High Jumping with Katie

This morning I had a high jump workout with one of my multi eventers Katie. We took a few jumps from six steps and then we did some full approach work over cones. Our emphasis was on maintaining lean and developing rotation around the bar. We struggled with that all morning long. After taking a good look at the footage that we shot I think that I've come up with a simple solution or answer to our question. If you will consider the two videos below you should see two very different things.

1. Consider the knee of each jumper. You will see that the male jumpers knee lifts to the 90 degree position and stays there allowing the hips to rotate above the head causing the center of gravity to pass below the actual height of the bar.
2. The female jumper continually drops the knee which allows her to jump on the height that she can lift her hips to.

Katie Sheehan

Brad Pruente

In this video you can see that similar to Katie, Brad drops his knee as the rest of this body rotates flat over the bar. Had me maintained his knee positioning even slightly more so he would have continued his bodies rotation around the bar allowing him to pass over this height. This is something that I see over and over again at High School meets.

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