Forge

At the end of the 1950s, a Soviet track coach and some students from an aeronautical engineering institute worked out that if you want to jump higher, the useful thing to practise might be landing.

The coach was Yuri Verkhoshansky, born in Moscow in 1928. He had come into sport in the 1950s coaching track and field, mainly sprints and the high jump, which is a relevant detail: the problem he was trying to solve was a practical one belonging to specific athletes he was standing next to.

The problem was this. Jumpers need to produce enormous force in a very short time. The contact between foot and ground in a running jump lasts a fraction of a second. Conventional strength training, lifting a heavy thing slowly, builds the ability to produce large force over a long time, which is a genuinely different capacity. You can make an athlete much stronger in the gym and watch their jump not improve at all, and coaches had been watching exactly that for decades.

So what trains the short, violent, involuntary end of the spectrum?

The answer they arrived at, working with the engineering students, was the depth jump. Step off a raised platform, drop, land, and rebound upward immediately.

The scenes between are imagined: the gymnasium, the boxes at various heights, young jumpers being asked to do something that looks less like training than like a dare. What is on the record is the mechanism, and the mechanism is why this episode exists.

When you land from a drop, the muscles of the leg are stretched forcibly and involuntarily. You do not choose it. Gravity and your own mass impose an eccentric contraction on you at a speed you could not produce voluntarily, and the nervous system responds with a reflexive, powerful concentric contraction to stop you collapsing. If you time an upward jump into that moment, you are riding a contraction far more forceful than anything you could initiate on purpose.

That is the whole idea, and it is genuinely clever. Ordinary training asks the body to produce effort. This asks physics to produce the effort and trains the body to survive and redirect it.

Verkhoshansky published his first research on it in 1964, having worked on it for some years before that as part of his post-doctoral work. Over the following decades he produced a substantial body of theory, including work on how to sequence special strength training and on the delayed effects of concentrated loading, and he became one of the most influential sports scientists of the twentieth century. He died in Rome on the twenty-sixth of June 2010, aged eighty-two.

I want to establish two things before we go further, because both get confused constantly.

First, this is the most advanced thing in this entire volume. Every other season here can be started by anybody. Standing, tai chi, foot work, bodyweight progressions: begin where you are, go slowly, nothing bad happens. This one is different in kind. You are deliberately generating large impact forces and asking tissue to absorb them, and the tissue in question needs to already be capable of it. This is the last thing you add, not the first.

Second, Verkhoshansky knew that, and spent a great deal of his career saying so, and was largely ignored on the point once his ideas travelled. The story of how a carefully specified method for elite jumpers became a warm-up exercise in general fitness classes is most of this season.

There is a detail I keep coming back to.

He developed it with engineering students. Not physiologists. People who thought in terms of loads, materials, and forces, and who would look at a human leg absorbing a landing and see a structure managing an impulse.

That framing runs all the way through the method and it is why it works. The body, on landing, is a spring being loaded. The question is only how much load, from what height, how often, and with what capacity to absorb it.

Get any of those wrong and the spring is a shin.

Next episode: why he refused to call it what everyone else calls it.