Why does my triple jumper's stride completely change between the hop and the step?
A triple jump is one run-up followed by three different jumps, and the hop and the step are not supposed to feel the same.
A coach watching a triple jumper for the first time often asks why the stride looks completely different coming out of the hop than it did going into it. The honest answer is that it is supposed to. The hop, the step and the jump are three separate takeoffs stitched together, and each one changes what the body does on the ground after it.
Why the hop changes everything after it
The hop lands on the same leg that took off, which nothing else in sprinting does. That single-leg landing absorbs force differently than a running stride, and whatever happens on that landing is exactly what the step inherits. A hop that comes down flat and fast hands the step a runner's rhythm. A hop that comes down steep and braking hands the step a dead leg to work with.
This is why "fix the step" is usually the wrong instruction. The step is reacting to a decision the hop already made a tenth of a second earlier.
What to actually film
- The full phase, hop through step through jump, in one continuous shot.
- The runway approach, not just the pit, since approach speed sets up all three phases.
- More than one attempt. One clean hop and one poor one, side by side, is more useful than either alone.
The Film Room reports phase count and hip rise per phase from the hip trace, which is the closest a single camera gets to separating the hop going wrong from the step going wrong, instead of blaming whichever one happened last.
What it cannot tell you is whether the athlete changed their stride on purpose or lost control of it. A deliberately shorter, punchier step and a step that simply fell apart can produce a very similar hip trace, and only a coach watching live, or asking the athlete, can usually tell which one happened.
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Related
Why does my jumper's approach run look different from their flat sprint?
A long or triple jump approach is not just a shorter sprint. The last two steps are built on purpose to set up a takeoff rather than to keep accelerating.
Read →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.
Read →How many steps back should a triple jumper's run-up be?
Longer is not better in triple jump the way it is in long jump, because a faster approach only helps if the hop, step and jump can still absorb the speed.
Read →