Fitting vaulting into adult life

[jowens102]

Hello All,

I suspect there are a considerable amount of people in my situation, and we could help each other out. In short, I vaulted in college and it was the primary focus of my life for four years. Although I wasn't great, I loved everything about it, the highs and the lows. I used to get up at 4 am, 6 days a week during my summer breaks to lift, before landscaping for 13 hours. Now I am 30, I have a great life, but I have noticed recently that there is a distinct void left from a lack of vaulting. About 3 months ago I started getting back to the gym on a regular basis, and have been doing track workouts and plyo's for the past 2 months or so. I finally feel like I've gotten rid of the cobwebs and rickety joints, and am getting back in good enough shape to vault. I also find myself watching youtube videos of vaulters and reading this forum pretty much every night before I fall asleep.

Now that the background out of the way, my impetus for writing this post is to try to start a conversation for people in my situation, to trade training advice (as it is significantly different than it was in college in many ways), figure out how to fit it in a "regular" life, motivate, and maybe try to get some training partners. Another reason is that it turns out vaulting can be pretty expensive once you get out of the auspices of a college athletic facility. I have no poles (or spare cash to buy a set), there used to be a vaulting facility near me, but I remember that it was pretty expensive (although I do understand why the costs are high), and can no longer find it online. I guess to start things off, I would appreciate any feedback on how to keep the costs as low as possible, I used to know of some pole sharing programs (HIP) and wonder if they are still running, how they work, etc. Also, I live in southern NJ (Williamstown) and wonder if there are any pits around (backyard or otherwise) that are open to a friendly face, maybe for upkeep costs or work (or beer). I would love to start competing again at some point, but obviously need to get in a good bit of drill/vault time on a pit. Finally, it would be cool to share training programs or exercises we are doing. I hope there are others out there who can commiserate and we can start a smaller community here, as I don't see that there currently is one. Thanks a lot, I appreciate any feedback.

Jake

[IAmTheWalrus]

Hey Jake,

First, best of luck to you. Vaulting after college can be a very rewarding, but also very difficult, experience.

I have had some personal success vaulting after college, at least enough to keep me coming back for another year, haha. I was a decent college vaulter (4.65m) but after I graduated I kept training and worked as a coach for a local university after moving to MD. I found the freedom to really focus on my particular needs, both technically and physically, to be very liberating. I also didn't have the pressure of needing to compete every weekend, so I was able to train for several weeks only focusing on one or two things, instead of always trying to be ready for a competition. I ended up also stripping out a lot of the general conditioning type workouts from my training program, and really focusing on what I needed for speed and explosiveness. My usual lifting sessions consisted of the squat with some plyos mixed in, and my track workouts usually consisted of different variations of short sprints. I ended up increasing my PR to 5.06m, and I still have some low hanging fruit to address that should allow me to crack the 5.20 barrier next year.

With that as my background, here is my advice to you.

1) Either join a club (NJ has a lot of them) or volunteer at a HS/college that will let you use their pits/equipment

2) Evaluate yourself, both mentally and physically, to determine what you need to address from training, and what kinds of training you can do well and on your own. Where can you push yourself?

3) Determine the minimum that you need to do on a particular day or week, and then do it. For me, there are some days where all I do is squat, because that's all I had time for, and others where I will workout for 2 hours. It's easy to get intimidated by training for the vault, especially if you read this forum a lot, because there are so many things that you can do. Basically it all boils down to deciding what is most important, and then making sure that you work hard when you do that.