This week’s guest is Jeremy Fischer, USA Track and Field lead coach at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center. Jeremy works with Olympic medalists, Brittney Reese and Will Claye, as well as Paralympic performers.
Jeremy is also active in the USATF coaching education program and is a great resource for anyone looking at getting athletes more explosive.
Jeremy’s experience as an athlete was a high jumper, and at 5’9, he leaped 7’6”!
One of my earliest memories as a young track athlete was going to “The Shell” in Madison, Wisconsin, and watching Jeremy jump 7’4”. Although he was the smallest guy in the competition, his unbelievable power on the runway and aggressiveness in the takeoff was something I had never realized was possible. It was like I was watching superman.
Now, years later I have the good fortune to interview Jeremy on many aspects of speed and power training, as well as ideas on training for the track and field jumps. I really enjoy discussing training with jumps coaches, since the events are the pinnacle of explosive power development, and has implications for nearly any other athletic activity.
Make sure you listen all the way to the end of this one, as a highlight of this whole podcast series was listening to Jeremy chat about his ideas on the “two-minute drill”, which he got from Willie Banks.
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Key Points:
- Jeremy’s background as an athlete and coach
- Key performance indicators for track and field jumpers
- Principles in the way Jeremy sets up his main power training cycles
- Some of the biggest differences in training a track and field jumper versus a basketball or volleyball player
- How to approach strength training for long term development in the jumps
- Jeremy’s take on plyometric training volumes throughout the yearly scheme
- Some of the ways that Jeremy would change the way he trained in his experience as an athlete
- Jeremy’s thoughts on complex training and potentiation in the course of building power
- Jeremy’s thoughts on extended power training for jumpers, such as the “2-minute drill”
“(For our jumpers) We do the typical quad test plus 2, overhead shot, underhand forward, standing long jump, standing three jump, a 150m and a 30m sprint”
“I’ve gotten away from weightroom measurement, because a clean is good, but it’s only a 40% correlation with actual high jumping. The more you start to high jump, the more specifics you see… if I’m doing high jump with a weight vest from a 3 step, I think there’s more correlation than what their clean number is.”
“When you’re developing kids the most important thing is developing athleticism, developing balance, right to left leg balance, trying to make them as athletic as possible”
“My elite athletes, they get fit fast”
“We’re working on the tires, working on the suspension…. After an hour training session, we’ll spend 2 hours working on things like balance, pre-habilitation stuff post training that we have the luxury to do, at this level to keep them healthy”
“I jumped 7’4” in high school and barely lifted a single weight, did a bunch of plyometrics and things like that. I never squatted more than my bodyweight in the weightroom, ever. To go to college and have to lift and be on a regimented program was probably still too much for me, and that’s probably why I struggled the first couple of years, because I went from nothing to something. Being conscious of that as high school and college coaches, knowing how to progress your athletes through development (is important).”
“Working with Jamie Nieto at age 36, one bar away from a medal, we trained 2-3 days a week, and that was it”
“This last year I had a kid who jumped 24’4” in long jump in high school, and I don’t think we lifted more than 70-80 kilos in squat”
“A lot of time we just jump into plyometrics, we don’t analyze what we are doing, and we don’t do it correctly”
“When we are talking about jumping, we are talking about muscle stiffness. I’ve you’ve seen it, a long jumper slip on the board. When they hit the end, all of their muscles fire, and they go 8 or 9 feet in the air. That muscle stiffness that happens there, that’s what we are trying to develop when we do our plyos”
“As I look at it, why did I run all those 300’s and run all those extra stadiums? I would change things back then to working smart and hard. When I learned from other coaches in South America and Cuba, I couldn’t believe the unbelievable quality of work that was done, and how low quantity work that was done”
“We do our potentiation/complex training outside. We’ll pull all the weights outside on the track”
“We do the two-minute drill for all events (long jump, high jump, triple jump), it’s such a low intensity of what we are trying to do that it’s not that big of deal for an athlete to do that… sometimes I’ll have my high jumpers do the two-minute long jump drill”
Notes:
The following video is what Jeremy and I were talking about when he mentioned athletes who create massive stiffness in their takeoff leg when they slip on the takeoff board in long jump. This video is not nearly the best example of this, as I’ve seen athletes literally go twice as high upon slipping, but it gives you the basic idea of that instant muscle contraction that results in super stiffness of the takeoff leg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_BxNgFV4dY
About Jeremy Fischer:
Jeremy Fischer is the USATF Lead Coach at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center. Specializes in Horizontal Jumps. Successfully coached at the Rio Olympics, Brittany Reese and Will Claye to medals. Long time and popular instructor in the USATF Coach Education Certification Program. In addition to the USATF, Jeremy has coached at Cal State Northridge, The University of Wisconsin, The University of Oklahoma.
Over his collegiate coaching career Fischer has been responsible for guiding 17 student-athletes to NCAA All American status. Fischer is USATF Level 3 Certified, holds Level 2 Certificates in the sprints, jumps and throws and currently serves as the Level 2 (event specific school) Jumps Lead Instructor. He is also certified by the NSCA and USA Weightlifting.
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