Here’s a scenario every vaulter in Idaho knows by heart: it’s October, the pit is covered (or packed away, or belongs to a school that isn’t yours), the weather has turned, and your next real competition is months out. So you… what? Wait? Scroll vault videos and feel bad?
Absolutely not. The off-season is the single best window you get all year, and the surprising part is that most of the work that makes you a better vaulter doesn’t require a pit at all. Coaches who understand this show up to indoor season with athletes who run better, plant better and are strong enough to actually do what their technique is asking of them. Coaches who don’t spend the whole season managing the same problem over and over.
Let’s talk about what you can actually do between now and your first meet.
Why Fall Is the Only Real Window You Get
Apex Vaulting makes this point about as bluntly as it can be made: during winter and spring it’s difficult to make major technical or physical changes because you’re competing, and summer gets eaten by vacations, beach vaults and athletes leaving early for college. Fall is when everyone’s back on a normal schedule with few or no competitions on the calendar.
Their framing is the one we steal every year at practice: fix it or live with it. If a vaulter has a flat takeoff and is always under, that is very hard to change during indoor season while they’re trying to compete. Fall is the chance to drill it, break it and rebuild it — because right now, nobody cares if you’re sore on Saturday.
The same source points to a line from Alan Launder’s Beginner to Bubka that’s worth taping to your weight room wall: “What is technically desirable must be physically possible.” Translation: if an athlete keeps failing at a technical model, sometimes the fix isn’t another cue. It’s that they aren’t strong enough yet. Fall is when you go fix that.
Pole Runs: The Drill That Doesn’t Need a Pit
If you take one thing from this post, take this one.
Apex Vaulting notes that many running and planting drills can be done entirely off the pit — you do not have to jump to work on pole vaulting. Standing and walking plant drills are useful. Pole runs can be done in a gym or outside on grass. Their observation is that a lot of coaches complain about their athletes’ approach and then rarely actually do pole runs.
And then there’s the frequency argument, which is the part that changed how we structure our own weeks. Apex reports that their athletes do 3–5 pole runs at every single practice, which adds up to roughly 390–660 pole runs across a year. Their point isn’t the number itself — it’s that frequency beats volume. A drill done 50 times in one session goes stale (reps get worse past a certain point), while the same drill done a handful of times, constantly, over months, is what actually builds the skill.
So a no-pit fall week can look like:
- 3–5 pole runs, every session, on grass or in the gym
- Standing and walking plant drills — no approach, no jump, just the movement
- Overhead carry work, which Apex specifically recommends when jumping up is the problem, because removing the plant lets the athlete focus on driving up
- Short-approach pop-ups and takeoff isolation on the days you do have a surface
You don’t need a pit for a single one of those.
Drill With a Purpose, Not a Tradition
One of the sharper things in the Apex material is the reminder that every mistake an athlete shows you is a drill waiting to happen. Full jumps won’t fix plant timing — you have to isolate the skill. If jumping up is the issue, cut the plant out of the drill entirely.
They organize this around the five components of the vault:
| # | Component | Can you train it without a pit? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pole carry | Yes — grass, gym, hallway |
| 2 | Run | Yes — pole runs anywhere |
| 3 | Plant | Yes — standing and walking plant drills |
| 4 | Take off | Partly — short approach, pop-ups |
| 5 | Off the ground | Limited — needs a landing surface |
Four out of five. That’s your fall.
Apex also recommends building a schedule that alternates big days (longer approaches, full jumps) with drill days (off-the-pit drills and short-approach work). The drill days keep the central nervous system recovered between the heavy sessions and let you attack the weaknesses the big days exposed. If you don’t have pit access at all right now, you’re just running an extended block of drill days — which is a completely legitimate training phase, not a consolation prize.
One caution from the same source, and it might annoy some people: gymnastics is not the automatic answer. Apex argues that swings on a high bar, pull-overs and giants have real carryover, but front rolls and tumbling largely don’t, because we don’t do those movements in the vault. The reason so many gymnasts succeed at vault, in their view, isn’t mystical body awareness — it’s that gymnasts arrive with the upper body strength that high school track programs usually never build. Which brings us to the weight room.
Build the Strength Your Technique Is Asking For
Apex’s guidance for preseason is to build GPP (general physical preparedness) first: push-ups, pull-ups, squats, deadlift variations, goblet squats, kettlebell swings, leg lifts. High volume, low intensity — for a lot of beginners, that means bodyweight. The regressions and progressions matter, because athletes who can feel success keep making progress, whereas athletes who just keep failing a gymnastics move they aren’t strong enough for don’t.
Then target the weakness:
- Can’t hit runway speed, can’t jump up? → lower body focus
- Can’t invert, no push off the top of the grip? → upper body focus
They also give a concrete upper-body benchmark that’s easy to chase over a fall: working up to a pull-up with 50% of bodyweight added for one rep — so a 150 lb athlete doing a pull-up with 75 lb around the waist. Their claim is that lat strength at that level dramatically improves pull-overs and increases push-off in the vault. And notably: gymnastics moves like pull-overs don’t build that strength — they’re testers that reveal whether you already have it.
On how to organize the whole thing, Apex describes following a linear periodization model — starting a season at low intensity and high volume (5 sets of 8–12 reps at 60–75% of 1RM on core lifts) and ending it at high intensity and low volume (5 sets of 2–4 reps, even singles, at 95%+ of 1RM). They’re clear that a conjugate approach may be just as good or better; that’s simply what their program runs. Either way, the principle is that there’s a plan and the plan changes across the year.
And please hear the headline of their “no magic bullets” piece: progress is gradual, it comes from technique + physical training + periodization working together, and no single drill or cue is going to add several feet to your PR. Fall is where you bank the boring work.
Keep a Record — Your Future Self Will Thank You
Here’s a low-effort, high-return habit for an off-season: write it down. iPoleVault makes the case that pole vault is unusually technical — pole stats, steps, grip, standards, weather, runway conditions — and those details are genuinely hard to remember months later. Many elite vaulters and coaches keep written notes on each vault, and reviewing them chronologically lets you see patterns, growth and mistakes over time.
In a fall block with no meets, a notebook is how you prove to yourself that something is changing. Log your pole runs. Log your lifts. Log what the plant felt like. When indoor rolls around and you’re deciding whether to grip up, you’ll have actual evidence instead of a vibe.
The Gear That Makes a Pitless Fall Work
You don’t need much, but a few things earn their keep when you’re doing hundreds of pole runs on grass, turf and gym floors instead of a runway:
| Item | Why it matters in the off-season | Price at TetonVault |
|---|---|---|
| Pole tips | Pole runs on concrete, gym floors and frozen ground chew through tips fast. FiberSport tips come in 7 sizes and fit virtually all brands. | FiberSport $29.95–$39.95; UST-ESSX $25–$35 |
| Pole guards | Protect the lower shaft where it grinds on every plant — cheap insurance on an expensive pole. | UST-ESSX $25; TetonVault custom (your colors and logo) $15 each |
| Cone markers | Marks, steps, footwork grids, drill lanes. 2” discs for footwork, 12–18” cones when it needs to be seen across a field. | $1.50–$14 |
| Step hurdles | 6”, 12” and 18” for footwork ladders and acceleration work — light enough to carry a full set to the infield. | $24–$34 |
| Athlete chalk | Grip doesn’t stop mattering just because it’s 40 degrees. 8 oz shaker bottle. | $24.95 |
If you’re building out a program’s off-season setup, a training pole is worth a real look too. TetonVault’s Kids Practice Pole is a rigid drill pole built specifically for plant mechanics, approach work, pop-ups and grass vaults — it does not bend, it is never for real vaulting, it carries a hard 150 lb athlete weight limit, and it requires qualified coach supervision. Used correctly, it lets young athletes bank hundreds of reps without putting wear on a competition pole.
Speaking of which — if fall is when you figure out that an athlete has outgrown their pole, this is also the ideal time to order rather than scrambling in January. Entry-level options across all three lines we carry: the UST-ESSX Launch ($378–$409), the Gill Pacer One ($405–$570), and the FiberSport Non-Carbon Training Pole ($460–$545), which ships with a BlueCam tip and a 1-year warranty. Browse everything at /shop?category=poles.
Show Up in January Like You Never Left
The vaulters who jump big indoors aren’t the ones who found a secret pit in November. They’re the ones who ran 400 pole runs, got their pull-up strong enough to matter, drilled the plant until it stopped being a decision, and wrote all of it down.
You don’t need a pit to do any of that. You need a pole, some grass, a plan and a fall.
Need help building that plan — or figuring out which pole your athlete should be on when the season starts? Get in touch with Coach Dopp. TetonVault is based in Idaho Falls, we coach this event every day, and we’d rather help you set up a good off-season than sell you something you don’t need. Ready to gear up? Head to the shop.
