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How do you coach triple jump if you've never done it yourself?

Most of what a first-year jumps coach needs is the phase order, a short run-up, and the patience to keep the hop low.

Somebody gets handed the jumps most seasons who has never triple jumped a day in their life. The whole event fits in one sentence once you know it: the hop lands on the same foot that took off, the step lands on that same foot again, and only the jump switches to the other foot. Most beginner faults are some version of getting that order wrong.

The fault that shows up in almost every first practice

New triple jumpers hop as high and as far as they can on the first phase, because a big hop looks like the athletic thing to do. It leaves nothing for the step or the jump, and the athlete lands the whole event in two phases instead of three. The fix is a low, fast hop that trades height for speed carried into the next two phases, and it feels wrong to teach before it feels right to do.

A sensible progression

• Standing triple jump into a pit, no run-up at all, so the phase order gets grooved before speed is added.
• A short run of six to eight strides before the full runway, so an athlete who loses the order under speed has less speed to lose it at.
• Single-leg bounding series down the runway or across grass, which builds the hop-and-land rhythm without the pressure of a real attempt.

Where the Film Room helps, and where it does not

The triple jump setting reports the first takeoff angle, a phase count taken from the hip trace, hip rise per phase, and overstride on the runway. For a coach who does not yet trust their own eye, the phase count is the most useful of the four, because it does not require judging technique at all: it simply confirms whether the hop, step and jump happened as three distinct phases rather than the athlete bailing into a jump early. Hip rise per phase will show the tall-hop problem as a number rather than a guess.

It will not tell you whether the correct foot did the hop and the step. That is a common beginner mistake, switching feet partway through, and a side-on clip that is reading hip height and phase timing has no reliable way to say which foot was on the ground at any given instant. That one still has to be watched live or frame by frame, by eye.

Beyond that, an afternoon with a local jumps coach or a clinic will teach a new coach more in a day than a season of clips will. The Film Room is a good second pair of eyes once you know roughly what you are looking at. It is a slow way to learn what that looks like in the first place.

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