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Why your high jump approach falls apart in the last three steps

The run looks fine until it does not, and the plant inherits every mistake made before it.

A jumper comes off the curve, and instead of arriving at the plant ready, they arrive at it late, short and busy. The steps get quick and small, the hips never lower, and whatever the takeoff produces was decided before the foot went down.

The last three steps are the jump

The penultimate step is where the hips drop, which is what gives the takeoff leg something to extend through. The final step is quick and flat, with the plant foot placed ahead of the body so the athlete can be levered upwards rather than pushing from underneath. Chop those three steps and there is nothing for the plant to work with, however aggressive it looks.

The usual causes, in the order worth checking

• A start mark in the wrong place. If the run does not fit, the athlete adjusts at the only point available to them, which is the end.
• Approach speed the athlete cannot yet plant against. Speed you cannot convert is speed that arrives as panic.
• A curve that tightens too late. Leaning into the turn instead of running the arc pulls the last steps in underneath the body.
• Eyes on the bar. Looking at the bar in the last three steps shortens the run every time.

What the app measures, and what it leaves to you

The high jump and vault event measures the plant: hip rise as a share of body height, takeoff angle, and knee fold and extension. That is the moment the approach was for, and it is the moment worth measuring, but be clear about what is not in there. It does not measure your curve radius, your step lengths or where your start mark should be. It cannot tell you what went wrong in the approach. It can tell you, in numbers rather than impressions, whether what you did in the approach worked.

That turns out to be the useful thing anyway. Move the mark back a foot, film three jumps, and see whether hip rise goes up. Run the curve wider, film three more, compare. The camera is the scoreboard for approach changes you make with a tape measure and chalk, and it is a far better scoreboard than whether the athlete says it felt smoother.

Two drills that fix more of this than they should

Short-approach scissors over a low bar isolate the plant from the height, so the athlete stops thinking about the bar and starts feeling the last two steps. Five-step curve runs with no bar at all fix the arc and the plant foot before there is anything to be intimidated by. Both are in the app for this event, and both work best when nobody is trying to jump high that day.

Measure and mark the approach on the ground, every session, with the same tape. A camera cannot do this for you, and an approach that is different by half a step is a different jump.

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