Why does my long jumper land and then fall backward in the pit?
A hard landing that pitches an athlete back onto their heels usually loses more distance than a slightly worse takeoff ever will.
The jump looks big in the air. Then the athlete lands, sits back onto their heels or hands, and the tape comes out short of where the flight suggested it should be. The measured mark is taken from the closest point of contact, so that fall-back costs real distance, not just style.
The landing gives distance back, it does not add it
Once an athlete leaves the board, the hips follow a fixed path through the air. Nothing done in flight changes where the hips land, only where the legs and arms end up relative to them. A jump that lands the feet well ahead of the hips is going to pull the body backward after contact no matter how hard the athlete reaches forward at the last instant, because the hips are already behind the feet before the sand is even touched.
What usually causes it
- Reaching the legs out too early, before the hips have finished rising, which plants the feet ahead of where the hips will actually be at landing.
- A takeoff angle steeper than the usual 18 to 22 degree window, buying height at the cost of forward travel and leaving the hips underneath the feet regardless of arm action in the air.
- Arms stopping their forward reach before the feet touch the sand, which removes the last bit of forward pull the athlete had available.
None of those are fixed by shouting instructions during the flight, since the flight is too short to react to. They are fixed with short-approach jumps where the only goal is a landing that keeps the hips travelling forward through contact, at a height low enough that the athlete can feel it rather than just survive it.
Where the Film Room can and cannot help
The long jump setting reads takeoff angle against the 18 to 22 degree band, hip rise as a share of body height, and trunk and arm position through the approach. All three stop at takeoff and flight. If the angle is reading steep, that alone explains a lot of the sit-back, because a steep angle plants the feet ahead of the hips by geometry. If the angle and hip rise both look normal and the athlete is still falling backward, the fault is in landing timing, and none of those three numbers will show it.
A single 2D camera cannot measure how far the athlete's landing mark sits behind their hips at the moment of contact, because that needs the sand strike and the hip position in the same frame, and the back of most pits sits outside a camera set up to film the board. Film wide enough to catch the whole pit before comparing landings across jumps.
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Related
Why does my long jumper land shorter than their speed says they should?
A fast approach and a short landing usually means the speed never converted at the board, not that the athlete stopped being fast.
Read →Why your high jumper knocks the bar off on the way down
Legs taking the bar after the hips have cleared is a timing fault at the top, and usually a takeoff point that drifted before it.
Read →How long should a long jump run-up be?
Long enough to reach the speed the athlete can still take off from, and not one stride longer.
Read →