This past weekend one of the elite jumpers I work with had a catastrophic injury. During a competition at UNC, Jade Ellis tore his left Achilles tendon as he ran down the run way for his sixth attempt in the long jump. Training had been going well and he was jumping great (especially considering the relatively slow surface at UNC) and everything was going well until that final jump. Jade is a grea [...]

Track and field is all about numbers. The competition is certainly important (maybe more so) but most people are just as concerned with the numbers- the times, the distances, etc. With this in mind, I wanted to throw out some interesting factoids for you to chew on. Did you know:The average velocity of a top athlete running the 400 hurdles is higher than one running the 110 hurdles?The fastest rec [...]

I've been in Eugene, OR for the USATF National Champs since Thursday to coach some athletes and also do the sport science work with the shot putters that I've handled for the last 7 years. Yesterday I took the time to roam around and shoot some video that I'll be using when I teach USATF's Level 2 Biomechanics curriculum in a couple weeks. This video is shot at 210 frames per second using one [...]

I've had the luxury of being to several Prefontaine Classic meets and it's always one of my favorite meets of the year. The crowd is always super well educated and gets in to every single event. I didn't go to this year's competition but it seems to be one of the better renditions of this annual classic. The long jump was perhaps the best competition of all with Dwight Phillips and Irving Sala [...]

Every training method one has should have an origin. Every technique I have that I share with the other coaches that I work with is explained first with history. What I mean is that I share who and where I got the idea, method, and exercise from in order to understand my interpretation of the information. I also explained what worked and what didn't work well for me. Often, like the olympic lifts [...]

Due to the requests on the forum, here's the entire lecture of the snippet I posted earlier from Dan Pfaff's horizontal jumps talk in Las Vegas. Special thanks to Tom Kaberna for sending me a non High-Def version of this video that was small enough that I could actually upload the entire thing for viewing. [...]

OK. Here's my last video (at least until I return home from a family visit in NY). This one's a 5 minute clip from the DVD titled, Penultimate and Takeoff Mechanics in the Long Jump. The video was shot at the HPC ELITETRACK Gold Medal Clinic held at the 2008 Olympic Trials. In this video, legendary coach, Tom Tellez, teaches the mechanics that made Carl Lewis and many others to elite status in t [...]

Here's another 5 minute clip from Dan Pfaff from the National Podium Education Project in Las Vegas. This talk was on absolute strength and power development for world class horizontal jumpers. As you may be able to tell, Pfaff is a generalist and many of the themes that he uses for coaching one event group are used in what may appear to be very different event groups. Enjoy. [...]

Many on this board have been following the training of Nick Newman, an emerging elite long jumper who I've been coaching for the past 18 months. Last year, Nick and I both lived in NY and we saw each other on a fairly regular basis for competitions, testing and technical training. Now both Nick and I have moved and we live on opposite sides of the country. His training has been going great and he [...]

I was at the NYU FastTrack Invitational on Friday coaching a post-grad athlete and one of my collegiate multi-eventers in the men's long jump when I overheard a coach say this (verbatim) to her female long jumper (which was going on concurrently in an adjacent pit) upon being asked how to keep her feet up longer before landing: It's just a matter of waiting a little bit for the landing. Post tho [...]