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There's no reason for you to try to gain or lose weight. If you train well, the weight will take care of itself.

You should be able to clear 9-10 just fine by the end of outdoor. Distance spikes are fine for vault at these heights.

If you want to get a head start, work on carrying and planting the pole... That is the major challenge for beginners.

When you say "high bar (sometimes)" what does that mean? How often can you be on the bar?

He is driving the hips BACKWARDS! HE IS LITERALLY GOING BACKWARDS ON THE POLE!

You've got yourself a pretty enviable situation there...

Alan Launder (altius on this board) has a book called Beginner to Bubka: and Isinbayeva Too! that is far and away the best resource for you to look into. Get the DVD too...

You can buy it in the "Store" section of this website.

DJ, can you explain what you mean by that? At this point in my career, I'd do almost anything to take pressure off my hamstrings...

I've been dealing with something similar for over 4 years now... Get rid of it now while its still fresh! In addition to the previous comments, I recommend seeing a massage therapist. If you don't have the money for that, find a lacrosse ball and a hard surface to penetrate into the tissue to break ...

I think you are right! It should be more about increasing stride frequency and getting the feet down in time to get the hands ready to go STRAIGHT up.

I did see the knee dropping on one of them... the rest did look good though. Yeah I would say that soft poles and short runs are best done for length rather than height because of the time... Stiff poling for height from a short run is beneficial though. I'll be looking for film of your practice and...

After watching again it looks like it's really only a big problem on one or maybe two of the jumps, but it seems it's either that or a flat-spin off the pole... the latter is always my problem with these. I think time's got a lot to do with it, definitely... or rather that the feeling is that you ha...

Really good jumps! Everything is solid until the trail leg hits the chord... Then it looks like there's a bit of a tuck going on. Is that the sense you get?

If you are really serious about your run, it would pay off to take fall and do other kinds of running and training instead of cross country. Those distances over and over again can really mess with both your muscle type AND with your stride. Some good leg plyometrics could help, as might deadlifts, ...