powerplant42 wrote: He doesn't 'pike' like you do after the swing, because he's already upside down. You get into the dreaded V position, where you need to be in I position, driving your shoulders down and your hips up... 'shooting', as KB would put it. Remember, when the pole is at its maximum bend, you should be more or less upside down.
PP’s main point here is that you’re stuck in the “V” position – your hips are way too low after your swing, even tho your feet are quite high. That’s even worse than a “tuck/shoot” position, because at least tuck/shooters have their hips up higher, and are ready to “shoot”.
I have to be careful with the word “shoot” here, because my usage of the word (derived from back in the 1970s) isn’t the same as “shoot” in the tuck/shoot sense. I apologize for this confusion in terminology, but it’s so ingrained in my thinking that I find it hard to express myself without talking about “shooting”.
So my “shooting” is in the sense of a “shoot to a handstand” on a highbar – in a continuous chain from the swing. It has very little in common to a tuck/shoot. I didn’t even know what that was back in my day!
Take a look at Post #4 and #5 on the Bryde Bend thread here:
http://polevaultpower.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=15483You will see that my hips are fairly high in relation to my CoG (Center of Gravity). Compare this to your “V” position, and you may see why you’re “stuck” in the “V”. YOUR CoG is right in the crotch of your “V” – which is right above YOUR crotch! And your hips aren’t moving very fast at all. Once you get stuck there, it’s hard to recover, because you’ve already let the pole get ahead of you.
As PP inferred, in my model (a variant of the Petrov model) I’ve already inverted, and I’m well ahead of the pole (i.e. I haven’t let the recoil of the pole get ahead of me). So the pole can recoil all it wants, and by being in control of the situation (as per the pic), I’m able to not only “ride” the natural recoil of the pole, but keep adding additional energy into it – by straightening into the “I” position. This ACCELERATES my ascent skywards. This is what I call “shooting”, just like shooting to a handstand on a highbar. Notice that this isn’t a perfect “I” position YET, as PP implies. Rather, it’s moving rapidly TOWARDS the “I” position.
I think where PP slightly misled you is that he said that you should be almost inverted at max pole bend – as you pass the chord. That’s not true. Instead, I would explain it this way (and as I commonly do, I ask you to relate it to similar drills on the highbar) …
When you Whip thru the bottom of your swing (just before you pass the chord of the pole), your trail leg should be swinging/hinging so quickly that you’ll feel a “whipping” sensation at the bottom of your swing. Just before this maximum Whip point, your trail leg is swinging long its fastest. Just after this max Whip point, your trail leg kind of “snaps” or “whips” in time with the pole (or highbar), such that it “pops” your entire body TOWARDS an upside down position (but not quite as quickly as PP was saying. However, he did say “more or less”).
Try this on the highbar, before you try it on the pole. Just after the Whip, do you feel your body become somewhat weightless? “More or less” weightless? This is the sensation I’m talking about, and I think it’s also what PP was thinking about. When your body is “weightless”, that’s the time to quickly get inverted – by hanging back with your shoulders whilst your hips and legs rise. If the swing is done correctly (and your swing is getting there, 6P), then you’ll feel this sensation.
So back to what PP was saying, it’s not that you’re already inverted, it’s just that your body has become “more or less” weightless and you’re able to easily rotate to an inverted position without a lot of resistance from your body weight. The pic you see of me on Post #5 is the outcome of my quick swing/hinge/whip/snap.
And the way you need to look at the pic in Post #5 isn’t that I’m “stuck” in this position. Instead, my hips are rapidly rising, and this is just a snapshot in the middle of this rapid rising of the hips. If this was video and we stopped it frame-by-frame, you’d see that my hips are quickly and constantly rising, right thru to the pic in Post #6.
Now to compare that to you being stuck in the “V”, if we looked at your vid frame-by-frame, we’d see that you’re stuck in that “V” for quite a few frames – too many frames. Actually, NONE of my frames would ever show me in a “V”. My hips are bent to their max in Post #5.
Do you see now? I’m sure that PP had this in mind in his post above – he just didn’t explain it as thoroughly as I’ve just done.
And to correct you on Brian and his vid, Brian is NOT a tuck/shooter! He gets upside down very early, and keeps his hips moving. I saw him do this at the Alki Beach Vault, and I’ve watched his vids too, so please don’t think he tucks/shoots. He swings to an invert in a continuous chain – like Bubka.
Also like Bubka, Brian does a “slink” to get upside down, but that’s a fairly minor style difference. The main point is that he inverts early – same as me. Brian’s hips start out fairly low, but he slinks out of it, whereas your “V” position is so extreme that it’s hard to recover.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Slinky Toy, you can see it in action here:
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/ss/Physics_Illustr.htmI use the word “slink” in this context – the context of how the curvature of the back “slinks” (curls) up from the hips to the shoulders, as the vaulter extends up the pole. Bubka does it on some of his bad vaults. Brian Mondschein does it regularly. So does Lukyanenko.
Having said all that, don’t expect to correct just this one fault. Trace it back to the takeoff and swing. Get that going even better than it is now, and the Whip/Extend part of your vault will start happening quite well – even without you realizing it much!
If you fix the bottom half of your vault, the top half will fix itself! In other words, if you Whip to this weightless feeling I speak of, the rest of you vault will be very, very easy. There will be no struggle to muscle your way out of the “V”.
If anything above is too detailed or too technical, I apologize. I just get the feeling that you study the vault quite closely, so you can handle all the detail. Let me know if I’ve confused you with any of it.
Kirk Bryde
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. thanks for all the help {nods}. -6P