The Track and Field Performance Podcast
Ross Jeffs: Profiling Sprinters and Jumpers, Preventing Hamstring Injuries, and Coaching in Realtime
1h 10m
In this episode, we sit down with Ross Jeffs — jumps and combined events lead coach at Aspire Academy in Qatar, and former sprints and hurdles coach with experience across the UK, Netherlands, and now the Middle East.
Ross brings a deeply curious and evidence-informed approach to coaching, shaped in part by his own experiences as an athlete, working directly with coaches like Jonas Dodoo, and much more. This conversation gets into the weeds on athlete profiling, monitoring, injury prevention, and the technical nuances of the triple jump.
Timestamped Topics
- 0:00 – Introduction & Ross's coaching journey from Jersey to London to Rotterdam to Aspire Academy in Qatar
- 3:30 – Categorizing athletes: concentric, elastic, and metabolic types across sprinting and the jumps
- 7:14 – The metabolic athlete — backside mechanics, rhythm, and why front side cues can backfire for certain athletes
- 12:19 – Can athletes shift along the continuum? The risks of overwriting an athlete's natural movement solution
- 12:49 – Force plate monitoring: why relative peak power output from a shallow CMJ has become Ross's most sensitive tool for fatigue and performance prediction
- 16:09 – How to execute the shallow CMJ correctly and why it sits between a traditional CMJ and a reactive strength test
- 19:16 – Hamstring injury management in triple jumpers: why Ross overhauled his approach after two grade 3 injuries and what he does differently now
- 23:04 – Why Nordics and direct eccentric loading may be adding to the problem rather than solving it in-season
- 27:19 – Triple jump influences: Paul Weston, Keith Hurston, Jeremy Fisher, Randy Huntington, and lessons from Cuban and Eastern European methodology
- 31:03 – The Cuban jump system: 800 contacts in a single GPP session and what modern coaches can learn from it
- 37:40 – Structuring plyometric progressions from sand to grass to track across the training year
- 43:03 – When to individualize: moving from general bounding skills to athlete-specific phase work closer to competition
- 46:03 – Key differences between long jump and triple jump takeoff: why the triple jump is flat until the hop-to-step transition
- 47:45 – The role of the free leg and why displacing well at takeoff without a strong free leg recovery creates a different problem
- 49:41 – Pelvic posture on the runway and its influence on phase mechanics and lower back health
- 53:18 – Solving over-rotation at landing: why blocking is often misunderstood and can make things worse
- 59:54 – Managing fouling athletes: a sensory-based approach to steering, walking takeoff drills, and why it's a skill acquisition problem not a psychological one
- 1:07:47 – Where to find Ross: Coach Ross Jeffs on Instagram