High Jump Training | 5 Training Tips for the Developing High Jump Athlete: Part I

This coming spring will mark the 16^th year of my love affair with high jump event in track and field. For a 14 year old obsessed with trying to dunk a basketball, I was relegated to the 400m dash, the softball throw, and the long jump in my middle school track and field days. I didn’t really know much about the high jump until I found out that my high school had purchased a cheap pit that they set up in the dusty elementary school gym nearby for practice.

Our school was in its second year of track and field when I started; I consider myself lucky that was an option when I was around. My first ever try, I jumped 5’2”, and coached myself all the way through high school up to a 6’8.5” jump (2.04m) my senior year of high school. The average routine for me back then was to train long sprints with the team in the street a couple of days a week (we didn’t have a track), and then jog a mile to the elementary school on the other days to drag the jump pit out of the gym, and up into the parking lot where I could get more foot traction for my curve-running and jumping efforts. I also enjoyed running every other race from 100-400m, including the hurdles, did the horizontal jumps, and even threw discus a few times. Despite all this, my first love of high school was basketball, and the two sports lived in synergy for my high school years.

Once I got to college, things all changed. For the first time, I trained for track year round. I also had a bit more freedom in my initial training because I was a sports medicine major who didn’t get to train with the team often, so I improvised a lot of my training based on what I “thought” was good for me. Through pure will and desire, I squeaked out 6’8” (2.03m) my freshman and sophomore campaigns, largely through the acquisition of greater technique… and not so much because I was more explosive and powerful. Despite my efforts, I wasn’t quite the “athlete” that I was my senior year of high school. This might be evidenced by the fact that my long jump decreased over a foot from senior year of high school to freshman and sophomore years of college. My sophomore year, I was the epitome of “slow”, as I had spent much of the fall chasing weightroom numbers. When it came time to sprint hard out on the track, I found myself at the back of the pack.

It wasn’t until junior year that I finally started to “figure it out”, and this was largely just a product of doing what I was told, training constantly with the team (I quit my sports medicine major in favor of exercise science), and the subsequent improvement of a few key elastic and speed qualities. I was also starting to become a product of a head coach with a smart plan who was willing to deal with my insistence on some training variations, as well as training partners who pushed me to my limit, especially in the sprint training I so desperately needed to hit the demands of a more advanced level in the event. On top of this, I had an assistant coach who was an absolute master of telling me exactly what I needed to hear to believe in myself and reach new levels of performance. Without his subtle encouragements that allowed me to believe in myself, I doubt I ever would have hit the performances I ever did. When the year was all said and done, I had gained 4” on my high jump PR, was consistently jumping in the 6’9-6’10 range, and had also tacked 4’ onto my triple jump PR. This was also the first year that I was confident that I was faster than I was in high school, and all around, a better athlete.

I have spent the last 10 years learning precisely how that season was so effective in allowing me to smash my old PR’s, and although the list could be much longer than the one below, I can definitely give developing high jumpers out there some “wise old” adages based on a guy who tried it all, found something that worked, and then tested it all again in coaching.

Know that these things below are based on what it takes to create the physical characteristics of a high jumper, and aren’t technical advices (that may be another article for another day). I am keeping it this way so that this writing might be of interest to those athletes and coaches who don’t necessarily specialize in high jump, and the general principles might cross over. Without further ado, let’s jump to the first principle, that of team sports.

Don’t lose touch with team sports

As much as college coaches loathe their track athletes playing intramural sports, and as much as it can provoke many a sprained ankle, it isn’t all bad.

We can consider sport movement, at its highest level to be based off of a motor enneagram. A motor enneagram is a set of instructions the brain uses to perform movements economically and efficiently. It doesn’t want to have to “re-figure” out how to perform a movement every time an athlete performs it. This also comes with the process of habits and neural speed limits. How do we break these habits? We break it by giving the body something that isn’t exactly the pattern we are trying to improve, but a close cousin that carries with it many specific qualities of the primary movement. This also must be done at high speed, in order to help push (and break) the neural speed limits holding back the primary movement, in our case high jumping.

Getting better at sporting movements is all about teaching the body to acquire a better motor pattern

For the sake of this article, let’s use sprinting as an example. If all you do is flat ground sprinting for a period of time, your body will eventually adapt to that motor pattern/enneagram and settle for a pattern that won’t take the body out of its comfort zone.

Let’s say to remedy this situation, we place resisted and assisted sprints in the training program.

Since the brain doesn’t entirely pick up on the fact that you are doing pretty much the same thing as sprinting, it won’t have the “speed limit” in place for the assisted version of sprinting quite yet, and the skill picked up by getting better at the new training effort will be infused into the motor enneagram used for traditional flat ground sprinting. On top of this, the resisted versions of sprinting can add the motor instructions to infuse more force into the enneagram, while the assisted versions can provide instructions for rate of force development. These give the brain more scenarios and instructions to draw from when creating the ultimate motor pattern.

OK, so what does that have to do with team sports??(!)

So all that long, complicated science of motor learning aside, playing team sports, such as basketball, volleyball, or football allows a jumper to experience a wide variety of explosive skills that are close cousins of the skills they’ll need to propel themselves off of the ground. This all happens without the mental stress and strain of the carefully planned strength, plyometric and speed training progressions that allow high jumpers their typical seasonal development.

Team sport play also helps to improve the specific work capacity of the athlete due to the large numbers of accelerations, decelerations, cuts, jumps and hops. The specific work capacity of a jumper must eventually become quite high for their optimal development. For high jumping, it is impossible to get the work capacity needed for elite jumping through only high jumping because of the overload of that specific pathway. (High jumping too much is a great way to kill an athlete’s spring, but basketball and volleyball players don’t get the “dead jumping legs” nearly as often… their jump variety is huge!)

All this goes to say, that developing high jumpers (middle and high school) really need to be playing other explosive sports as not an optional, but integral aspect of their development! Once an athlete starts to specialize (i.e. college), they’ll want to drop the year round sport play, but I would still recommend the planned and periodic use of it in the offseason, and even using games to warm up for workouts in the pre-season periods (using a 30 minute game as a warmup is one of the best ways to get jumpers ready to move powerfully). Playing lower-intensity games is also a good way for a high jumper to transition between indoor and outdoor campaigns.

Now… obviously, once an athlete hits advanced levels, they need to be careful with how and when they participate in team sports, and how that fits into the total training model, but since this article speaks more to developmental athletes, well hang it up for now.

Do other speed/power events

Along the same lines of the motor enneagram theory, high jumpers need to be doing other explosive events on the track to aid in their development. If you look at Anatoly Bondarchuk’s landmark work “Transfer of Training”, you’ll notice that things like “100m dash performance”, or “10 bounds for distance” have a much (much!) higher transfer to the final training result than do things like barbell snatch or even ½ squat. By doing other events, high jumpers are expanding their enneagram in a much more specific manner than just training only in the scope of their event and the weight training that comes with it.

Look at guys like Derek Drouin who, in addition to jumping 7’10” can also put up a nasty heptathlon score (he even runs the 400m hurdles sometimes). The Russian high jump machine has preached the importance of long jumping ability for an increased ceiling of performance in their high jumpers as well. You won’t find too many 2.25m jumpers who can’t go at least 7.30m in long jump, and most will go much farther than that. The guy that won NAIA nationals at 2.25m when I was around, and went on to jump 2.33m (Trevor Barry) jumped over 26 feet (7.90m) in long jump, and also ran a nasty split on the 4x400m! I had the pleasure of high jumping against James “Flight” White when he attended the University of Cincinnati, and although his jump form could be described as “the worst ever/sitting-in-a-Laz-E-Boy-flippin-channels-on-top-of-the-bar style”, he still cleared 2.10m with a technique that he may well have just scissor jumped. If he had put any serious effort into things, he could have been going over 2.35m with no problems. He also long jumped mid 26’s.

(The influence of basketball, and lack of holistic sporting development, of course, is part of the reason that the USA is lacking a bit in field event talent. On another note, I saw a high schooler at a Dayton City meet in 2012, with probably no training, run a 47.3 in the 400m dash, jogging curves and sprinting the straight, while also looking back 2-3 times behind him. He went on to play basketball at a tiny school in West Virginia for a year, and didn’t do anything else. Again, rabbit trail…)

I am convinced that all high jumpers should perform the following events, at least occasionally, alongside their main event to help build the ultimate enneagram.

Elite level:

Long jump (occasionally)

College level:

Long jump (speed jumpers) or Triple jump (power jumpers, triple jump was my favorite weapon). Train athletes where they live.
100/110 hurdles (if the athlete isn’t going to maim themselves)
60/100m dash or sprint relay
Javelin (if the athlete isn’t going to maim others!)

High School Level

Long and triple jump
100/110 hurdles and 300 hurdles (300 hurdles are perfect for some early season elastic endurance and coordination)
Sprint relays (if you are skinny, and powerful enough to jump over a high bar, you can run the 4×400)
A working knowledge of the throwing events

More high jump training tips in Part II!

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