What is a good high jump with a lousy scissor kick, High Jump Technique

What is a good high jump with a lousy scissor kick technique?

Very curious, for obvious reasons.

Regards,

Seán

Sean.
Can you expand on what your looking for.

All clearances are good clearances.
Even the ugly ones.

Your own height is good, half your height is poor, 75% of your height is ok.
Jump 75% of your height with a scissors and you are ready to learn how to flop.

Do you mean you are the sole entrant at the West Districts or do you have a league match coming up for the point(s?).

Haha. No, I have yet to enter for the high jump, but I have cleared 170cm (more than once) with a shockingly bad scissor kick after my plyometrics session.

I am 182cm tall (approximately).

I don't know why I decided to give it a shot, but I might be interested in learning how to high jump properly...

Sean,
That's not to bad. The norm for scissor kicks for talented HJs is around 25cms below their flop PB.
But this does take a lot of hard work. There are a lot of technical points to execute the flop.
To start with we would need to know your physique, age, training and access to facilities if you would like to take the next step.

Basics
7 strides. 4 straight, 3 curve
Staying tall on all 7 strides
Lean in on curve. Drive knee up at take off (90*) while driving up and not leaning into bar.
The centrifugal force wil drive you over bar.

There are many exercises that you can do to facilitate this.
Hurdle drills, cones, speed work and general conditioning.

Bryan... that is such a good brief description of how to execute the flop! However I'm going to indulge in a good natured nit pick here over the quoted phrase, although as a mere humble Chemist I am amenable to any suitable "counter nit pick".

The way I understand the Physics is that what gets a jumper from one side of the bar to the other is more a consequence of Newton's First Law - that a body (stays at rest or) moves in a straight line at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.
As you approach along the curve, a centriPETAL force originating from the ground and acting inwards on the contact foot maintains your curved pathway. Then on take off, that contact is lost so there is no longer any unbalanced force acting in the horizontal plane. In consequence, Newton's First Law takes over (ie inertia) and you literally go off at a tangent - ie begin to move in a straight line (in the horizontal plane at any rate - the unbalanced vertical force of gravity means that the overall motion of your centre of mass is parabolic.) The same applies to rotational throws where again there in no force actually "driving" the implement forward although that actually is what Aristotle originally thought when he first tried to explain projectile motion almost 2000 years before Newton.
That's why it's so important to convince novice jumpers in particular that they don't really need to do anything to get themselves from one side of ther bar to the other since this is one of the things the curved approach does for them the instant contact with the ground is released. Otherwise they try to achieve that horizontal displacement for themselves and go straight into the bar.
"Centrifugal" force is a concept which I think I'd prefer to leave to "real" Physicists who, on mentioning it, always start to look very serious and begin talking about "non inertial reference frames".

Charles,
One was trying to keep this simple. Hence small easy to follow steps.
What I could have said was all the energy created by running the straight line & curve plus the energy created by the lift will drive you onto the mat without any need to lean into the bar.
The direction / arc of the jump has so may possibilities, on the ground and off that it would do your head in. Suffice to say once you have created all the forces above when you take off that's it.

Could add angles, foot placement etc but that just complicates things for now.

Sean
HJ starts once you can jump over your own height.
Where you want to go from there is called motivatition.
Good luck

Bryan,

What a great straightforward starters' guide to high jumping! My son is not a high jumper but high jumps for his club. He really enjoys it but as any training would get in the way of his main event he just has a bash. He's a car crash on the run up and not being a coach my explanations from my own dim and distant career are a bit rubbish quite honestly Off home to show him your beginners' guide which puts into just a few words what my rambling explanations could never do. Thanks Hopefully he'll enjoy this fun part of his athletics career all the more now!

Alison

Absolutely! And as I said earlier you did that admirably, a point which Alison has also subsequently made.
All the same I don't think there was any harm in explaining a small hiccup in relation to the dynamics of the jump, especially when this relates to one of the most common technical faults - ie the tendency of novice jumpers in particular to throw themselves across the bar. After all there may well also - and indeed should because it was so good! - be people out there who would want to take your synopsis a bit further, or who are already looking at the event at a more advanced level.

Perhaps the phrase in question could have been simply replaced by something like "after take off, the curved run naturally provides the jumper with the means of getting from one side of the bar to the other."

Just jump over the bar SeanH
It might be a bit lower in the middle of the bar, so dont aim for the stands

Thank you very much, Bryan. I highly doubt I could implement all of that on my own because I've never trained for high jump, ever... Haha

Ross, knowing my luck, I'll end up jumping on the bar instead.

That's ok Sean, as long as it's an elastic one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFG1oIE_IJc


...as Mr Punch says, "that's the way to do it!".