1 The Author Ed Fern Visiting European Coaches With My Eyes (and Ears) Open By Ed Fern, June 2009 Ed is originally from New Jersey in the USA He started high jumping when he was 14, using the old straddle style in 1968 In 1968 Dick Fosbury won the Mexico Olympics using his new technique, The Fosbury Flop Ed read in a magazine article that the flop was invented out of the scissors, so he went back to the scissors and developed his jumping technique over the next year, becoming the first high school student in New Jersey to do the flop He made the US Junior National Team in 1973 and went on to jump on Scholarship at Clemson University where he earned All American Honours and made the A standard for the high jump for the 76 and later, the 80 Olympics Unfortunately he did not make the very powerful US Team His jumps pbs are 220, 715 and 1505 Ed has been coaching Athletics since 1979 and has worked with almost every event in the sport including the marathon and cross country He wrote Ed Fern s Flight School a primer for young jumpers and coaches, which was published by Track and Field News in 1990 While in New Jersey Ed s athletes earned numerous State and National Championships, including a National Champion in Cross Country at the Junior College Champs in 1991! Since moving to New Zealand in 2002 Eds athletes have won over 20 National Championships and he has been a New Zealand team coach to the last two Oceania Games He has also conducted numerous courses and clinics and has been a regular member of staff at the NZ Young Olympian Camp since 2002 On April 10 of this year I left New Zealand to make my second visit to Europe in three years to add to my knowledge of coaching I firmly believe that the higher profile of Athletics and the consistently higher level of competition make Europe the place to go if you want to know what s new and effective in the world of coaching I find the coaches there to be innovative and extremely professional in their approach to the sport I also find them to be extremely open in the area of sharing knowledge and experience For this article I will recap my visits to three of the top jumps coaches in the World After a long set of flights that took me through the massive Beijing Airport, I arrived in Germany for my first ten days My destination, Bayer Leverkusen, the most successful athletics club in Germany, would be a return visit for me as I had spent five days there in 2006 Bayer Leverkusen s indoor training facility When I walk into the Bayer indoor facility, I get the feeling that as a coach; you could not get better than this Virtually everything you would possibly need is at your fingertips The indoor 200m track with the adjoining 130m straightaway, 3 sand pits, 2 high jump pads, 2 pole vault pads, a full indoor throwing cage, three weight rooms, a rehab room for basic exercises, a full sports medicine facility, outdoor 400m facility with a 300m cinder track on the infield, and every medicine ball, box, elastic, pole or throwing implement you could want The vaulting poles number in the hundreds as this is one of Germany s centres for Pole Vaulting
2 At Bayer I spent my time shadowing Head Jumps Coach Hans Jorg Thomaskamp Hans Jorg has been with Bayer for over ten years, having previously been with the Dortmund Athletic Club He has produced numerous athletes who have represented Germany from Youth to Olympic level He comes to coaching from a Sports Science background and looks at coaching from both practical and scientific points of view I met Hans Jorg on my previous trip to Europe and could not wait to get to Leverkusen to see what he was up to now As always when you are in a multi lingual situation, there is something lost in the translation, but I find Hans Jorg to be very accommodating in that he makes the effort to relate to you what he has just said to his athlete during the course of a training session When you ask me what I learned in Germany, or in any destination I visited, I think I must give rather nebulous answers I have been coaching athletes for over thirty years and, like most of us, I have found or created systems that work for me and my athletes When I visit a coach of Hans Jorg s stature I tend to pick up things that I need to improve on He has one of the best eyes for little technical aspects that I have ever seen I learn that everything that happens in a jump is the result of something that happened before that point Now this is not something new to me, but I am now so much more keyed in to watching the approach in every jump That s where the jumps are made You know how when you watch a high jumper, you know four steps out that they are going to clear the bar? That s what I am talking about, but it can come from even further back than that To paraphrase former world record holder in the high jump, Dwight Stones, If the first step is crap, the whole jump will be crap In Germany I saw some drills that I have never seen before One for Long Jump that involves three successive take offs from a short approach that end with the last take off producing a landing in the sand A measurement from the start of the first take off to the landing in the sand gives a predictor of how far the jumper is capable of jumping at that time I liked that one Hans Jorg said he got that one from the French Another drill that all the jumpers used was done to the side of the high jump pad It involved a run up of about seven strides with the last step being a hop onto a low box followed by another hop onto another, higher box, and followed by a flight onto the high jump pad with the jumper landing on their butt The purpose of the drill was to extend the take off through the hip of the take off leg and do it again as they hit the top box Most athletes were great off the ground, and some could pull the leg back through for the low box take off, but only a few could get it around and extend off the top box into a beautiful flight through the air This drill is beneficial to all jumpers as it emphasizes the whip of the hip, as Hans Jorg puts it This is one he invented and the athletes love it I have found throughout my career that it is important to create drills and activities that not only produce the required result but are also fun for the athletes to do Picking up these two drills made the trip to Leverkusen worth the visit Hans Jorg is a coach who makes you think If you ask him a question, he might ask you a question I picked this up three years ago and I have found it useful in my own coaching I now ask more questions of my athletes, especially as they become more experienced in the sport Also, when I am working with other coaches, I find it much more useful to ask questions that set them thinking and problem solving than for me to just stand up and spout information From Leverkusen I traveled to Loughborough (UK) to work with Terry Lomax a Kiwi who is presently the United Kingdom High Jump Coach Terry works with four high jumpers, a long jumper, a triple jumper and a sprinter who runs for Canada Terry is a meticulous planner and when I was there his athletes were training twice a day in preparation for the season His athletes all knew what they had to do and when they had to do it, and rarely were there more than two athletes at a session at the same time I find this to be almost a dream scenario in that athletes were given heaps of individual attention As a coach of predominately high school athletes I have all my athletes show up at the same time, Monday through Friday I try to stagger what my athletes do throughout the week in order to be able to give the bulk of my attention to those who are doing technical work at any given time
3 Three of Terry Lomax s athletes relaxing after training Clockwise from right, Robbie Grabarz, 227, Martyn Bernard, 230 and Seyi Smith 1023/2089 The adaptation of basic running drills to the high jump approach has been the greatest addition to my coaching this year and Terry is an excellent teacher of this series of drills The basic idea is that high jumpers need to become extremely comfortable running the curve in the high jump and adapting these drills and later expanding on them will produce jumpers who can utilize the benefits of the curved approach to it s maximum benefit Terry s mantra is learn the drill, apply the drill and then load the drill This brings about strength when an athlete performs the event From Loughborough I traveled to Birmingham to spend a week with the enigmatic Fuzz Ahmed Fuzz is a former 220 high jumper who jumped for Iowa State University before deciding to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in his late 20s, taking first in his class in the process Watching Fuzz conduct a technical session is like watching a director work with actors in a play or a movie He uses terminology not normally heard in our sport, explaining that he gave high jumping a lot of thought while he was studying dramatic arts and he began to see correlations that he has elaborated on in his coaching He presently works with Tom Parsons (eighth in Beijing) and six others full time He consults with Beijing Silver Medalist Germaine Mason who trains in Jamaica but represents Great Britain He helps Olympic Heptathlon Silver Medalist Kelly Sotherton with her high jumping and he is also married to Commonwealth Games Silver Medalist, Julie Crane Fuzz has some young developing athletes he works with a few times each week as well Fuzz also uses the running drills in his high jump approach work and has incorporated a good bit of plyometrics into the drills for his top class athletes His approach to his athletes is relentlessly positive He helps them believe they will improve ( he TELLS them they are going to improve), and he puts the training in place for them to achieve He uses the talents of the UK strength and conditioning people at the High Performance Training Centre in Birmingham to structure individual plans for each of his athletes At each training session they get a sheet with what exercises to do, how much to lift, how many reps and how much rest in between sets There are back and side cameras set up on one lifting platform with a one minute delay so the athletes can observe what they have just done on the platform I also got to spend some time with Olympic Silver Medalist in the Triple Jump, Phillips Idowu one morning in Birmingham He has had lots of back issues throughout his career, which he puts down to sh***y technique A few years ago while the Miami Dolphins of the American National Football League were in town he spent some time with their strength and conditioning coach who gave him a great exercise to help him with his core strength He has seven car tires lashed together and attached to a back wall of the gym and he attacks them with a 3kg sledge hammer standing first on two feet and then stepping into the hit and standing in one leg The object is to hit the tires as hard as possible from a position of about half a meter away, and then control the hammer s rebound off the tires And let me tell you he HITS those tires, and there was almost no recoil
4 Phillips Idowu works the tires off two feet Phillips Idowu works the tires off one foot I left Birmingham with the thought that even though I fancy myself very adept at explaining concepts many different ways in order to get a point across, there are always more I was also impressed by how much time was spent on approach drills Sometimes the drills were the workout! Thirty minutes of drills followed by gymnastics on the high jump bed and some 60m sprints were a complete session on a few of the days I was there Both Fuzz and Terry also use box take offs to develop technique I have not used them much in my coaching but having watched a number of sessions, especially sessions where young athletes are trying to learn to relax and lay out over the bar, I can now see their value In 2006 I returned from Europe with a new understanding of the importance of lower leg conditioning for jumpers and sprinters and I added this type of work to our training and it has paid benefits This year my goal was mainly to find out how to continue to develop promising youth and juniors into successful young adults I came home with the understanding that certain basic movement skills must always be present, even if you are one of the best athletes in the world I watched Olympians doing the same drills that I have my fourteen year olds do, and I must say, the fourteen year olds do some of them better! In England I saw the athletes doing somersaults, handstands, cartwheels and other basic skills to improve their coordination and body awareness I believe this is vitally important
5 Strength training that is appropriate to each individual athlete is also an important aspect of what I need to be aware of over the next few years But it is important to work on technique at the younger ages and use body weight and light plyometric exercises to build functional strength with the younger athletes of 13 16 years of age Even though I coach twelve athletes who fall between 13 and 18 years of age, I must look at each athlete as an individual and structure their programs appropriately At the end of my visit to Birmingham I told Fuzz Ahmed that based on my record over the years I would be confident in saying that I was an accomplished jumps coach,( hell I wrote a high jump coaching book twenty years ago!), but when I go spend time with coaches in Europe I come away feeling like I don t know a thing! He said he felt the same thing last year when he visited Swedish High Jumper Stefan Holm Fuzz said he could not believe how simple and basic Stefan s training had been throughout his long career! He told me Stefan did variations of the same drills that he learned at the beginning of his career, at the end of his career They were just harder and the numbers were higher, much higher He continued, telling me that Stefan s simplicity of training made him go back and re evaluate what he did and make sure he had those basic skills in there So if there is any one message I would like to think I brought away from this trip, it would be that my job as a coach is to create robust, strong, coordinated athletes who are ready to compete in their chosen events I should consistently use the drills that best produce the technique that will give them success and they should know what they are doing and why they are doing it I have video of lots of what I saw and I would love to share it I am also open to any questions anyone may have regarding the trip or their own coaching You can contact me at ferns7@xtraconz Please put Euro Trip in the subject line of any emails Ed s trip to Europe was assisted by eight sponsors some of whom were private trusts Support was also provided by Oceania Athletics Coaches Association, Hawera Athletics Club, Taranaki Athletics and Taranaki Secondary Schools Sports Association