Here’s a scene every pole vault coach knows. Practice starts, everybody warms up, and within twenty minutes the whole session has quietly turned into one question: how high can we put the grip today? Somebody moves up a pole. Somebody else moves up two. Everyone leaves feeling like they worked hard.
And nobody got better.
Apex Vaulting names this trap about as well as it can be named — practice, they write, “ends up just becoming a game of how high can we raise the grip and what’s the biggest pole we can get on.” If that sounds a little too familiar, you’re in good company. It’s the single most common way a pole vault practice goes sideways, and the fix isn’t working harder. It’s building the week with some actual intent behind it.
Let’s talk about what that looks like.
Not Every Practice Should Look the Same
The biggest upgrade most programs can make is simple: stop running the same practice every day. Apex Vaulting breaks vault sessions into three types, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it:
| Day type | What it looks like | The point |
|---|---|---|
| Small / drill day | Drill work, finishing with roughly 3–5 full jumps | Learning a skill |
| Medium day | A few drills, progressing to 4–6 left full approaches | Carrying the skill into a jump |
| Big / long-run day | Drills starting from 3 lefts, working out to longer approaches | Expressing it at speed |
The structure matters because each day is answering a different question. Small days ask can you do the movement at all? Big days ask can you still do it when you’re flying? Those are not the same question, and you cannot answer the second one honestly if you never spend time on the first.
Notice something about that table, too: even the drill day ends with full jumps. This isn’t a case for abandoning the runway. It’s a case for earning it.
Drill Days Are for Learning, Not for Numbers
If there’s one line from this whole post worth taping inside your pole bag, it’s this one from Apex: “Drill days are about learning a skill. That is best done through drills, not full jumps.”
Full jumps are a test. They’re wonderful, they’re the reason we all do this, and they are a terrible place to learn something new. Everything happens too fast. The athlete is managing speed, plant timing, takeoff, swing, and a crossbar all at once — and under that much load, nobody is absorbing a new motor pattern. They’re surviving.
Drills strip the chaos out so the athlete can actually feel the position. And here’s the part that makes this more than a nice theory: drills reveal what full jumps hide. Apex’s developmental framework describes vaulters who look controlled on full jumps but who “still struggle with drills that address phases and don’t include the whole jump.” Read that twice. An athlete can look pretty good on the runway and still not own the underlying skill — speed and athleticism paper over a lot. The drill is where the truth lives.
One more piece of practical sequencing from the same source: when you pick a drill for a medium day, it “should be a drill that the athlete did on their drill day.” Don’t introduce new material on a day you intend to jump. Reinforce, then express.
Build the Season From Short to Long
Most coaches build a season by adding height. A better model adds distance and angle first.
Apex recommends starting the season “closer on the runway on all three types of practice and also doing drills for distance. As the season progresses the approaches should get longer.” Short approaches early. Drills aimed horizontally. Then, week by week, let it stretch out.
Why horizontal first? Because of a spectrum they describe nicely: “Between drills done for distance (horizontally) and full jumps (jumps done for height/vertically) you have a spectrum of angles.” Your whole season lives on that spectrum. You’re not flipping a switch from “drills” to “vaulting” in March — you’re slowly rotating the athlete’s effort from out toward up, and every week sits somewhere on that dial.
This is also, bluntly, the safest way to build. Short runs and flat angles are forgiving. Long runs and high grips are not.
The Other 80 Percent
Here’s where a lot of high school programs leave the most on the table. Coach Karlie Place puts a number on it that stops people cold: “You wear your spikes maybe 20% of practice. The other 80% is drills, plyos, sprint warmups, lifting, and recovery jogs.”
Twenty percent. If you only count practice as the part where you’re jumping, you’re ignoring four-fifths of the work that determines how high you jump.
And that 80% has a clear priority inside it. Team Hoot, whose general prep programming is built around developing “power, balance, strength, coordination, general fitness and most importantly, speed,” states the case in six words: “The easiest way to vault higher is by getting faster.” Their general prep plan is explicitly designed for the window when an athlete has extended time to train without weekly competition — because that’s when real strength and speed adaptations actually happen.
So build your week to protect that. A few honest suggestions:
- Sprint work is vault work. It isn’t a warmup for the real session — on many days it is the session.
- Lift on a plan, not a vibe. Place’s guidance for beginners is to “learn how to lift” and follow coach-designed offseason and in-season protocols.
- Core after jumping. Place recommends core work following jump sessions to build the specific strength inversion demands.
- Protect recovery days. Adaptation happens between sessions, not during them.
The Gear That Makes Good Practice Possible
You don’t need much to run a real practice, but a few items punch far above their weight.
A rigid practice pole changes what a beginner can do safely. Our TetonVault Kids Practice Pole is built for exactly the drill-day work described above — approach runs, plant mechanics, pop-ups and grass vaults — where the goal is the movement pattern, not height. It is intentionally not designed to bend, carries a firm 150 lb athlete weight limit, and must never be used for real vaulting into a pit. Those aren’t suggestions; read the safety notes before you order.
The other one is almost embarrassingly cheap for what it does. The Gill Elastic Krossband ($34) is an elastic training crossbar with foam sections that replicate a real bar’s profile. It stretches instead of falling, so there’s no resetting between attempts — and more importantly, it removes the sting that quietly teaches young athletes to steer away from the bar. For a program trying to run high-rep, confidence-building practices, it’s the best thirty-four dollars in the event.
When it’s time for real poles, we carry all three major lines side by side — UST-ESSX (Launch from $378, Recoil from $599), Gill Pacer (Pacer One from $405), and FiberSport (non-carbon training poles from $460, USA Carbon Plus from $675). Different bend feels, different price points, same job: give your athlete a pole appropriate to where they are right now. Browse the full lineup at /shop?category=poles.
Put It Together
Good practice isn’t complicated. It’s just deliberate.
Pick a purpose for each day before you walk onto the runway. Let drill days be about learning, with a handful of full jumps at the end. Let medium days rehearse what you already drilled. Save the long runs and the big poles for the days you’ve earned them. Start the season short and flat, and let it grow. And remember that most of the work that raises your bar happens when your spikes are still in the bag.
Do that for a season and the grip goes up on its own — because you built a vaulter, not because you dared one.
Need help building it out? Coach Dopp has spent years running these sessions with high school athletes in East Idaho, and he’s happy to talk through your program’s practice structure or help you pick the right poles for the athletes you actually have. Get in touch, or shop the full TetonVault lineup and get your program equipped for a season that counts.
