Friday Fitness - Jump Testing

We like jumping high

The theme of spring here at SmarterVolley is cross-training grab bag. On Tuesdays I’ll address some specific pieces of coaching in practice or matches. On Sunday I’ll do a beach volleyball post, similar to the Beach Week posts I’ve done in the past. And on Fridays I’ll be posting some takes on the topic which you might broadly call Strength and Conditioning.

First, a short rant on why “Strength and Conditioning” is a terrible term:

1. Strength isn’t necessarily bad for volleyball players, but it's not a top priority. Especially strength as applied in traditional weight-room metrics.

2. Conditioning outside of game play is almost completely useless for volleyball players.

Here are the physical qualities that do matter for volleyball players:

Height
Arm Length
Speed
Reactivity
Power
Stability
Quickness
Visual Acuity
Soft-tissue Quality

What should strength and conditioning coaches call themselves instead? I’m arguing to bring back the term fitness and start calling themselves Fitness Coaches.

Does the term fitness kind of sound like 80s aerobic videos or bring back memories of PE class? Maybe. But the etymology of the word fitness means something like “suited for the circumstances,” and the fitness was probably used in an evolutionary context before it was used in a training context. And I like the evolutionary context.

What do you think of in terms of evolution? Survival of the Fittest.

What helps you not only survive but dominate a volleyball match? Skill, size, and power… probably in that order. Conditioning is close to irrelevant because teams tend to all have similar levels of conditioning as it is taken care of by practice play. (Here’s a test: find me an NCAA team with a significant positive difference in point differential 2 years in a row between Set 1 and Set 3 and link it to their conditioning program.)¹

When NCAA coaches recruit, they look for tall athletes who move well and can apply explosive power. In an evolutionary sense, the athletes who are not fit for high-level volleyball get weeded out. The short ones get dropped unless they compensate with incredible levels of skill and/or incredible levels of power. The slow ones get dropped unless they are very tall and/or very skilled. And the unskilled ones can hang around as long as they have enough of an advantage in size and/or power.

I’m kind of mushing speed and power together a little bit, although there’s some differences between the two. But what I’m trying to do is set up a bit of a strawman to knock down here. To make a somewhat unfair caricature of NCAA volleyball programs, what I see is:

The coaches spend all their time recruit fast and explosive athletes. Then when the players arrive, they are handed off to strength coaches where they bulk up while being tested as or more frequently on conditioning tests with little relevance to volleyball as they are tested on their jumping ability - the one thing which the coaches covet over all else. Most NCAA coaches can tell you their sideout % by rotation and whether that’s improved and where their weak points are but very few can tell you off the top of their head whether their players jump better or not over the course of their 4 years.

There’s some exceptions to this of course. But if I had to paint NCAA volleyball with a broad brush, that’s how I would do it.

What Gets Measured Improves (Maybe)

As volleyball coaches, we like jumpers. We want the high-flyers and let’s be honest, we’ve all made a comment or two after a loss about how the other team was just, “more physical than us,” so hey, I coached them up but there really wasn’t anything else I could do.

And hey, there’s some truth to that. The bottom line is that the height at which you attack and block makes a big difference. And it’s not just the pure attacking height, but the ability to jump is also a decent proxy for the ability to explode laterally for a ball or to move quickly to cover a ball or to do any of the 1000 other things our players need to do on the court.

It’s not easy to improve an athlete’s ability to jump. Then, again, it’s not easy to make players better passers either. Most coaches recognize that part of the process for improving an athletes skill is measurement. At a certain point, we want to know how well an athlete is passing and compare it to previous matches or practices. There’s a motivational aspect to it; athletes tend to push themselves a better harder when they know their performance is being tracked. There’s also a feedback aspect to it. Okay, we tried something, did performance change? Yes? Let’s keep doing it. No? Let’s try something new.

Therefore, if we want our players to jump better, we need to measure how well they are jumping. And we need to do it regularly.

The ideal measurement tool here would directly measure attack height of a ball attacked in a game situation. The combination of camera technology and AI will make that a reality sooner rather than later. It’s already in place in FIVB matches but I haven’t seen any teams applying it in real-time in practice yet. But I’m sure we’re not far from that.

So if we can’t measure real-time, what can we do?

Practical Measurement

There’s 3 main types of jump-testing devices: