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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.

The clearance looks good. The back goes over, the hips go over, and then the bar comes off behind the athlete, taken by a calf or a heel on the way down. It is the most irritating miss in the event, because everything that decided it happened before the part anybody was watching.

The bar tells you where the top of the jump was

A flop is a curve through the air with its highest point somewhere along it. Take off too far from the bar and the top of that curve happens before the bar, so the athlete is already descending as they pass over, and the last thing across, which is the legs, meets it coming down. Take off too close and the opposite happens: they are still rising at the bar, and it tends to go on the way up, off the shoulders or the back.

So the half of the jump you are annoyed about is a fair clue about the takeoff point, which is the thing worth going to measure.

The three causes worth checking, in order

• The takeoff point. Mark where the plant foot lands on several attempts and see whether it is drifting away from the bar. Most coaches want it roughly an arm's length out, and more importantly in the same place every time.
• The finish of the clearance. Once the hips are across, bringing the chin down towards the chest lifts the lower legs. An athlete who holds the arch and keeps looking back at the sky keeps their legs down, and the legs are what takes the bar.
• Height that was never there. If the plant produced very little lift, the margin over the bar is small enough that ordinary timing errors turn into misses. That is a plant problem dressed as a clearance problem.

Fixing the finish without a bar to be scared of

Back-overs onto the mat from standing are the direct drill: no approach, no height, just the shape, with the hips up and then the chin to the chest and the legs following. An elastic band in place of the bar is worth more than it sounds, because an athlete who is frightened of a metal bar will not commit to the finish, and no amount of explaining changes that. Short-approach scissors work the same fault from the other end, by making the legs the part of the body with something to clear.

Where the app helps, and where it does not

Plainly: the Film Room does not judge anything that happens over the bar. It reads the plant, and it reports hip rise as a share of body height, the takeoff angle, and knee fold and extension. There is no arch measurement, no leg lift, no bar contact, and a pose tracker watching an upside-down athlete from the side would not be a witness worth trusting anyway.

It is useful for the cause rather than the symptom. Two numbers matter here. A hip rise that is small for that athlete says the plant did not buy enough height for anything at the top to rescue. And a takeoff angle under about 30 degrees gets flagged as the approach carrying the jumper past the bar rather than up it, which is what a takeoff point drifting too far away produces.

For the clearance itself, film it and step through it yourself. That is not a limitation worth apologising for. It is one phone, one side of the pit, and an athlete upside down.

Compare like with like. Same camera position, same bar height, preferably the same session. A clip from Tuesday and a clip from a meet two weeks later differ in more ways than the jump does.

Related

Try it: Long jump takeoff analysis from a phone video