Ive spent many years coaching mens gymnastics who, ultimately, vault quite well when the boys are older, stronger, more powerful etc. Although i have though lots about trying to teach my young boys a correct, efficient running technique, i have never actually attempted to do so. I have even had offers from professional sprinting coaching to help me.
I read an article many years ago (so the facts me be a little blurry now) about how your average sprinter runs at 11m/s during a 100m race. The worlds top gymnasts were measured at 9m/s towards the end of the vault run. The person testing said that by efficiently increasing the technique and therefore speed of a gymnasts run then they would achieve higher, more difficult vault!
It seems to make sense but in reality have we got time to spend hours on teaching our gymnasts to run like a sprinter? This takes years for them to run with an efficient, powerful technique.
Further pushing me away from asking my boys to perform running drills everyday is that i see our WA coaches doing it with their gymnasts. It seems like an unwritten rule that young female gymnasts have to be shown correctly how to run during their early development. GREAT you may say but for me, having watched the little girls doing the drills very well and having hope, then to watch them run down the track with limbs flailing everywhere doesn’t fill me with confidence for the future of their sprinting.
Any thoughts?
I haven’t done running drills with my gymnasts mainly because i don’t yet have the knowledge and they all run pretty well anyway. I can however see the benefit in doing them. The goal need not be to create sprinters. We don’t need them to be as fast as world class sprinters. However even and extra 0.1 m/s faster could be the leg up on the competition that gets them the gold.
I too have never done any running drills and our boys vault much better than the girls at our gym who do the running drills. Maybe it’s just something about boys
I too have toyed with the idea of implementing running drills and specific sprint training into my boys’ programme. I even went as far as writing a 6 week programme to develop the run up – but as mentioned above, in reality I could never spare the precious time to put it into practice, and wasn’t prepared to let it replace another part of my programme I valued more.
Of course, the most important part of the vault is the run-up, as without this no other part of the vault can happen. But, I have listened to many coaches talk about running drills and their importance (mainly WAG coaches I must admit), however, after watching their gymnasts vault and seeing a technically efficient run-up with good knee lift and arm-swing, the vault itself has always been somewhat of a let-down.
Furthermore, if you watch many of the great male vaulters, you will see a variety of different running techniques – some running with their arms swinging side-to-side across the body (Dragulescu and Deferr) and some running with straight arms (Uchimura) – I’m sure none of these techniques would be taught in sprint training yet the final product is great nonetheless.
Finally, I think the vault being performed needs to be taken into consideration – as of course some “power vaults” such as the handspring double-front types will need 100% speed in the run up, but other types (Yurchenko’s for example) you will see performed with a much more controlled approach. With this in mind, is it worth investing all those hours training the run-up?
I’m going to agree with the presumed consensus here: not too many running drills for boys. As we all know boys are just faster and stronger naturally. I coach both MAG and WAG and I use the running drills more for the girls. I’ve noticed here (in the US) that, generation after generation, I’ve had to teach more and more kids how to run because of the lack of natural athleticism. However, when the boys go through puberty and start gaining loads of strength and speed, I drastically curtail running drills.
I have to chime in here (maybe a little late in the conversation). I feel that yes in principle running drills are critical, but the running drills done! are usually incorrect, why? because gymnastics coach teach running drills taught by gymnastics coaches, sprint coaches don’t use many if any of the drills gym coaches use.
However the main! key idea behind sprint training is that if you do it right you are actually kill 2 birds with one stone.
a- Leg strength training and plyometric training necessary for tumbling
b- Sprinting kinetics and tumbling are very similar. So with proper sprint training you will see improvement in tumbling..
The technique is not as important as the actual results and the training, because with vaulting the main deciding factor is that the gymnast needs to be able to control the velocity in order to perform the vault. Article explains all this in better detail.
Overall though i think if you put in the time and you implement the training in your program as part of the warm-up, and strength training rather than just vault you will benefit.
Valentin Uzunov
TheGymPress.net
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