PV Coaching Guide

1. One single technical cue

   Athletes need to focus on one thing and one thing only during competition. There may be many things you want to change about their jump, but the human mind can only focus on one during the heat of competition. Technical efficiency is paramount to pole vault success, but this is better developed in practice, not at meets.

   Lock in one change, then spend the rest of the meet hammering it into their minds.
   

   2. Pole selection

   Poles have two determining variables: length and stiffness.

   The longer the pole, the higher an athlete can grip, but the harder it becomes to move the pole to vertical and land deep in the pit.

   The stiffer the pole, the more energy is returned to the athlete during the recoil phase.

   
   Think about a spring: when you compress a thinner spring, it stores less energy and releases less when it is let go. When you compress a big thick spring, it really unwinds explosively. The same is true for poles: the "thicker" the pole, the more energy it can return. That's how Olympic pole vaulters like Mondo Duplantis can just rocket off the top of their poles: they're jumping on very very stiff poles for their body weight. For simplicity, you can think of pole stiffness as being synonymous with thickness like a spring.

   The name of the game in pole vault is to grip as high as possible on as stiff a pole as you can. In high school, pole stiffness is indicated by a “weight rating” at the top of the pole. Your job as a coach is to get the athletes to use as "big" a pole as possible, in other words to have them use incrementally longer and stiffer poles as they become better at the event. Again, the bigger the pole, the higher an athlete can jump, but they need to be good enough to use that pole first, otherwise they will fail.
   

   3. Settings

   The three settings in pole vault are step, grip, and standards. Pole vault is a precision event, and each of these three need to be dialed in nearly perfect for a successful jump. Just six inches too far back or forward on the runway with too high of a grip can spell disaster for a pole vaulter.

   The standards are the vertical towers that hold the bar up. These can be moved "shallow" which is slightly forward towards the runway, or "deep" which is backwards away from the runway. The bigger the pole an athlete uses, the more "shallow" their jump will be, and the coach needs to watch for this and adjust the settings accordingly so they don't hit the bar on the way up or the way down.