlete’s loading and exploding abilities as well as their coordination to manage variations in patterns.

Think about this for a second. If an athlete wants to move quickly off the ground, they must apply force into the ground much more quickly. They must not only apply force quicker but also redirect the force quicker to leave the ground quickly. Now, low-level plyos do allow quickness off the ground, but there’s not a lot of force applied into the ground—it’s merely elastic energy.

In the early to middle training phases, medium-level plyometrics are the best way to get speed off the ground & force into the ground, says @leetaft. Share on X

On the other hand, if they jump from a maximal height, they will greatly increase the force into the ground but might not be able to get off the ground very quickly, at least not in the early to middle phases of training when they’re not fully prepared. So, the best alternative to get both speed off the ground and force into the ground is medium-level plyometrics.

Here is a list of exercises I love to use. I’ve included videos so you can see the execution of the exercises.

The Knee Tuck Series

Tuck Jump with a Hand Tap on the knees to slightly control the height. To execute this plyo, the athlete must not put too much emphasis on jumping high but rather jumping quickly. You’ll notice the athlete’s head doesn’t go vertical very much, but the knees and hips flex quickly to bring the knees up to the outstretched arms and hands.

Video 8. Tuck jumps with a hand tap emphasize jumping quickly.

Vertical Tuck Jump. In this version of the tuck jump, the athlete attempts to bring the knees up above the waistline to challenge body awareness and to increase the intensity of the landing. In this exercise, you can see the athlete is trying to jump higher by watching the head travel vertically.

Cycle Tuck Jump. The level of body awareness goes way up as well as the intensity of the landing. The athlete is not jumping maximally, as these are medium-level exercises, but the force into the ground is increasing as it slowly goes toward more unilateral bias.

The Lateral Series

Lateral Leap. Also knowns as an ice-skater, the lateral leap challenges the athlete’s ability to use effective and efficient positions to quickly leap right to left while maintaining stability in supportive structures of the foot and ankle complex, knee, hip, and pelvis, and upper body influencers such as shoulder and head. The athlete must quickly redirect the force going angular into the ground and return in the direction they came.

Video 9. Lateral leaps require athletes to quickly redirect the angular force going into the ground and return in the direction they came.

Medial Continuous Hops. In this video, notice how the athlete performs on the same leg moving to the inside (for example, the right leg moving toward the left or vice versa). This exercise places the stressors on the medial structures of the body, such as the groin and adductors, quadratus lumborum and obliques, and structures of the foot, ankle, and lower leg such as posterior tibialis, peroneal, and gastroc-soleus. The hops also challenge the glute medius to support frontal plane pelvic positioning upon landing.

Lateral Continuous Hops. The stress to the body shifts on this exercise to the lateral structures such as glute medius and other supporting structures. I tend to migrate toward the continuous medial hops more than the continuous lateral hops for one primary reason. In court and field sport, athletes do so much cutting and hard change of direction that the IT-band is always under tension due to the hip structures (TFL and glutes) it attaches to. It’s not that I don’t train this exercise—I just monitor it with my athletes. My first priority as a strength coach is to do no harm.

The Bridge Between Beginner and Advanced Training

I don’t know, but I believe medium intensity plyometrics and jumping have their place. As a matter of fact, because I’m traditionally a very low-risk coach, I love medium intensity plyos. I like to find sound strategies where I can increase the variability, and therefore the feedback, the athletes get by training at sub-maximal levels.

I love medium intensity plyos. I can increase variability and get more feedback when athletes train at sub-maximal levels, says @leetaft. Share on X

One of the ways I attack jumping, especially plyos, is by enhancing the parts of the body above the hips to recoil and redirect energy quickly. This is where the fake throw methodologies come into play.

To enhance the performance and safety of all your athletes, you need to train at all levels and intensities with plyos. A medium level is simply a strategic tool that checks a lot of boxes, at least for me. I use them, I get results, and my athletes gain great foot and ankle resilience. Maybe most importantly, my athletes like them and feel great from doing them. And that’s good enough for me!

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Throughout my professional career, I have traveled across the country visiting, as well as consulting, with many professional and collegiate athletic teams and programs. During these occasions, I have witnessed and been asked to evaluate various off-season and in-season athletic team training sessions and planned program designs. These observations, as well as my numerous discussions with physicians, rehabilitation professionals, sport coaches, and strength and conditioning professionals, expose a concern over the incorporation of high-level stressors (i.e., high-intensity exercise) into the athlete’s training program design. This apprehension (fear) appears to intensify at the time of the in-season training period, because, in addition to training, athletes also participate in team practice and game day competition.

To initiate this dialogue’s “elephant in the room,” I need to address the anxiety triggered by the distressful “what if” that arises during the course of an athlete’s training. In my four decades of professional practice in the related fields of sports rehabilitation and athlete strength and conditioning, as well as my time as the CEO of a 2,000+ employee, 185-facility physical therapy enterprise, my experiences have taught me to learn from the mistakes of the past, place emphasis on and address the concerns of the present, and make concise and well-thought-out decisions based upon factual information. Since initiating these principles, I’ve realized the large majority of “what if” fears will never come to fruition.

If an individual places focus upon the “what if” scenario of a possible fatal accident while driving a car, “what if” a deadly virus is acquired while wandering into crowded public settings, and “what if” serious injury transpires from participating in athletic competition, this individual likely wouldn’t drive a car, wouldn’t leave their home, and certainly would not participate in athletic endeavors. However, we can assume the majority of the population does not address life’s circumstances with this perspective. So why is there such a strong concern placed upon the “what if’s” during the athlete’s training?

Now, with that stated, the application of high-level stressors during training is not a free pass for the S&C professional to institute poor programming and inadequate training agendas or provide “off the cuff” imprudent decisions that are not well-organized, evidenced-based, or well-coached. 

What Is a ‘High Stress’ Application?

In my previous SimpliFaster blog post, I highlighted Al Vermeil’s Hierarchy of Athletic Development, as well as Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, including the need for an unaccustomed stress application in order for physical adaptation to take place. High stressors are applied in the form of exercise “intensity” and may include, but are not limited to, exercise weight, exercise velocity, jump heights or distance, running velocity and distance, and many other activities utilized to enhance an athlete’s physical abilities. High levels of applied stress do not necessarily translate to the application of a heavy weight or high-velocity movements. High levels of stress refer to the application of a stressor to which the athlete is unaccustomed, resulting in a physical adaptation to that particular stressor.

An appropriate programmed unfamiliar stressor at suitable periods of the training cycle is needed for physical adaptation to take place. Share on X

You should also note that normally perceived “lower intensity” stressors may in reality be of “higher intensity” when utilized in the rehabilitation and training environments. Such a scenario may include a rehabilitation exercise progression to a 1-pound weight during a straight leg raise exercise where the patient previously had the limited ability to only lift the weight of their leg. “Healthy” high school and college freshmen who have no formal history of organized training would likely begin with lower stressor intensities (perceived as high to them) when compared to their seasoned peers. These same principles apply when introducing a progression of appropriate and significant high intensities (i.e., heavy weight, high sprinting velocities, etc.) founded upon the demonstrated abilities displayed by the experienced athlete during training. Regardless of the type of perceived intensity application, the premise remains that an appropriately programmed unfamiliar stressor at suitable periods of the training cycle is needed for physical adaptation to take place.

A review of Al Vermeil’s Hierarchy of Athletic Development (figure 1) demonstrates that strength is the physical quality foundation from which all other physical qualities evolve.

The physical quality of strength has been recognized to assist in injury reduction¹, as weaker athletes sustain more muscle and mechanical damage when compared to their stronger peers². Stronger athletes also display faster sprint times³, as well as the ability to change direction more rapidly and more efficiently⁴. When compared to stronger athletes, weaker athletes tend to rely more on ligaments for joint stability in high-intensity situations. This phenomenon is known as ligament dominance⁵, placing this group of athletes at increased risk of injury. During athletic competition, with athleticism and skill being very similar, it is the stronger athlete that will usually prevail. Strength is an essential physical quality in both the rehabilitation and athletic performance environments.

The Physical Quality of Strength

The physical quality of strength, as with any physical quality, is continually enhanced with the appropriate cyclic application of unaccustomed high intensity. You should evaluate and treat every athlete as an individual, as some may not be suited or properly prepared for the same high-intensity stressor applied to their peers. Proper preparation and the establishment of a work capacity are fundamental essentials often overlooked during the athlete’s training process. These fundamental essentials will help ensure future desired physical quality outcomes while allowing for suitable recovery and decreased threat of injury.

Proper preparation and the establishment of a work capacity are fundamental essentials often overlooked during the athlete’s training process. Share on X

Clearly, strength-based athletes such as powerlifters and Olympic-style weightlifters place no constraint upon weight intensity performance, as this is the outcome goal for success in these competitive sports. The objective for lifting weights in the team sport setting is to assist in the enhancement of the athlete’s physical qualities and athleticism, not for the creation of a competitive powerlifter or weightlifter. We should also note that other non-weightlifting activities such as sprinting and body weight exercises will also enhance strength qualities. However, we should not ignore that in many arenas of team sport competition, the athlete must produce high levels of force to overcome much more than their own body weight against the influence of gravity. Such examples include a football player breaking a tackle, hockey players fighting over the puck, basketball players rebounding under the boards, and wrestlers during match competition.

These examples substantiate the requirement for the application of external high stressor intensity during training. You should observe the following variables during the planning, as well as the execution, of a high-intensity exercise performance:

• Demonstrated body control and correct posture adjustments with associated proper technical proficiency as exercise intensity is progressively increased.
• Demonstrated applicable executed exercise velocity.
• Successful execution of the programmed exercise training intensities as related to the physical quality standards of the sport of participation.

The physical quality standards of the sport of participation are utilized as a reference to establish a foundation for the preparation of the athlete to eventually compete in practice alongside their peers and on game day against their opponent. An example of the strength and explosive strength standards for the sport of American football can be found in figure 2

There is also an important relationship with regard to the programmed increase in high-intensity exercise and the athlete’s ability to control and maintain proper body posture(s) and technique during exercise execution. The acknowledgement of this relationship is essential to ensure for:

• Enhancement of the physical qualities necessary for optimal athletic performance.
• Sustained proper technical exercise proficiency resulting in the athlete’s optimal application of force against the external resistance.
• The velocity (i.e., rate of force development, impulse) at which the athlete’s executed force is applied.
• Physiological and biomechanical efficiency, for the proper distribution of the applied stressor upon the athlete.
• Safety from injury.

Another consideration often asked about is how high a level of applied stress is enough. In addition to the physical quality standards of the sport of participation, a balance should exist between these sport standards and guideline limitations placed upon high-intensity applications. Using the squat exercise as an example, the general rule for the athletes trained under our supervision is a full squat exercise weight intensity limitation of twice their body weight. Once accomplished, the emphasis is placed upon exercise execution at higher velocities at this same high (as well as all) exercise intensity.

This philosophy of training transpired during an “ah-ha” moment while working with my good friend, Hall of Fame S&C Coach Johnny Parker, during many off-seasons with his NFL New York Giants players. During the 1980s, Coach Parker and I also met and worked with a former Soviet weightlifter and weightlifting coach named Grigori Goldstein. On one particular occasion, we witnessed a NY Giants player who had executed a successful 425-pound squat at a body weight of 178 pounds. When Coach Goldstein was asked how to continue to make this particular player stronger, he responded: “You don’t need to make him stronger. You need to have him move the bar faster.” Progressing this player through what would eventually become Vermeil’s Hierarchy of Athletic Development would be much more beneficial for his overall athletic performance than continuing to focus on making him stronger.

There are exceptions to every rule, and the two-time body weight squat limit is no exception. There was an outstanding running back with the Giants for many seasons (he was also a member of the 1986 Super Bowl Championship team). At a stature of 5 feet 7 inches and a body weight of 202 pounds, this player also performed a 620-pound full squat. If his squat exercise limitations had been set to two times body weight—i.e., 404 pounds—he likely would not have physically endured a single NFL season or had his outstanding NFL career.

All athletes should be evaluated for high-intensity limitations and exceptions based on such criteria as their stature, the standards of the sport, and their position of participation. Share on X

In hindsight, when considering the “risk vs. reward” with regard to a high-stress application, Coach Parker and I often discuss whether this player would have been as successful if his squat exercise intensity had been limited to 500 pounds or 550 pounds with increased barbell velocities versus three times his body weight. All athletes should be evaluated for high-intensity limitations and exceptions based on such criteria as the athlete’s stature, the standards of the sport, and the position of participation. For example, does an Olympic fencer need to lift as much weight as a football lineman?

Lifting Heavy Weights In-Season

During the aforementioned discussions, there is increased apprehension over the inclusion of high-intensity exercise performance during in-season training. This concern appears to be centered upon the inclusion of team practice, as well as game day competition. However, we may then ask, if an athlete executes high-intensity exercises during their off-season training, where they may also achieve personal records (PR’s), why then during the most important time of the year is there a hesitation to prescribe high-intensity training?

If you establish in-season training intensity limitations at, let’s say, 80% of the athlete’s previous off-season physical performance, why then have the athletes perform so diligently during the off-season? Where is the logic to attaining substantial off-season physical achievements and not at least maintaining, if not continuing to improve, these achievements during the competitive season? Would any sport coach instruct any athlete to limit their physical abilities to an 80% effort during game day performance? Is a 20% reduction in effort considered acceptable? If a reduction in effort is not deemed acceptable, why then is any programmed deficit during the in-season training considered not acceptable as well? Not only will a weaker athlete likely perform at less than optimal, but a continual loss of strength due to the physicality of a long season in conjunction with a steady application of a shortfall (inadequate) intensity may also set the stage for possible injury.

The philosophy for in-season high-intensity stress application was introduced to me in the fall of 1996. Coach Parker was now with the NFL New England Patriots, and numerous discussions led to high-intensity weight applications of 90% or greater at appropriate training periods during this particular in-season. At the conclusion of the 1996 NFL competitive season, 35 New England players set PR’s in one or more of the foundation exercises (i.e., squats, cleans, bench press, etc.) as the team entered the NFL playoffs. Wouldn’t we, as coaches, aspire for our athletes to physically “peak” at the most important time of the year, the time of the post-season playoffs? This same Patriots team eventually competed in that same post-season Super Bowl XXXI.

The Relationship Between Exercise Volume and Intensity

Higher programmed exercise volumes have an inverse relationship to exercise intensity. As an example, if an athlete performs a squat exercise with 100 pounds for 10 repetitions and their exercise descent and ascent are both 2 feet in distance (a total distance traveled of 4 feet), we would calculate the total work performed (work = force x distance) as 100 pounds x 4 feet x 10 repetitions = 4,000 ft. lbs. If the same athlete squatted 150 pounds for five repetitions, the work performed would now be 150 pounds x 4 feet x 5 reps = 3,000 ft. lbs., resulting in a 25% less overall quantity of work performed (i.e., 3,000 vs. 4,000 ft. lbs.). However, the same athlete would also execute a 50% higher quality of work (i.e., 150 lbs. vs. 100 lbs. per repetition). Appropriately programmed in-season high-intensity exercise execution corresponds with a lower volume of work. Reduced exercise volumes also help avoid the excessive physical fatigue that may lead to many physical consequences.

Appropriately programmed in-season high-intensity exercise execution corresponds with a LOWER volume of work. Share on X

Using the above example, I present two in-season squat workouts (after warm-up) below. Figure 3a represents an actual college football in-season squat workout limited to 80% exercise intensity. Figure 3b represents a higher exercise intensity in-season squat workout. Both programs are based upon an athlete’s demonstrated 500-pound squat performance.

Figure 3a demonstrates that an increased amount of work (17,200 ft. lbs. vs. 15,500 ft. lbs.) may be achieved with the programming of lighter weights, thus enhancing the athlete’s ability to perform more exercise repetitions. However, the average squat set quality of work is approximately 21% lighter in the limited intensity workout when compared to figure 3b, the high-intensity workout (362.5 lbs. vs. 403.8 lbs. respectively). A lesson imparted upon me by both legendary track coach Charlie Francis and my good friend Derek Hansen is a concept that is easy for many coaches and rehabilitation professionals to understand, but difficult for them to trust. Physical performance at 90–95% of an athlete’s abilities is still submaximal; thus, these high intensities are still safe to perform. The attempt to execute excessive exercise volumes at these high intensities is what subjects the athlete to possible injury.

Physical performance at 90–95% of an athlete’s abilities is still submaximal. Thus, these high intensities are still safe to perform, as long as the exercise volume isn’t excessive. Share on X

In addition, a greater amount of accumulative in-season exercise volume (work) may eventually lead to excessive physical fatigue, setting the stage for overtraining, poor recovery, decreased on-the-field performance, and eventual soft tissue type injury. An additional consequential risk that low-intensity, higher volume workouts may present is the illusion of a light workout session when the reality is often the opposite. As demonstrated in figure 3a, lower intensity “light” work sessions may transform to “heavy” work sessions due to the greater-than-anticipated quantity of work performed. It is acknowledged that during the course of training, athletes require days off and “unloading” workouts to assist in recovery and avoid overtraining. However, athletes remain “fresh” by maintaining (as well as enhancing) their strength levels during the competitive season, not by persistently resting.

Do Athletes Sprint Enough in Season?

There also appears to be a reluctance to incorporate appropriate levels of high-velocity (intensity) sprinting during the competitive season. Once again, this hesitation appears to be due to the concern for injury, and more specifically, the onset of soft tissue injury (i.e., hamstring strains). Sprinting is required not only for enhanced athletic performance, but the prevention of high-velocity injury as well.

Sprinting is required not only for enhanced athletic performance, but the prevention of high-velocity injury as well. Share on X

If an athlete isn’t acclimated to the repetitive high-velocity movements that occur during practice, competition, and the prolonged competitive season, how then could there be expectations for them to remain healthy under such stressful physical circumstances? The following are benefits to incorporating high-intensity (velocity) sprinting during the athlete’s in-season training.

1. Enhances running velocity – Stating the obvious, to maintain and possibly enhance an athlete’s running velocity, the athlete needs to run at high velocity. Sprinting is the purest plyometric activity and will enhance the physical qualities of strength, explosive strength, and elastic strength. Although some athletes may rarely achieve 100% of their maximal velocity during their sport of participation, the enhanced starting abilities (i.e., first step) and improved acceleration capabilities associated with high-velocity sprinting will also help contribute to optimal athletic performance.
2. Enhances the speed reserve – Higher running velocities will also enhance submaximal running velocities (i.e., 80% of an improved running velocity is faster than 80% of the previous lower running velocity). The athlete will also improve their physiological and energy efficiency (economy) at these new high and submaximal running velocities, as well as consistently maintain these velocities throughout the game day competition.
3. Improves neuromuscular efficiency and timing – Sprinting will provide a stimulus to both enhance and “fine-tune” rate coding, contractile velocities, and efficiency of recruitment. Maximal muscle activation of the medial (semitendinosus) and lateral (biceps femoris) hamstring muscles occurs at different musculotendon lengths⁷ and at different time intervals during the running cycle. Precise timing for these differences in activation to happen is crucial for both performance and injury prevention.

In addition, the lateral hamstring muscle, the biceps femoris, consists of two heads, a long head and a short head (figure 4). These two distinct anatomical components of the muscle also have two different and distinct nerve innervations, the tibial nerve (long head) and the common peroneal nerve (short head). For the athlete to maintain and/or achieve the proper neuromuscular efficiency of the medial and lateral hamstring muscles, as well as the proper timing of the nerve innervations to the long and short heads of the biceps femoris muscle at high velocity, the athlete must perform at high velocity.

4. Improves the coactivation index of the lower extremity musculature – The coactivation index is an additional neuromuscular consideration for training at high velocities. During slow-velocity movements, including those with applied high intensity, agonist and antagonist muscle groups work amicably together over the prolonged exercise period to stabilize the joint(s), demonstrating a coactivation index (ratio) of approximately 1:1. High-velocity movements are dependent upon brief periods of time requiring a prominent contribution from the agonists, while the opposing antagonists must demonstrate a lower level of activity.

The “quieter” the antagonists, the less opposing they will be, resulting in a higher contribution of the agonists for ideal force application. This emphasized contribution by the agonist muscle groups corresponds to a shift in the coactivation ratio, favoring the agonists muscle groups. The highest skilled athletes are those with the ability to completely relax their antagonist muscle groups during high-velocity activities, as rigid and “rough” movements are likely the result of poor coordination between agonists and antagonists.

One of the Last Advantages

The programming of high-intensity training via the application of unaccustomed stresses is necessary for physical adaptation to transpire. The application of high stressors during off-season training will continue to improve the physical qualities necessary for optimal athletic performance. In-season high-intensity training will maintain, if not continue to improve, the physical qualities attained during the off-season training. The appropriate incorporation of high-velocity in-season sprinting will also maintain and possibly improve the athlete’s running velocity.

Appropriate in-season sprinting will also assist in the prevention of soft tissue injury, due to maintaining or enhancing the athlete’s strength levels, intermuscular coordination, and neuromuscular timing. As many athletic teams have off-season training requirements as well as training facilities available to them, the application of high-intensity stressors during in-season training may be one of the few advantages remaining in competitive team sports.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Lauersen, J.B., Andersen, T.E., and Andersen, L.B. “Strength training as superior, dose-dependent and safe prevention of acute and overuse sports injuries: a systematic review, qualitative analysis and meta-analysis.” British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2018; 52: 1557—1563.

2. Newton, M., Morgan, G.T., Sacco, P., et al. “Comparison between trained and untrained for responses to a bout of strenuous eccentric exercise of the elbow flexors.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2008; 22(2): 597–607

3. McBride, J.M., Blow, D., Kirby, T.J., et al. “Relationship Between Maximal Squat Strength and Five, Ten, and Forty Yard Sprint Times.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2009; 23(6): 1633–1636.

4. Watts, D. “A Brief Review on the Role of Maximal Strength in Change of Direction Speed.” The Journal of Australian Strength and Conditioning. 2015; 23: 100–108.

5. Hewett, T., Ford, F., Hoogenboom, B., et al. “Understanding and preventing ACL injuries, Current biomechanical and epidemiologic considerations – Update.” North American Journal of Sports Physical Therapy. 2010; 5(4): 234–251.

6. Hoffman J. Norms for Fitness, Performance, and Health, Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 2006.

7. Higashihara, A., Nagano, Y., Takashi, O., et al. “Relationship between the peak time of hamstring stretch and activation during sprinting.” European Journal of Sports Science. 2016; 16: 36–41.

In today’s expanding world of high school sports performance, there are a multitude of tools at our fingertips that can really help our programs stand out. Some of them are technology-related: For instance, velocity-based training devices, online training websites, etc., are all things we can lean on to make our program better. Other ways we can ensure the success of our program are programming-related: APRE, linear periodization, conjugated periodization, cluster sets, and the tier system (just to list a few!). These are all modalities that can fit into programs and, when mastered, help us grow as coaches and ensure the development of our athletes.

I will discuss my program’s process and the step-by-step approach we use to prepare our young athletes to climb the ladder from our “Block 0” program upward, with the goal of reaching our “Block 4 Elite” level. This is the first of several articles in a series that will provide an in-depth and comprehensive look into the process our athletes go through from the lower grades through the end of their freshman year. I give an overview of the program in this article and will go much more in-depth for each portion in upcoming articles.

Invest in the Future with the Talents of Today

Over the last 22 years, I’ve used or (at the very least) researched just about every one of these things with athletes. Having a growth mindset and embracing and growing from both success and failure is, in my humble opinion, a sign of striving for success in any field.

I’m a big believer in self-reflection and evaluation. When I sit and evaluate the multitude of things we have instituted across the years in our program, one specifically jumps out at me as being probably the most important of all. Having a vertical integration plan for athletes with an evidence-based protocol to transition from the sub-freshman level to the varsity level is, without a doubt, the most impactful addition to our program. It has had a great effect on not only the development of strength, speed, and power, but the overall health and well-being of our athletes.

A vertical integration plan for athletes with an evidence-based protocol to transition from the sub-freshman to the varsity level has been the most impactful addition to our program. Share on X

The way we approach the transition from a little-to-no-experience-level athlete coming to us from middle school to a senior athlete very close to full maturity doesn’t have to be complicated. It does, however, have to be organized and done with purpose. The process can vary by situation. If we have exposure to the athletes at the middle school level or below, it is an even greater advantage and opportunity. Yet, even if you don’t see your athletes until the first day of their freshman year, an organized and purposeful plan will help them reach their full potential.

Buying into the Process of LTAD

The first step in the process of vertical integration of your program is developing a rock-solid and trusting relationship with your sub high-school-level coaches and athletes. Every situation I have been in has been quite different in many ways. One factor that remained the same in all was the eagerness of most lower-level coaches to have me involved in the development of their athletes.

A second factor that was also the same was the excitement of parents and their kids to have the opportunity to be submerged in the coaching and culture that they will experience at the high school level. Most of the time (including my current situation), that eagerness has resulted in not only trust in the process, but an attitude of growth that has led to a smooth transition. If your lower-level coaches embrace a growth mindset and are willing to accept the educational process, there is a great opportunity for excellence.

Building a solid relationship with parents and athletes will also lead to a situation that is conducive to your goals. While that trusting and positive educational working relationship is often an end result, in many cases there are obstacles that must be navigated. The most restrictive of these stems from a lack of experience in actually doing what is best for the young athlete.

My biggest obstacle with all three groups that need to be nurtured is without a doubt the process that many call “slow cooking” athletic development. As we all know and understand, we live in an “instant results” world. This situation is no different. A slow and in-depth process of mastering the ordinary aspects before moving to the next step is absolutely the correct path to take, but it isn’t the one that sells.

Parents can PAY outside coaches who will have their 12-year-old doing the same workout as a 17-year-old. Coaches can seek out high-level programs online that will promise immediate success with little or no attention to the details of actual mastery. The challenge for us lies in building a trust that will convince both groups to allow us to do what we all know is best.

The biggest factor in developing the trust of athletes, parents, and other coaches is being present, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

The biggest aspect of developing this trust, in my experience, is being present. Reach out to coaches. Learn their process and evaluate what strengths they may already have. The worst thing we can do is walk into a situation (often one that has been that way for many years) and make it seem like they know nothing and do everything wrong. A discouraged coach is that much harder to bring around to your way of doing things.

Once you have a personal relationship started with coaches, they will trust that what you need them to do differently is best practices. Spending time with them in both a co-coaching and teaching/learning environment will bring them into your program much faster than just showing up and demanding change. It’s also very ineffective to simply email a document or program to these coaches. In my experience, much will be lost in translation and very little will be put to use. The bottom line is you need to reach out and build a positive personal relationship first. Once you have that established, the idea of “slow cooking” the process and the skills needed to do so will be embraced and accepted.

Fostering the Trust of Parents and Athletes

The much more difficult job will be selling the idea to parents and athletes. The single biggest issue I have, even in our higher levels, is them accepting and trusting our process. They see athletes doing heavy back squats, jumping on 54” boxes, and doing full Olympic movements and want to do them as well. It’s human nature to want to emulate the people who are already successful. Too often, we don’t realize that the success of those high-level athletes came about because of a process.

Literally on a daily basis in our program, I have to talk about trusting our process and not resisting our programming because it could be done with heavier weights. Parents often don’t understand how adaptations differ and push a higher volume “bodybuilding” type program. They see hypertrophic results and confuse “big muscles” with powerful and explosive ones. Being strong, powerful, and explosive doesn’t always correlate to muscle size.

Once you build trust, parents and athletes alike will turn to you with questions that will shape their beliefs, and not to an outside source motivated by income, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

As is the case in many of my articles, I suggest relationship building and education to combat these obstacles early on. The single biggest limiting factor for our athletes is lack of parental knowledge and support for what constitutes a safe and effective sports performance program. It’s our job to foster those relationships as early as possible. Once you build that trust, parents and athletes alike will turn to you with questions that will shape their beliefs, and not to an outside source motivated by income.

What You Allow Is the Standard

Once we have built the trust of our lower-level coaches, parents, and athletes, we still must implement our program. One philosophy I have come to embrace is that movement matters more than anything else we do in our program. This means that, first and foremost, we want our athletes to move as safely and efficiently as possible in everything we ask them to do. This particular belief really does make as much sense as anything in sports performance. If the athlete has a high level of dysfunction in their technique and movement, it is clearly not the safest situation. Our top priority as a sports performance professional is to do no harm. This means we must not do anything that could lead to a preventable injury.

Nobody would argue that point. If we can all agree on that as a directive for all coaches working with athletes (not just in the weight room, but also in sport), then why are so many coaches ignoring that idea? Why are there too many situations where athletes are not only allowed but instructed to add load to obvious dysfunction? While I fully understand at some point we have to load our athletes, this is a fine line, and a debate for another article. Many, many factors go into how and when each individual coach decides to increase the intensity of the lifts their athletes do. It varies by coach and athlete.

At the very least, I encourage all programs to implement a blocking classification protocol with an evidence-based plan for progression, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

My point here is that, at the very least, I would encourage all programs to implement a blocking classification protocol with an evidence-based plan for progression. This will ensure that all athletes have the opportunity to gain mastery of basic movements (which will take care of a good portion of dysfunction on its own) prior to adding load/intensity to those movements. Hopefully, coaches will include movement screening or various evaluations within their programming, which will give even more information to the coach and athlete on potential movement issues that they then can work on. Within our program, we focus on these things in an effort to ensure our athletes have a mastery of movement and technique that will lead them to the highest possible level of training they can achieve while leaving as little as possible on the table.

Phase One Transition Program

The first step toward this mastery begins when the student-athlete comes into our program for the first time. At York Comprehensive High School, we have a middle school strength and conditioning class. This is a great advantage for us. I am able to work with those coaches to have our athletes prepared with the basics when they come to me. The vast majority of our Block 0 program is done at the middle school in these classes. In my previous position, I ran a well-attended sports performance camp through our Rec year-round, as well as a summer strength camp in the weight room. Both of these situations were good ones and I encourage everyone to develop similar programs.

The Block 0 program continues in the spring and summer for those athletes. The middle school athletes who attend our after-school program in the spring will regress and progress in preparation for the summer transition. Once we hit summer, I spend the first three weeks reviewing our basic movements and evaluating the status of each individual athlete.

This is the time we begin the transition to everything we will do moving forward. Variations of each movement are broken down, taught in detail, and practiced over and over. We detail how we use the tier system, how the clock and set times work, and every other aspect involved. Our main goal during this time is making sure as many Block 0 athletes as possible are prepared for the transition to Block 1. My next article will go in-depth into the actual details of this phase.

Earning the Right to Train Block 1

The goal of our transition period in the spring and summer is to have our athletes ready for the climb to our Block 1 “New Lifter” level. This level runs just like all our higher levels do, but with programming differences. We use three “tiers,” although it is a definite “modified” tier system.

Tier 1 is normally a “dynamic” tier for our higher block athletes. It is where we would do our more power- and speed-based movements. This is one area that we have modified for sure. We still program movements such as a loaded jump in Tier 1 with our Block 1 athletes. The main modification is that we also include strength and even volume-based movements.

Our thought process is that most of our Block 1 athletes lack strength and size, so we focus on developing that strength to the point where our power-based movements will be more effective. A weak athlete will struggle with force production. So, while we still do some “power” movements (typically pulls and loaded jumps), our main focus is not in that area. We particularly focus on developing strength in the upper back and traps, which the athletes will need for more advanced movements later on.

Our Block 1 athletes lack strength and size, so we focus on developing strength in the upper back and traps, which they’ll need for more advanced movements later on, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

Tier 2 is always our “strength” tier. This is where our athletes perform our three main types of strength-building movements: trap bar pulls, squats, and bench presses. In our tiers, we always have an A, B, C, and D movement. Typically, in our modified system, D is either spot or rest. In Tier 2, A is always our main movement or variation. B is an auxiliary antagonist movement and C is some sort of mobility or “prehab” movement. A typical week of our Tier 2 session for our Block 1 athletes looks something like this:

Our Tier 3 movements are typically higher-volume, hypertrophy-developing exercises. We use a standard Upper/Lower/Total plan for all three tiers with some slight modifications with our Block 2-4 groups. In a later article, I will outline the exact protocols, sets, volume, and intensity we use and how we came up with the modifications we did.

Goals of Block 1

Our philosophy of “slow cooking” our athletes does not change even as we transition to Block 1. We absolutely program volume and intensity in this block. It is, however, a distant second to our two main objectives, which are mastery of technique and teaching bar speed.

In the book “The System,” Coach Johnny Parker discusses the training he received from Coach Goldstein, a former Eastern Bloc coach and master of the “Soviet System.” If you have not read this book, I urge you to purchase it at once and dive in. One of the pillars of the Soviet system is making sure the majority of the program for athletes is done in an intensity range of 70-85%, moving the bar as fast as possible, but with great technique. Too much time spent below 70% will not be enough to increase strength effectively, while too much time above 85% will result in strength gains, but not the type of explosive strength that translates to sport. We call that the “sweet spot” and we preach to our athletes that bar speed trumps all.

We use Block 1 as the time to begin to develop moving the bar with great speed and technique. We spend about half of our volume in the 50-59% relative intensity (RI) range during this time. The other half is split between 60-69% and 70-79% RI ranges. As the year goes on, we slowly begin to slide the intensity and volume from low to high. By May of the first year, as our Block 1 athletes prepare to transition to “Block 2 Novice,” we may be down to 20% of volume in the 50-59% RI range, the majority in the 70-79% RI range, and 5-10% in the 80-85% RI range.

Our No. 1 coaching cue for bar speed came directly from a phone conversation with Coach Parker, where he talked about not needing an accelerometer back in the day to know they were moving the bar fast. Instead, he listened for the “plate clang” and that told him his guys were moving it. “Make the plates clang” is something I say 100 times a day. I think it is an excellent cue to get our young athletes to understand bar speed.

“Make the plates clang” is something I say 100 times a day. I think it is an excellent cue to get our young athletes to understand bar speed, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

The final piece of our Block 1 program is a slow and steady increase in volume. Our Block 1 athletes use a modified version of 5-3-1 for the three strength movements that I “stole” from a good friend of mine, Jeremy Evans. I made slight modifications to fit what we do from a volume programming standpoint. In our programming, we use volume as our first consideration for forcing progressive overload.

I have a system for the number of reps of volume per month we program our athletes to do in squats, presses, pulls, Olympic movement (variations), and posterior chain movements (again, to be discussed in a later article in this series). I have a number I want each block to reach in the last month of the school year. I count backward, decreasing 5-10% each month until I reach month one. I then use Prilepin’s Chart to select the proper set/rep numbers and fill in our tiers. We “wave” weeks with high, low, big, and moderate percentages of monthly volume and “wave” days within each of those weeks. High, moderate, and low are based on a set percentage of the weekly total volume count.

Our Block 1 athletes begin with 500 total reps of volume for month one and peak at +/-700 heading into the sport pre-season. We divide those reps up by exercise and begin with 24% squat variations, 20% pulls, 20% pushes, and the rest loaded jumps, Olympic variations (lots of pulls), and PC work. One thing to note is that we only count intensity of 50% or greater. We still shoot for a 2-1 pull-to-push ratio, at least. We just use body weight and band movements to reach that ratio. As the year progresses, if we notice we are lacking as a group in a certain area (bench press, for example), we can slide the percentage to address those issues with more volume. Our Block 1 athletes use partial movements and variations and progress to full movements as they advance blocks.

Last, but not least, we test our athletes when we feel they have reached the point of movement mastery and a promotion to Block 2 is a possibility. I will cover our blocking system later. Basically, we use a combo of body frame, body weight, and strength ratios in our three strength movements to recommend promotion. Movement mastery is also a deciding factor.

Our Block 1 athletes must achieve a combined 80% of the following “goals” to be eligible for promotion.

So, for example, if we have a large-framed athlete who has a body weight of 200, his chart would look like this:

This athlete is well above the 80% threshold. If he also masters his movement, we will promote him to Block 2.

Next Steps and Phases

This is a very basic outline of our transition plan for new athletes coming into our program. As I stated, I will add depth to this outline with future articles in which I will go into more specific examples of how we use everything from our tier system to volume and relative intensity. I will break down each step as well and expand on our athlete blocking classification system and how we institute it. I hope this article gives you some insight into the thought process we use when introducing our athletes to our sports performance program.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Does your youth sports club preach player development and follow through with its promises? Or does your club toss “player development” around as an alluring phrase to hypnotize parents into joining your organization?

If there is anything you should get from this article, it is to take player development seriously and uphold it meticulously, as well as take radical action to ensure your players develop in a well-rounded fashion.

“Player development” is a buzzworthy slogan in the youth sports world that is widely broadcasted, yet rarely executed. Clubs that practice player development year-round and for the life of a child athlete’s career are few and far between.

What Is Player Development?

Let me first dive into what player development is not: It’s not about coaches and clubs.

Rather, player development focuses on the young human first and the construction of the complete player—one who is physically, technically, and tactically sound. Adding on to that, it is also one who is mentally resilient and prepared for the oscillations of life.

From the physical side of player development, are your athletes strong, powerful, fast, agile, and conditioned to withstand the demands of the game and a year-round schedule that is more rigorous than that of the pros?

Technically speaking, are your athletes sharp with sport-specific movements, especially under pressure and applied in a game situation? This could be a basketball player dribbling their way out of a double team, or a soccer player beating a defender one-versus-one, or a baseball pitcher throwing three strikes. Do you reinforce these skills weekly, and do you hold players accountable to practice on their own?

In the tactical corner, can they move off the ball, anticipate the next play, understand the role of their position, and think creatively without coaching cues from the sideline?

And looking to the mental side, are they able to pull themselves out of hardship, tackle adversity with poise, use nerves as fuel to perform at a high level, and be forgiving of themselves for their mistakes?

The physical, technical, tactical, and mental pieces perform an integrated dance when true player development is the focus of clubs.

If you are a coach who preaches an attacking formation, how do you expect players to run at top speeds off the ball and make lightning diagonal runs? They need the physical piece, too.

If you are a coach who preaches perfect passes without opposition, how do you expect players to pass and move under pressure? They need the tactical piece, too.

If you are a coach who preaches risk-taking with technical skills, how do you expect players to be confident in their approach if you berate them for their mistakes at training sessions? They need the mental piece, too.

If you are a coach who preaches sharp combination play, how do you expect players to be skilled on the ball if you don’t reinforce skill mastery at your training sessions? They need the technical piece, too.

To that end, it all matters.

Coaches do their players a tremendous disservice when they fail to fill the player development buckets of physical, technical, tactical, and mental equally.

Coaches do their players a tremendous disservice when they fail to fill the player development buckets of physical, technical, tactical, and mental equally, says @fitsoccerqueen. Share on X

I understand that the noise of wins and rankings gets in the way, but we all need to remind ourselves daily why we coach: to help youth athletes become their best selves on and off the field.

Expounding further, this goes beyond sports and extends far into the long term: a college player lasts for a finite moment in time, but a human lasts longer—a human who can accept failure with ease, a human who can thrive in the competitive workforce, a human who can lean into creativity to grow something magical, a human who takes care of their health after sport ends.

Here are 10 things clubs should do to practice player development.

Refer out to Experts

This much I know: It takes an army to develop a player. A team coach, technical coach, and strength coach are just a few of the experts involved in the player development process—no one person can do it all. Sure, referring out to another niche expert might be a harsh reminder that you do not know it all, but don’t let it be a hit to your ego.

As an example, a coach referring out to a strength and conditioning professional to improve their team’s speed mechanics and ability to handle eccentric load is a step in the right direction. I have seen a few clubs do this, and these are the clubs that are respected for providing their players with not only value, but great care. Another initiative I have seen recently that guides players with the mental piece is a club reaching out to a sport psychologist to give a presentation on performance anxiety, and how to deal with failure.

Even if you do not make money or profit by recommending the strength coach, physical therapist, or sport psychologist down the street, you provide a tremendous service to your young player. Parents take notice too. When clubs and coaches invest in resources and realize it is valuable for the long run, even though they may cringe at the cost, everyone benefits. Most importantly, the young players blossom.

Have a Holistic-Purpose Sport Technology

Sport technology can be useful if applied properly, but it can be detrimental if it’s only invested in for the sake of having cool offerings to splash on social media. Clubs that have genuine intentions with sport technology examine the data first before looking at the likes on Instagram.

You need advanced technology for optimal player development. It can tell you valuable information about managing fatigue and adjusting training sessions, so your players perform at capacity. However, technology is useless if it is only used to take a photo of a leg sensor on a 10-year-old for Instagram, rather than having the coaching staff apply it. It is tantamount to buying a luxurious car without having a mechanic to maintain it and keep it functioning.

Invest in youth sport technology so you can apply data to tweak your pitch and gym sessions, not to show parents your club has more products than the club next door, says @fitsoccerqueen. Share on X

The same goes for youth sport technology: invest in it with the purpose of applying the data to tweak your pitch and gym sessions that training week, not for the sake of showing parents your club has more products than the club next door.

Don’t Focus on Wins and Rankings

Take it from a woman who recruits for college, wins and rankings matter far less these days. Of course, back when colleges traveled to showcases more and attended the top tournaments in the country, kids had to be on a team with a high ranking. But now?

More college programs operate under the ID camp model, where players travel to them, pay a fee, and get evaluated for 1–3 days. More college coaches are moving into this model because they do not want to fork out the travel expenses, they can stay at their home base, and the talent comes to them with checks in hand.

While a fraction of college coaches still go to top tournaments, it does not hurt to be on a winning team. However, it is no longer everything, nor is it a make-or-break factor.

Can these kids go to an ID camp and leave a remarkable impression upon the coaches? Do these kids know the game? Do these kids present all buckets of the total player—physical, technical, tactical, and mental? Moreover, can they apply their skills? Are they physically fit to handle the demands of competition and outrun other potential recruits? Are they mentally tough to prove themselves in a single day on campus?

If clubs focus on player development, players will show themselves well at ID camps. Is that not the end goal here?

Encourage Other Sports and Physical Activities

There are a plethora of coaches out there who remember that kids are kids, and they are meant to be exposed to a variety of movement, sports, and physical activities. This is not just from a physical development standpoint, either. These coaches realize that a variety of activities is good for a kid’s mental and social health, too.

A study from the American Journal of Sports Medicine shows that kids involved in multiple sports who participated in more games still experienced fewer injuries. Of course, I could list an archive of studies on the topic, but we all know the research is not new.

We also cannot forget that load monitoring plays a pivotal role here if a kid chooses to play one sport. Yet, most clubs don’t do the strength and conditioning piece, so how do we expect these kids to handle the chronic loads and recover effectively? The caveat is if kids opt to do a single sport, does the coach truly encourage fatigue monitoring? Do they incorporate strength, balance, spatial awareness, and other basic motor skills into their sessions?

Video 1 (here). Crawling is not just for elementary school kids, but for all athletes. The decision of how much and when is up to the coach, and that will vary based on needs.

It is a tough, yet fair question to ask, and it takes a little creativity and preparation from the coach’s end. Kids need a diverse palette of movement to build neural connections in their brain and enhance motor skills, so let us provide them with that.

Give Equal Playing Time

Clubs that give equal playing time to child athletes practice all of the components of player development all at once. Game play is the best way for kids to explore their sport beyond rehearsed practice sessions. When kids are on the field playing the sport they love or in the gym exploring movement, they are learning how to problem-solve, move, sprint, make mistakes, apply their skills, and more.

Clubs that give equal playing time to child athletes practice all of the components of player development all at once, says @fitsoccerqueen. Share on X

Video 2. Pull-ups are great for developing strength but don’t forget general monkey bar training. Having athletes complete straight sets is part of the training process and adding general climbing or pulling motions is essential for a complete athlete.

Going beyond learning the game through playing time, can you imagine what this does for a player mentally? Can you see them beaming with confidence? Can you seem them smiling when they are out there with their teammates? Can you seem them shining with joy when they score a goal?

The coaches who realize that the local U10 tournament championship is trivial compared to the happiness of the kids are the ones doing player development right. The coaches who expose young ones to a lot of minutes, positions, and scenarios are the ones looking out for the longevity of their players.

Moreover, it pains me to see 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds sitting on the bench discouraged, disoriented, and confused as the rest of their teammates are out there playing. What is worse is that these kids develop a nasty taste in their mouth for the game and wonder if they will ever be good enough.

Sure, the “better” kids’ parents might get mad that their 8-year-old’s team is not winning games, but I promise a college scholarship will not suffer because of this. Player development is a long-term process, and setting kids up for successearly by exposing them to the game as much as possible ensures they soak in an understanding of the game.

Clubs that provide equal playing time at the young ages understand it is paramount for kids to develop physically, technically, tactically, and mentally through equal playing time.

Guide Players Through College Recruiting

Following through on promises of college recruiting preparation is another way clubs practice player development. After all, most of these players and parents have the end goal of a college scholarship and evolving into an even better player after high school is over. This is the social piece of player development that clubs often overlook, and it’s the most critical.

As a college recruiter myself, it is easy to tell which athletes went into the process prepared and educated by their coaches. These are the players who reached out to us early, drafted an edited and professional email, and stayed in touched with us for feedback relentlessly. Sadly, most young athletes are not even taught how to draft an email, yet clubs promise college recruiting pathways for their players.

The clubs that walk the walk with college prep value their players’ long-term dreams to play at a high level.

Increase Players’ Strengths

The best coaches see the genius in their players and amplify their talents to bring them out during competition.

Reminding kids of their strengths consistently—what they bring to the collective group, their role on the team, and their talents—has a way of boosting confidence and hyping kids up. While it is important to work on weaknesses and instruct players on what they can improve, it is another thing to berate them, tell them they’re terrible, and not provide them with guidance on how to improve.

Not every kid will be the aggressive one. Not every kid will be the fast one. Not every kid will be the play-maker. Not every kid will have it all. But what coaches can do is hammer home to their players what their strengths are so they can further grow and nurture them.

Make Injury Prevention a Priority

The health of the players affects whether or not they can continue to develop, and clubs that blend in the physical piece of player development make injury prevention a priority. They execute dynamic warm-ups before training sessions and games, consistently reinforce strength and mobility work, and make it mandatory to stretch and recover after games.

The standard for injury prevention training is set by the coach, who creates a culture that requires doing the small things to stay healthy for the long haul.

It can be something as simple as motivating kids to buy an in-house pull-up bar:

Video 3 (here). Assisted pull-ups allow anyone to train at home. Having a pull-up bar at home reminds athletes and even coaches that training doesn’t need to be away from home to be effective.

Requiring players to keep a foam roller, mini band, and nutritious snack in their bag during tournaments also goes a long way.

Something as efficient as performing an on-field strength session that attacks all muscle groups of the body so kids continue to get stronger is also a good idea:

Video 4 (here). On the field, core work is easy and adding a ball to the equation enhances the training. Any athlete can benefit from this partner-assisted exercise.

You can also program maximal sprints with a long recovery to ensure kids are reaching top speeds during practices:

Video 5. Group speed training can be done with short races. You don’t need to sprint one at a time to get improvement in player speed; you just have to have a good plan ready for adjusting to what you see.

These are easy actions that the best clubs take to physically develop their players, and they need to be mandatory.

Foster a Safe and Inspiring Environment

It warms my heart to see coaches welcome their young players at every practice session with excitement, exuberance, and passion. Making kids feel important, loved, and valued the moment they show up to the field instills trust, and provides them with an escape from the stressors of daily life. Even it is something as small as putting a bow in your hair to match your young athletes during their sessions, it means the world to them that you are relatable and welcoming.

Video 6 (here). Lower level drills and games are fun for everyone, not just the athletes. Incorporate participation when you feel it enhances the learning process.

To that end, infuse practices with goofiness, laughter, smiles, and high-fives. The mental side of player development begins with providing your players with great care and putting them in an environment where they feel safe, pumped up to play, and welcomed.

The mental side of player development begins with putting players in an environment where they feel safe, pumped up to play, and welcomed, says @fitsoccerqueen. Share on X

I cannot for the life of me understand a coach who is emotionally abusive, makes kids cry, and yells and points in their faces. This is so incredibly far from player development because it ignores the most critical piece: the mental.

Building players up, giving them a sense of community, and ensuring they are comfortable the moment they arrive is key.

Promote Free Play and Creative Thinking

Seeing coaches get out of the way is refreshing because it allows kids to play, be autonomous, and enjoy the sport for what it is. Not only can they learn to be independent thinkers, they can tap into the creative corners of their brains to better flow along with the spontaneous nature of the game.

Stopping play every 10 seconds to bark out a coaching cue that goes in one ear and out the other can prove to do more harm than good for young ones, especially after they have been told what to do all day in school and by their parents.

Club-wide free play nights are an excellent way to ensure kids run around uncoached and give them a break from the structured, rehearsed tactical drills. However, there needs to be more free play encouraged besides clubs having just a set night. This can start with the coach speaking to their players about weekly pick-up games in the neighborhood, educating the parents about why something like this is critical, or telling kids to create their own drill, skill pattern, or game each week.

As an example, my players came up with this awesome game of 1v1 dodgeball:

Video 7 (here). One-on-one or 1 v 1 doesn’t need to be actual soccer. Global athletic development is about competition and athleticism, not only sport-specific skills.

There were no instructions, rules, or limitations given. They were given a bag of dodgeballs and were free to create any game they desired. The result? They had a blast.

I understand that it is tough to bite your tongue and keep from sounding important and acting as the authority. I also understand it is hard to put the practice plan away and give kids your power. However, for the sake of developing their brains into magicians rather than robots, it is worth you just watching and staying quiet.

Every behavioral change from parents and players starts at the top—with clubs and coaches not only setting the expectation and sticking to it, but simply educating weekly and reinforcing the importance of creative play.

Make Player Development Your Standard

Player development comes with costs, including potential game and money losses and parental criticism, but clubs that value player development will make it happen, says @fitsoccerqueen. Share on X

Player development is beautiful, but it will come with costs, which means wins might suffer, parents might criticize, and money might be lost. But if player development is what clubs preach—and value—they will make it happen. I have seen few walk the walk, so let us be grateful for those who do not use player development as a sexy catchphrase, but rather, as a standard practice.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

During my career, I have found the high jump to be the most difficult event to coach in track and field. Narrowing the discussion to the jumping events, three factors determine success in the long jump: takeoff speed, takeoff angle, and the height of center of mass at takeoff. The long jump also has the least technical demand. The triple jump depends on similar factors, and if a coach is patient, an athlete can progress through it with minimal technical issues. What makes the high jump a bigger challenge are the curved nature of the approach and the rotations that result because of it.

What makes the high jump a bigger challenge than the other jump events are the curved nature of the approach and the rotations that result because of it, says @HFJumps. Share on X

Before progressing, it is necessary to identify the immense influence Boo Schexnayder’s teachings have had on my development as a track coach and, in this specific case, training for the high jump. His resource, “The High Jump: Technique and Teaching,” is a must-own. I watch it before every season, and a new light bulb goes on in my head every single time. I also refer to my seven-page outline of this resource numerous times each year.

Along with the teaching of Coach Schexnayder and others, I’ve found developing the following essentials to be most effective for developing young high jumpers. Before we dig into those, however, I must first lay out some general groundwork:

• • Anytime you see an asterisk (*), it means that you should refer to Coach Schexnayder’s high jump resource for further information.

 

• Most of our high jumpers utilize a 10-step approach, although I think you could make a solid argument for the use of eight steps. Ultimately, the approach length is about athlete comfort and strengths. In terms of step numbers moving forward, a 10-step approach is obviously 1–10. However, to remain consistent in communicating with all high jumpers, an eight-step approach is numbered 3–10.*

The Start

With high school athletes, I am an advocate of the crouch or rollover start.* I have a theory that athletes who are “elastic” favor the rollover method because of the movement prior to the first step, which allows them to utilize energy via the stretch-shortening cycle. I find that high jumpers gravitate to this method, and it makes sense, as the majority would be classified as elastic-based instead of strength-based. For example, if Ben Johnson and Andre De Grasse did any of the jumps, my guess is Johnson would prefer the crouch and De Grasse the rollover.

The start must be consistent. That’s why I prefer the rollover or crouch start over the run-in. There are more steps with the run-in, which increases the chance for variation, says @HFJumps. Share on X

I am generally a laid-back person, but during the teaching and rehearsal of the start, I am extremely intense. The start is the place where novice athletes tend to be lazy in any of the jump approaches. Variation will occur in any approach, and the most consistent parts of the approach should be the beginning and the end. In reality, the end somewhat takes care of itself because the athlete will steer to where they feel comfortable taking off. The highest variation tends to reside in the middle, and in order to minimize that variation, the start must be consistent. This is why I prefer the rollover or crouch start as opposed to a run-in. With the run-in, there are more steps, and more steps increase the chance for variation.

General acceleration mechanics should be followed during the start and initial steps. I look for a gradual push to vertical posture during the first three steps in a 10-step approach. However, during various drills and runs away from the high jump runway, I challenge athletes to push to vertical in a wide variety of steps to challenge coordination and general awareness of posture.

Initiation of the Curve

Because of my personal experience in the event, I was well aware of the importance of running the curve and the resulting lean created, which is necessary for quality rotation over the bar. One of the most common problems for athletes is that they abandon their lean as they come closer to the bar. Early in my career, my focus for the lean was during steps 8–10 in the approach, but encouraging athletes to “stay in it” did not yield great results. It was not until I was primarily tasked with coaching jumpers that I finally took Gary Winkler’s advice and “looked upstream” in regard to this issue. By emphasizing a quality initiation of the curve and rehearsing it A LOT, you significantly increase an athlete’s ability to maintain the lean.

A common problem for high jumpers is abandoning their lean as they come closer to the bar. Address this by emphasizing a quality initiation of the curve and rehearsing it A LOT. Share on X

According to Schexnayder, the transition to the curve should begin with a slight turn of the hips during push-off in step 4. Step 5 initiates the curve and should travel outside of the line of travel. This establishes the lean. Step 6 establishes the curve and should land back on the line of travel. Verbal emphasis and demonstrating to the athlete how to run a smooth curve and not a “post route” tend to help with the problem of cutting the curve during steps 5 and 6.*

The video below showcases a drill we use to practice curve initiation. We do it on the high jump runway, but the beauty of it is that you can complete it in any open space (such as a school cafeteria or hallway during the winter months). You can construct a practice curve with chalk or cones*, or you can use the center circle on a soccer field. I have 10-step-approach athletes run back five steps from the start of the curve to establish their starting mark, and we rehearse steps 6–10 depending on space. Objects can be placed in the necessary locations for athletes to simultaneously rehearse the shifting visual focus during the event.*

Video 1. Running a marked curve on the track and rehearsing the high jump approach.

Arm Action in the Curve

One common error I find with novice jumpers is a decrease in the range of motion of the limbs. In general, the range of the inner arm will be smaller than the outer arm during the curve, and this should seamlessly correspond with the contralateral leg to preserve proper timing. However, many jumpers shrink the range severely during steps 6–9. I have even seen jumpers whose arms are bent nearly 90 degrees and locked at their sides during this entire portion.

I am a “least intervention necessary” coach, so trying to find a successful verbal cue and providing visual feedback would be my first steps. A steady diet of circle runs, half circle runs, and serpentine runs (my favorite) utilizing the same cue would accompany this. I have recently found success with some athletes using mini barriers (mini hurdles, cones, etc.) during half circle runs and in the curve of a full approach (hat tip to fellow high school coach Kevin Ritter).

It is a challenge to do this with a large group during the full approach, as the barriers need to be moved from rep to rep, but it is doable with reference chalk marks and video after a jumper has rehearsed the approach enough to establish consistency during a session. The mini barriers pose a hazard to the feet, and the arm mechanics tend to open up.

Video 2. The center circle of a soccer field can be used with cones or mini-hurdles in curved running.

Video 3. Simulating the high jump approach on a curve with cones.

Lean into the Plant

Earlier, I mentioned failing to lean as a common error for beginning jumpers during the last few steps. I believe one of these four things cause it:

1. 1. The jumper abandons the lean because they are moving at a velocity they can’t handle. In this case, move the jumper’s starting mark forward and encourage them to be more “controlled” during the approach. I do not like to use the word “slower” because it tends to cause the jumper to accelerate uniformly and then slow down abruptly at the end. Nobody enjoys the result of a crossbar wedged into their back!

 

1. 1. The jumper has a fear of not being able to land in the pit. A steady diet of short approach jumps (possibly adding a ramp) may help instill confidence.

 

1. 1. The jumper is not comfortable in flight. Earlier this year, I almost smacked myself in the forehead when I heard Dan Pfaff speak about jumpers inhibiting their abilities due to their fear of flight. Because of this, they attempt to find a solution that will make flight feel safer, such as ceasing to lean inward. In their mind, this will make it more likely for them to land safely.
      Simple popover drills may be just what novice high jumpers need to develop comfort with flight, says @HFJumps. Share on XI had sworn off drilling simple popovers because I felt there was not much connection to the actual event. However, despite all my creative interventions, I know the brain is an overprotective mother and will do whatever is necessary to keep the athlete safe. Popovers may be just what they need to develop comfort, and it makes sense to implement them in early season programming. I do not foresee this issue going away, due to the lack of free play and increase in specialization our youth are exposed to prior to high school. Unless something changes on this front, I expect the collective proprioception and coordination of adolescents to continue to decline.
   2. The jumper failed to initiate the curve properly. It is hard to maintain a lean if you don’t do what is needed to create it. See the previous section.

 

1. If you are still having difficulty getting a jumper to lean in all the way to the plant and be vertical at toe-off, video 4 below may be helpful. The bar in front provides a constraint that can help the jumper get into proper position.

Steering Ability

As much as we would like all approaches to be identical, they simply are not. A high jumper will find a way to steer to a “safe” takeoff spot, and if they do not, it is common to see them run through the plant and head back to the start (I rarely see this happen in the horizontal jumps). So, if they are going to steer to safety, why is it important to enhance steering ability?

Practicing steering with drills that have a higher degree of variability may help the jumper better focus on the ideal takeoff mark in competition, says @HFJumps. Share on X

I view it as supplemental insurance. Practicing steering with drills that have a higher degree of variability may help the jumper better focus on the ideal takeoff mark in competition. In other words, the range where the jumper feels safe at takeoff should not be the standard for where takeoff should occur. A tighter window is desired. Steering drills are only limited by an individual’s creativity. Here are a few I use that you can close with an actual jump or a scissor kick.

1. 1. • Start at a random spot and run into an attempt.

 

1. 1. • Start at a predetermined or random spot and skip or run-run-jump into an attempt.*

 

1. 1. • Insert 1–2 exaggerated bounds within the approach and complete an attempt.

 

1. 1. • Start at the takeoff spot, run away from it on the curve, and turn back to run into the attempt on the coach’s clap. I brought this to the jumps after utilizing a similar version in coaching the hurdles. I call this “out and back on a clap.”

Video 4. The “out and back on a clap” drill used to further develop steering ability.

Note that these options are less than 10% of the jumping we do. Whether it is “normal” short or full approach work, novices get a high degree of variation on each attempt because they are novices. They need to practice decreasing the variation of their “normal” work by practicing “normal” work. You should use the “fancy” drills listed above sparingly. We often use them as a break in the monotony, as athletes tend to find their challenge enjoyable.

Approach Rhythm

A quality approach has a rhythm that gradually quickens. This implies that the jumper is gradually accelerating. There should be no abrupt changes in the tempo of ground contact. The most common error I see with approach rhythm in high jump at the high school level is starting out with a very fast tempo and slowing as the jumper progresses into takeoff. Increasing momentum does not exist in this scenario as the jumper is not gaining weight during an approach.

I do not have a magical answer to improving the rhythm in the approach other than demanding full engagement during approach rehearsal. It cannot be an aimless run, yet it is common to see this at any high school track meet. I purposely work with our horizontal group during a segment where our high jumpers work on approach rehearsal. During this time, I keep an eye on the high jumpers, making sure they show maximum intent. It is easy to be engaged when the coach is around, but, ultimately, they need to be held accountable as individuals.

We don’t just address rhythm during approach work in our jumping program. It is essential in almost everything we do, says @HFJumps. Share on X

We don’t just address rhythm during approach work in our program. It is essential in almost everything we do. I encourage readers to follow the work of Andreas Behm and Chris Parno, as they have great ideas for implementing rhythm into training sessions.

Curvilinear and Coordination Considerations

Absorbing and redirecting energy is paramount in any sport, and high jumpers must be able to do it on a curve. In regard to training, a simple way to prepare the foot-ankle complex to be able to handle these demands is to perform activities on curve(s). The intensity of each activity can be in line with the training theme for the day. Here is a compilation of activities that athletes can do on the bend:

Video 5. Depending on the day’s training focus, numerous exercises can be performed on a marked curve, including hops, gallops, bounds, skips for height, and run-run-jump patterns.

Video 6. I have yet to find an athlete who does not enjoy the curvilinear chaser. Solo runs using Freelap are another great option.

It is important to note that high jumpers should still do the linear version of these drills. On the flip side, I feel sprinters, hurdlers, and long/triple jumpers should perform the curvilinear version to enhance robustness and better handle the curve sprinting they will be exposed to!

I am always looking for ways to challenge an athlete’s coordination, and asking them to complete an attempt from the other side (conjugate jumps) does this really well. We start with short approaches and a scissor kick. As athletes develop comfort, they move back and may even attempt actual flops. The ratio of great to good side jumps (we don’t use the word “bad”) can be anywhere from 1:1 to 10:1, depending on the time of the season. There are health benefits to being more balanced, and it also serves as a way to identify athletes who may be successful in the triple jump!

Balanced Tendon Training

Over the years, I have had sprinters and hurdlers, as well as long and triple jumpers, who, although they weren’t feeling great physically heading into a competition, produced very good (sometimes phenomenal) results. I have never had this happen with a high jumper. The following is a consideration for all athletes, but maybe it carries more weight with high jumpers.

Developing tendon stiffness is a common goal of training that I hear about in a wide variety of sport circles. It makes sense. We see elite performers who barely bend and have ground contact times flirting with zero, yet they produce an almost unimaginable rebound off the ground. Therefore, we design training activities (sprinting, plyometrics, explosive lifts, etc.) that emphasize the development of this quality. I will be the first to admit I have probably gone too far on the spectrum with this in the past. Developing tendon stiffness should be balanced with enhancing tendon health. This podcast with Dr. Keith Baar helped me connect some dots in regard to this balance.

While we do want our athletes to bounce like Tigger, we must take into account that genetics play a big role in that ability. It is similar to the high school football coach who sees the huge and freakishly fast football players who make their living on Sunday and then wants to transform his athletes into them. The most common way is to attempt to get players to physically look the part by spending hours in the weight room, but that can happen at the expense of speed not coming along for the ride.

High jumpers tend to be at risk for tendinopathy due to the torsion involved in the event. By implementing activities that promote tendon health, athletes will have a better chance to feel their best, which will allow them to perform their best.

The Necessity of Triangulation

High school facilities are anything but consistent. Because of this, it is even more important to control the controllable. One way is to ensure an accurate starting mark. If your athletes don’t triangulate their approach, they open the door to more variability.

The image below shows two standards (rectangles) and a crossbar. An example of a possible triangulation (in feet) is given using the Pythagorean triple: 12, 16, 20. Many of our jumpers’ bottom check marks are 12 feet. Prior to competition, our athletes use this triangle to pull through to their top check mark (where they start).

One athlete holds the start of the tape AND 48 feet at the intersection of the crossbar and near standard. Another holds 12 feet directly out from the standard (bottom check mark). A third athlete holds the tape at 28 feet, forming a line perpendicular to the line out from the standard. Once the triangle is set with the tape measure taut, a piece of tape is placed at 12 feet and 28 feet. Then, each jumper can measure their distance back to their starting mark from the bottom check mark while ensuring the tape passes over the piece of tape at 28 feet.

 

1. In addition, coaches and athletes should be sure that the line that they pull out from the standard to establish the bottom check mark is in line with the crossbar. In other words, the intersection of the crossbar with the far and near standard would be collinear to the bottom check mark if viewed from above.

An Emphasis on Consistency

While this article is far from a comprehensive guide to coaching the high jump, I hope it has emphasized the critical items needed for consistent jumping, and it has given some options to progress to in programming once you build a solid foundation. Above all else, remember to keep your high jumpers happy and healthy!

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By Graham Eaton

If coaching is equal parts art and science, then working well with other coaches on the staff is crucial. Coaches who are flexible with each other will make their team better. This can promote athlete buy-in because of the visible connections and communication between all coaches.

There is a dizzying array of choices when it comes to exercises and programming. I have ideas about what is necessary, and so do our jumps and weight room coaches. It is up to us to communicate often and compromise as needed to keep the athletes healthy and happy. I really feel that our goal is their performance, not pushing our own agenda. We need to keep our egos in check.

First off, I don’t think it is my job as a high school coach to reinvent the wheel or make my mark by devising cutting-edge exercises and training methodology. I think the good stuff is already out there. It is my job to sift through things and implement them in ways that make sense. Sometimes it can feel like I have to be a “Jack of all trades, master of none” type figure. Thankfully, I have a great team of coaches to help me.

If coaching is equal parts art and science, then working well with other coaches on the staff is crucial. Coaches who are flexible with each other will make their team better, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

There is always something new and exciting in coaching and you should approach it with a mix of curiosity, openness, and skepticism. When coaches see a new concept, new information, or new exercise on social media, they often have strong emotions, whether positive or negative. You can either embrace it fully or be threatened by it and ultimately reject it.

When listening to podcasts, reading articles, or attending clinics, I sometimes come across a really cool idea and concept and, quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with it. If it isn’t something I am all-in on, then I just won’t use it. This doesn’t mean that I regret having encountered the information or that after some ruminating it won’t become useful. Sometimes, another coach’s situation just doesn’t pertain to me and mine doesn’t pertain to them.

Chances are that you and your team of coaches are already doing some things really well. Also, like our team, you may perceive shortcomings that you need to address. Change is necessary for growth. It also isn’t good if your program constantly goes through massive overhauls every year because you feel the pull of the latest trends. Both instability and stagnation can be harmful to a program.

At some point, you and the other coaches need to adhere to a set of training mantras or principles that you believe in and just get better at those with a nearly imperceptible rate of change. If you teach the key concepts and foundations on the track and runway and in the weight room, then everything else is just logistics with some chaos sprinkled in to motivate. I am very lucky to work closely with two coaches who have clear goals and beliefs.

Something for Everyone

At Triton, we prioritize speed because we had a drought of speed and decided to address this. Once speed is present, it becomes easier to train the other energy systems. Track isn’t just running fly 10s. The track events are a harmonious blend of the ATP, lactate, and aerobic systems. Race modeling and aerobic work are important, but having lungs and a plan is no good without some wheels. Trust me, with our population, I am willing to let some things take a back seat.

If speed is 1A, then movement is 1B. I try to utilize warm-ups that get all athletes ready for all their coaches. I don’t think most high school athletes have an abundance of experience with motor skills. Recesses are shorter, gym classes are becoming less frequent, and video games are all-encompassing. Jeremy Frisch has inspired me with his balance of structure, play, and experimenting. Early in the season, we spend a lot of time using warm-ups to assess abilities and readiness. I think if you coach a large group, you have to calibrate to a certain level what defines a typical athlete in your program.

I do not usually come with an exact plan for warm-ups. I know coaches reading this might raise an eyebrow or cringe at this. I have been asked for an exact list of my warm-up “drills” before, and I am usually not sure how to respond. I am not a Type A coach, with templates and lists of every warm-up task I am going to do in every cycle of training. I enjoy thinking on my feet and I find that if I am overly structured, I limit opportunities and creativity both in myself and my athletes. Track is very linear, obsessive-compulsive, and rehearsed when compared to other sports. A block start is practiced over and over, whereas one play in football can have several different options.

I do have a rough outline, as well as a purpose for why I do these things. My rationale might not match up with another coach in a different situation. I do a few of each and repeat, progress, and regress as needed.

This is enough of a plan for me to prevent me from becoming unhinged. I want my athletes to become more complete athletes and they need variety to accomplish this.

The starting point for most of our drills is Dr. Ken Clark’s three-bucket position. Imagine a bucket of water on your head, thigh, and toe, and it elicits a pretty good starting point posturally. I like this isometric because it develops hip flexor strength and also provides a reference point for later items like dribbles and wickets.

Frans Bosch has been a huge influence on our movement and sprint drills. Basically, the thought here is that, across our sport or in most sports, there are very few basic patterns (attractors). Although individual athletes may express power and speed with different styles, we expect the attractors to be very similar. By adding chaos and fluctuations, athletes can adapt and become more resilient. This resilience can make the attractors more deep-rooted. You do need repetition and practice to get better, but monotony can hinder learning and progress. No struggle, no progress.

You do need repetition and practice to get better, but monotony can hinder learning and progress. No struggle, no progress, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

Commonalities between all of these are:

• Rhythm/timing
• Minimal energy leaks
• Neutral hips
• Relaxed head/neck
• Stiff lower limbs
• Scissoring or switching (hip flexion/extension)
• Arms that contribute to timing or vertical pulse (do drill without arms, add them back in)

I don’t really give too many specifics on what athletes should to do with their arms. I would rather allow them to self-organize with subtle cues like “no tension in hands/wrist,” “turn the swag on,” or “up and down with a bop” if something looks rigid or, for lack of a better word, “off.” A lot of this is a potentially moot point because without good lower limb stiffness/adequate time to reposition limbs, the timing and posture cannot be present. So, arms aren’t really a big rock at first with our athletes, but I put them in positions to feel the contributions.

If they become good at a drill, I simply reorganize and change the task. This can be both motivating and frustrating in a good way. Block starts are frustrating. Hurdles are frustrating. So, I like some unpredictability in our practices.

I think if you change the task, you will change the athlete and their resilience. Late in the season, when we are looking to be at our best, I often do away with a lot of these if I feel the athletes have progressed adequately. I also let them choose things that they like and try to invent something new. You would be surprised how motivating even the littlest of choices can be.

Video 1. Different or the same? New tasks with a similar purpose can keep boredom at bay. Flexion and extension drills with good timing in different rhythms are a great way to challenge the athlete to acquire skills.

The Weight Room

We lift 2-3 days a week. Our shotput and discus coach, Katelin Invernizzi, is also our weight room coach. She is a former distance runner who has competed in figure shows, powerlifted, weightlifted, and done CrossFit. These days, she tends toward powerbuilding for herself, but it is clear that her influences span across several of these disciplines. She spends a lot of time addressing specific mobility and technique issues here. She also gives me suggestions for items to include in my warm-up that can make the time in the weight room more productive.

If she feels someone is better off doing a dumbbell split squat than a front or back squat, we meet them where they are at. We also feel that the athlete who can do both bilateral and unilateral squat variations will probably benefit from this extra repertoire. We used to be big pushers of bilateral squatting only, but have come around on unilateral mostly because of the reality of a 12-week season. It often takes five weeks just to get athletes to a point where we feel comfortable having them front squat with even a partial range of motion. Katelin would rather a kid have at least a point of entry to begin the process. It is motivating and easier to progress with a bevy of squat modalities, but we can’t afford to overthink with athletes with low training ages.

The programming isn’t super fancy and many kids don’t lift. Most of our two-season kids are invited to the weight room. For most others, there is no continuity and we feel like we restart every spring season. It may sound like a cop-out, but if they don’t lift during soccer and basketball season, then lifting for 10 weeks just adds fatigue.

I tell her that I need my athletes to just get stronger and become more durable. We joke around about giving the kids “wowies,” which are just the usual things in a more exciting disguise. The only thing I communicate is selecting exercises that are a continuation of the day’s track work. This is a generic form of undulating periodization.

We also don’t plan deload weeks. School vacations, doctor’s appointments, tests, driver’s ed classes, and all sorts of other things eat up their time. I am not sure if this is just the culture of our school district or also the reality elsewhere. Either way, it is pretty frustrating, so we generally just train and do a little less lifting in a tough stretch of competition, but we never do nothing.

A few rules or guidelines we follow are:

1. 1. Don’t have your athletes do lifts that you don’t know how to do. If you don’t know how to teach your athletes how to squat, clean, or deadlift, then don’t. I don’t think they are that hard to learn, but there is more to them than “sit back,” “jump and catch,” and “pick the bar up with your legs.” Poor t-spine mobility and an absence of a front rack mean a no-go on front squats and cleaning.

 

1. 1. Do main lifts for strength on speed days, as well as med throws and plyometrics. We do teach the clean, although we are debating whether to keep it. It does have value for helping our athletes become athletic and receptive to cues.

 

1. 1. Do hypertrophy reps on one lactate day to add some tendon/muscle strength without frying the CNS or as assistance lifts to support main lifts.

 

1. 1. We don’t do triphasic lifting or post activation potentiation. These are not advanced lifters and they already have enough to recover from. Too many things lumped together creates crappy form. Focus on one thing at a time or the main thing.

 

1. 1. Bar speed doesn’t matter if athletes are not strong first. Strength comes before power. We don’t have measured VBT technology like collegiate or professional organizations. Toward the middle/end of the season, we may ask specific athletes to move the bar with more intent. They should always execute the eccentric with control, which will set up a better concentric.

 

1. Increasing force generation though lifting doesn’t guarantee that force application increases. Get stronger, but don’t let the lifting volume ruin the sprinting!

Fitting in Jumps and Hurdles

I feel that a strength for us is not overworking our athletes. The jumps coach, Tyler Colbert, and I communicate before and after every single practice to make sure that we both got in 80% of what we needed. It will never be 100%. He just finished his first year and did a terrific job with a mostly underclassmen jumps crew. He attended clinics and watched countless videos. I think he understands that coaching is about continual education.

He is responsible for the jumpers by himself. The only thing I ask him to keep in mind is that all of them are sprinters first and our cues need to be consistent. Tyler often assists me with the sprints workouts and devises a workout appropriate for the JV runners.

Here is what we have generally agreed on for our week’s plan.

• • Long and triple jumps are accelerations. It is important that athletes learn how to set up a good jump by building to a good rhythm to stay running. Spinning the wheels does not yield a good jump. Do full approaches on acceleration/max velocity days, but allow them to get some Freelap timing and acceleration work in. I think 50% of the main workout is a fair percentage and can make the jump work better.

 

• • The high jump and pole vault are paired together as vertical jumps and can be done on X-factor day and before a lactate day.

 

• • Make sure each jumping event has two practice days in addition to the meet day—one full approach and one with something else.

 

• • If there are two meets that week, do one decent session and then use pre-meet time to get steps. Cut out the fluff and get specific.

 

• • Ask each other: Is something lacking or missing? If so, can I address it in warm-ups?

 

• Ask Tyler: Don’t do any extra plyometrics other than what are included in the sprint complexes on those days. Is there a plyometric/jump you would want me to program that you think has value?

For year one of us working together, we did a solid job. I want him to speak up. If a jumper is struggling but doing well on the track, then perhaps he should skip the main session altogether. It becomes a little fuzzy when you have an athlete who sprints, hurdles, and jumps.

This year, we had a sophomore boy do pretty well in the 400 hurdles, but I don’t think he hurdled more than five times in practice. His technique is not great, but speed, 400-meter work, and jumping work were a priority. Something had to give. Next year, we may look back on it and say, “Why were we doing that?”

Everyone thinks they do things the best way until the future reveals otherwise. I guess time will tell, but we try not to be married to anything. If something works better, we are sure to work through it in time.

I have such a reductionist approach to hurdles because our athletes are sprinters first. This year, we did not have a ton of success due to a lack of speed and experience. This will get better and I need to get better at selecting athletes suited to hurdle. I think if an athlete is fast enough or tall enough, can use their trail leg effectively, can execute a handful of dynamic drills with good arm and leg timing, and can hit hurdle one well, then they will eventually have success. I cannot make a kid who runs 13.0 in the 100m into a great hurdler, yet. I think we are set up better here for the future.

Changes Ahead

We had a solid year this past year, but we need to continually adapt and refine. After attending the Juggernaut Training powerlifting clinic a few weeks ago, I started thinking heavily about minimum effective volume (MEV) and maximum recoverable volume (MRV) and what this means for the sprinters at Triton. On the surface, a track coach may question the value of anything powerlifting-related because our athletes are not powerlifters.

I think it’s important to strive to hit the balance between minimum effective volume and maximum recoverable volume in any speed, strength, or power sport, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

I think in any speed, strength, or power sport, that striving to hit the balance between MEV and MRV is very important. How do we elicit a continued response to training without overdoing it? You can’t just do next to nothing any more than you can go hard every day.

Some factors that help determine these volumes are:

Gender

Females can do more volume. They have less muscle mass, so therefore there is less muscle to be damaged. The presenter at the clinic noted that females can do five sets more per week than males. What does this potentially mean for our female sprinters?

• • Slightly longer intervals. This could mean running the 27-second drill instead of 23 or 20, or running 300s instead of 200s.

 

• • They can handle slightly more absolute speed as long as the Freelap timer agrees and doesn’t show a huge drop-off.

 

• • More aerobic work for long sprinters since they run longer than their male counterparts.

 

• In the past, I have trained females slightly differently, but feel I went too far away from that this year, as my 4x400m relay underperformed. I also shifted some girls around, so where they may have done 400 and 4x400m twice a week in the past, they did 100m/200m or 100m/400m. We have a month-long stretch of two meets a week that makes it tough to do anything crazy. That 400/4x400m double is very important in this stretch.

Lifestyle

Unfortunately, it’s very hard to control this one. All we can do is educate and then respond to what we see. I do try to alternate training weeks so that every third week has less volume while maintaining appropriate intensity.

• • Diet, sleep, stress

 

• • The body can’t distinguish between the stress of a test and the stress of a squat or sprint.

 

• I am working through a simplified rating system to implement next year. If someone rates their fatigue or perceived effort as higher than expected, I will investigate and adjust if needed. I can’t give more information here because I don’t know what this looks like yet.

Genetics/Speed 

Just like insanely strong powerlifters who squat 900 pounds, more explosive athletes will need less volume due to how taxing their maximal work is. If you have a kid who runs a 10-meter fly in 1.30 seconds, he will be able to do that more often than your genetically gifted athlete who runs a sub 1.00. This is why Tony Holler’s Feed the Cats program has been so popular.

However, if you want the kid who runs 1.30 to improve, he will probably need some more repetitions to get better. He isn’t a cat yet. For my fastest kids, I find running personal bests is the hardest thing to recover from. An active nervous system will have more fatigue after going at “psycho mode.” Watch for an athlete slowly getting sorer or dropping off timewise, and rest them before it is too late.

The bottom line is that, as a high school coach, you’re probably better off doing a little less than doing more, unless something isn’t panning out. Then, you may need to do more. Share on X

The bottom line is that, as a high school coach, you are probably better off doing a little less than doing more, unless something isn’t panning out. Then, you may need to do more. Look at athletes’ practice times and meet times. If something isn’t matching up with expected performances, then investigate a bit more.

Working Together

In order to keep your athletes happy and healthy, you need to perfect the art of cross-coaching. Find time to discuss training and belief systems with your team of coaches and know what they are doing. Every coach on your staff plays an important role and can make major contributions.

I am very thankful to have Katelin and Tyler in my corner. We are three coaches with varied backgrounds who can come together for the express purpose of making our athletes better. Both of them understand the factors that influence training and continue to educate themselves, which in turn motivates me. I think pushing your staff in this manner ensures that no one ever settles.

Katelin and Tyler are both former distance runners who have run fly 10s this summer. This was without prompting. Both of them noted how sore they were the next day. I appreciate this exploration and find it important because you have to understand how different training affects your athletes. Coaches often have preferences in training. Katelin lifts, Tyler runs marathons, and I like to chase the pump and do drills. At the end of the day, we know that our inclinations take a back seat to what the science of sprinting suggests we do. Just because we trained or like to train a certain way doesn’t mean we should do that with our kids.

Coaches’ inclinations take a back seat to what the science of sprinting suggests we do. Just because we trained or like to train a certain way doesn’t mean we should do that with our kids. Share on X

Tyler has made it his goal to bring more short speed work over 90% into the season with cross country runners, who he coaches as an assistant coach alongside his father, Joe Colbert. Joe has always done a great job of reminding us that the kids are “our athletes.” It is not uncommon to find a mid-distance runner in the sprint group running our 5x200m staple workout. I have also sent 600m runners out for tempo runs before with him. There is something to be gained from everything.

The shared responsibility can turn a good team into a great team. We are excited to move forward. Check your egos, balance the training, and make sure every coach has a voice. Start planning now.

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