Jumps Mandating the Program - Coach Kyle Jacksic

There always seems to be a ton of conversations in the performance field revolving around Key Performance Indicators (KPIs–yes, I too struggled to figure out what it stood for for a long time…). Tracking KPIs is certainly important, but what you are doing with them should be more important in the program.

I struggled for a long time deciding what KPIs I would track on a consistent basis in my program. I first started with trying to track everything I could, but at the high school level ran into a load of speed bumps that limited my focus to be anywhere else but right there with the clipboard or the device in use. Then I went to the total opposite side of the spectrum: I’m going to track almost nothing and just go out on the floor and coach. Neither of those options ever really returned anything to me. 

So, the more I coached and the more I trained myself (you can be your own guinea pig, too), I realized what really mattered to me in our program. I wanted my athletes to be explosive, be good movers in space, withstand hits, run fast, recover well, and most importantly feel confident. 

I then had to take those ‘focuses’ and turn them into tangible evidence. But I took a lean back in the chair and thought about everything that can go wrong; I was at the largest high school in the state at the time, and only saw the majority of my athletes for 90 minutes a week. How was I going to gain actionable data to help me in dictating what I was doing with the athletes?

I had to keep things simple. I had to make sure they were repeatable. I had to make sure I could lean on sport coaches, interns, or fellow teammates to track the data properly. 

I had to make sure they mattered to the kids and mattered to me. 

Because of the belief system that I came to know, jumping in a lot of different variations and landing in even more ways was already rooted throughout my program. So, I wanted to figure out which ones to track and how my program was going to be dictated by it. 

The first jump KPI that I was drawn to was the standing countermovement vertical jump (CMJ). There were many ways to test it, and with my beliefs rooted in speed training, it was something I thought we could handle that would show us data that we wanted to see. Establishing the importance of this test was something our student-athletes were drawn to because it creates instant competition and intent when their numbers are getting yelled out. 

We saw great gains right off the bat in our jump testing which let me check the box of wanting our athletes to be more explosive. We had numerous athletes see multiple inches of growth early on. We saw trends over time that as students got older their verticals would uptick over time which showed a sense of long term development. But it also led me to how we can adapt our program to what the vertical is telling us?

That led us to start testing the non-counter movement vertical jump (Non-CMJ). We started to compare the CMJ data to the Non-CMJ which started to categorize our student-athletes into three divisions: 

1. Athletes who had similar Non-CMJ and CMJ numbers (within 10%).
2. Athletes who had 10% or higher Non-CMJs. 
3. Athletes who had 10% or higher CMJs.

The athletes with similar numbers gave us the basic answer: they’re balanced. Balanced to me shows that the athlete can do similar things along the Force-Velocity Curve (FVC) without much wavering. These athletes were found to adapt to the different speeds, pace, constraints, and exposures of game play easier than most.

Those athletes with 10% or higher Non-CMJs came back with better strength and force numbers than those athletes in other categories. This showed me that these specific athletes needed greater amounts of exposure to faster speeds and reactiveness in their programs to go back towards balance. We started to implement more exercises that were band resisted and band accelerated to begin to challenge their ability to utilize the stretch shortening cycle. I was elated that these athletes would eventually develop more of a ‘punch’ to their bodies than the slower ‘push’ that they were at before. 

Finally, those with 10% or higher CMJs showed the opposite: the need for larger focuses on strength training within the program. A large majority of these athletes were younger than those in other categories, which seemed to make a lot of sense, especially on the male side. This let us start to understand what movements and focuses were needed earlier on in their careers to bring them towards better balance later on. This let us design our ‘on-boarding’ program to really focus on eccentric and isometric training, developing healthy habits in movement quality, bigger and more stable muscles, and showing large gains in overall strength numbers. 

Finally, once we brought Output into our program, the 10-5 Test became a major KPI that helped boil down our program to close to a singular metric while also being able to gain insight into the readiness of the athlete. 

A lot of athletics involves performing then reperforming movement over and over again throughout. With the goal of making our athletes good movers in space and being explosive, we found that the 10-5 Test through our Output monitors let us see if we were checking a multitude of boxes in our programming concepts. Alongside that, if an athlete was outside the normal range for themselves, it would ping us as a staff which lead to constructive conversations with the specific athlete to find a root cause of why they were not performing at their normal level. 

We will dive deeper into KPI tracking, as well as more specifics on the 10-5 test, in the near future. If you want to gain some insight into using the 10-5 in your program, be sure to check out this video from Damien here at Output Sports.