Whenever I am working with athletes on a new drill, there are two interesting things that can occur on the gym floor:
Lack of motoric control (inability to control range of motion, so movement is clunky/awkward)
Lack of specific mobility (lack of authentic movement pattern from appropriate musculature due to a bony, hard structure or a soft tissue problem, effectively limiting range of motion)
With respect to teaching a vertical jump, there is of course the basic mechanics of “jumping” – avoiding buckling of the knees, arm and torso angle.
However, teaching the intention of movement in a vertical jump, along with teaching the appropriate response to an external stimuli is of utmost priority from a coaching point of view, which is my main perspective.
Coaching our athletes to jump with strictly internal cues can prove to be deleterious towards the goal of higher force production. Internal cueing can also lead to introspection of self-movement quality.
“In sum, an externalfocus compared to internal focus reduces consciousness and therefore the amount of attention needed to perform a given task. This frees up attentional resources that can be used to further the efficiency and automaticity of a movement skill.”
Essentially I don’t want my athletes second guessing if their back position is good, arm position is good, or if their ankle position is good. I just want them to move with intention of strength, power, and speed.
They shouldn’t be thinking about individual body parts, but they should rather react to an external event to help improve performance based goals.
Check out this one change to an athlete’s perspective and environment that is easy to use as a teaching tool. This coaching tool works especially well when you’re trying to get a shy or even introverted athlete out of their shell, and it also helps create context for other athlete’s if they have played baseball, basketball, volleyball, or any other overhead sport!
How Does This Work
The idea of achieving “triple extension” is a coveted and ideal technique sought after in many jumps and Olympic lifts. In the vertical jump, it is easy to “pull your punches” with respect to achieving full range shoulder flexion, extension at the hip, and knee extension, and ankle plantarflexion.
The external focus on “reaching” for the ball negates any internal focus that telling specific body parts will have on the coaching and cueing aspect.
Long story short, use whatever tool you have to your advantage to help improve performance based outcomes by providing external or analogy related cues. If you are performing broad jumps for example, have athletes jump just a little further than what they are used to – it should push them, but not be unrealistic… and on, and on you go!
Throughout the years of working with youth athletes, I’ve begun to notice a trend – many don’t have the ability to perform coordinated movements that are outside of their specific sports! General biases aside, many athletes do not have the ability to coordinate and move well!
With this in mind, check out this combination of exercises in order to re-educate your body!
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Many athletes I’ve come into contact with are in a strange stage of development – they are often just around that age of going through puberty, and they may have gone through a growth spurt or three.
Due to anthropometry changing very rapidly for these individuals, these male athletes begin to lose coordination while they begin to work out what happens when you grow 6 inches in less than 6 months.
This is largely why I believe in performing FMS related screens, as they may have certain passive ranges of motion that allow these athletes (read: baseball athletes who exhibit 180° or more of glenohumeral total range of motion) to succeed at their sport, but when asked to ambulate or move in any other way, they simply cannot due to lack of motor control.
This is one piece of the puzzle – there are other pieces too!
If someone can score (X) on an assessment, or have awesome ranges of motion, what happens when you ask them to perform a movement outside of that screen? What happens when you test physiological capacity such as an endurance test, or strength related test?
Lately at Cressey Sports Performance we have been identifying certain athletic qualities that many younger athletes have been missing – that is, they do not possess this ability due to early sports specialization. Skipping, shuffling, and hopping are a missing component out of these individuals’ movement dictionary. Initially, there is a noticeable limitation on their literacy in how to transfer force in many different directions!
With this in mind, we’ve begun to break down specifically how to improve these qualities, and I can go into slightly more detail in how the quality of elasticity and reactivity is important as an athlete.
Be Like Water… and Adapt
Essentially there needs to be an immediate reflexive action that needs to occur for jumping to feel bouncy. The quality of the stretch shortening reflex needs to be expanded upon!
“A stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) is an active stretch (eccentric contraction) of a muscle followed by an immediate shortening (concentric contraction) of that same muscle.”
I’ve written about how a baseball athlete’s lack of ability to transfer ground reaction forces may be a limiting factor towards improving velocity (which is essentially power over a given time in a certain direction), along with understanding how an athlete can improve these power qualities.
Further, by increasing one’s ability to coordinate certain limbs moving with and without a jump rope, you are encouraging motor units in those specific muscle groups to be activated by including low level jumping! Also, you can improve upon an athlete’s ability to absorb force, and produce force in an efficient manner.
Essentially there is a motoric item at work here in this combination. You are inducing small levels of force into the ground – and the ground has to push back at you in order for you to leave the earth. Sounds pretty intense, but this is how ground reaction forces work.
Ground Reaction What?
Your ability to put force into the ground comes down to joint position, muscular contraction, along with learning how to eccentrically load in an appropriate manner.
If you don’t have the ability to absorb or displace this eccentric force (think of when you load or absorb the forces from landing on the ground), expressing this force as a concentric force will be limited.
The concentric force is where you will be pushing the ground away. This is a relatively difficult concept to understand because many of these speed and power-related movements are done very quickly.
Analogously, if you can lift a weight irrespective of the time it takes to lift the weight, you will be able to display your maximal strength.
However, if you place a premium on the amount of time it takes for you to displace that weight (or how fast you can move that weight), then we are looking at power!
Fortunately for a lot of you reading and for your athletes, you won’t need to displace that much force in comparison to lifting a weight. You aren’t even jumping for a maximal height, because you’re still learning the mechanics and technique, which is different than putting maximal effort into a movement.
The most you are looking to jump is the thickness of a jump rope (which isn’t that much) – but you are doing it very quickly.
How Can I Use This Combination?
I use several cues for many of my athletes. Most of my athletes are still in the younger age range (12 to 16), and even if they aren’t I use some funny cues to get them to laugh and then the message sticks even better:
Remember that game where you used to think the colored tiles in a grocery store were lava? Sometimes you HAD to step off the white tiles onto the colored tiles in order to continue, but you did so super duper fast!
Think the ground is lava, and you have to spend as little time as possible on the ground.
After that, make sure your knees aren’t buckling every step of the way – maintain a certain level of rigidity as you move through this drill.
Integrating this into a Pop, Float, Skip drill, you will need to maintain a certain level of rigidity as you learn to skip on one leg, and pop and float on the other leg.
Programming
Many use jumping rope as a method for conditioning. When you understand the ramifications of this tool, it can also double as a low level elasticity drill, and you can integrate it in several different manners. In this case, I choose to enhance use it as a learning tool on top of inducing small levels of jumping into the body!
Personally, I often find that the last time an athlete felt this type of bounciness was sometime in grade school when they were given time for recess, dodgeball, kickball, four square, and all these other games that are no longer part of our youth athlete’s day to day happenings.
For programming, I like to teach the concept of elasticity and upper body rigidity first. Afterwards, teaching coordination of the upper body with skipping takes place, and then integrating a “pop, float, skip” exercise is useful for athletes before sprinting takes place!
Further, you – the teacher, coach, and trainer – should allow mistakes to happen. Learning a skill set takes time. It doesn’t happen right away. Learn when to give cues, and learn when to back off so the athlete can learn on their own.
At Cressey Sports Performance, speed and agility are all the buzz now. In fact, we are so focused on improving movement quality, that we often prescribe for our professional athletes two days quite literally focused on the movements outside of just lifting heavy weights.
It is one thing to create the environment for lifting weights, and another to take that next step and help an athlete learn how to sprint better, decelerate better, and improve their overall movements that you know will transfer to their sport.
Here are a few things that I see on a daily basis when it comes to errors that our athletes make.
Not Being Aggressive Enough with Arm Swing
This is a common item, as whenever we begin teaching sprinting drills at CSP, most often the athlete just simply hasn’t been instructed on what to do with their hands. Most of the time sport coaches will cue feet and knee mechanics, but not many think to also cue hands to help improve motion in either a forward or lateral direction.
This is a simple fix, however.
Simply cue the athlete to bring their hands back behind their torso by any means necessary. You can use tall kneeling drills, seated drills, or external cues to help improve this process.
Left (Correct): Top Hand placement is correct, and bottom arm angle is further back than the right. Right (Incorrect): Hand placement is more forward than left picture, and down arm’s angle is less than left.
Lack of Positive Shin Angle During Linear Acceleration
Another item is what to do with their body when they are “getting out of the hole.” There are many reasons why someone may look to improve their “shin angles” – they might be chasing an opponent, they are rushing back to defense (basketball), or any slew of items in which linear mechanics are of the most importance.
You see, when talking about speed drills, there needs to be an understanding that everything needs to contribute to going as fast as you can. If 3 out of 4 pieces of the puzzle are there, but that last piece is nowhere to be found, then you may be left in the dust by an athlete that could be stronger, faster, or more technically efficient.
Left (Correct): Positive shin angle leads to better forward motion of the athlete. Right: Negative or neutral shin angle reflects deceleration or slowing down.
This item talks about the ability for ground reaction forces to displace in a horizontal fashion. If you can imagine, there needs to be an equal and opposite force to whenever you move. So if you have a “knees over your toes” angle, you will tend to “fall” forward.
This can reinforced through several drills:
Lean-Fall-Sprint
Half Kneeling Starting Positions (into a Sprint)
Push Up and Go Starting Positions (into a Sprint)
Jump Back into a Sprint (in which the positive shin angle is created by a reactive step)
Prowler Pushes/Marches
… among many other drills.
If you don’t have a positive shin angle, you will be “telling” your body to decelerate automatically, and your lower half of your leg is no longer contributing to speed and acceleration.
Lack of Positive Shin Angle During Lateral Deceleration
This is very similar to the other item mentioned above, although the spin on this error is referring to what occurs during side to side deceleration.
Many drills and tests even separate the good from great, such as the Pro Agility Shuttle Test or 5-10-5, in which you are decelerating several times to identify how good your mechanics are for acceleration and deceleration.
This shin angle is important, because this can mean the difference between being cut off, or making an important play whether you are on the field, court, or rink.
Keep in mind this is no encouraging a genu valgus or simply knees collapsing in towards each other. This purpose is to improve your abilities to absorb force, and decelerate appropriately without any extraneous steps.
Left (Correct): The positive or acute shin angle will reflect the ability for the athlete to change directions quicker than the picture on the right. Right (Incorrect): The positive shin angle also reflects oversupination in which the athlete loses footing and could possibly roll an ankle!
Lack of Head Movement During Deceleration
This last item is one that is not often talked about, because it is not thought about that much.
If I can summarize this in one phrase – where the head goes, the body follows.
So if you are talking about acceleration or deceleration, your eyes and head position are vastly important towards improving your mechanics.
In fact, it might be one of the most important items, for the mere fact that you have many vestibular related items in your noggin, along with needing the ability to view and be aware of what is going on the field. If you are caught up looking down at the grass, you won’t be able to see what is going on player wise, positions that may be compromised, ball placement, among several different items.
So, barring any negative detriments towards tactical or strategic items (head fakes in basketball), if you can lead with your eyes towards the destination you want to go.
If you want to jump in the air, you need to look up (barring keeping your eyes on the ball).
If you want to go forward, look down (re: acceleration).
If you want to change directions, shift your eyes towards that direction, even if your body is going in another direction.
These are just a few items that I’ve picked up along my travels as a strength coach and trainer for several different sports and clients. I believe you can learn so much more by signing up to be a Certified Speed and Agility Coach by Lee Taft. I’ve had the blessing of being the “model” for this product, and we had a lot of time to discuss other cool things outside of filming. Please check it out, and remember I do get a cut if you do sign up through my affiliate links. Thank you!
As always,
Keep it funky.
P.S. This speed and agility course ends today, Friday, January 29, so make sure to sign up because the powers that be will be shutting down sign-ups afterwards!
