The repetition technique — my experience pole vaulting, and what I learned from it.

It all started one day when I went to sports practice.

I noticed an impressive opportunity ahead of me. At that time, it was nothing more than just a dream. I wanted to try pole vaulting. At that time, I only had a rough idea of what that actually means, and I would simply have to mess around and find out. I quickly discovered that the sport involved holding a long, flexible pole on one end and using it to propel one’s body as high as possible over a net. It felt intimidating, but I wanted to try it anyway.

My first week pole vaulting was not all sunshine and roses. I was pulled into the side and forced to vault on the grass, away from my peers. Many novices gave up right here, but I continued. Why, I don’t really know — I just felt like it… I had a good, blind feeling it would result in something good, and I imagined what it would be like if I could actually do it. That kept me going. This thought me a new line of thinking — I just need to keep repeating the same actions over and over and over again.

Basically, all I had to do now was stand on the grass, grab the pole(somewhere in the halfway point), thrust my leg into the ground, and use my form to swing across to the other side. Coach said I would do this for a very long time. I had multiple problems: for starters, my leg began to ache, and I had trouble keeping my pole straight as I swung across. I also had trouble holding on to the pole without my hands getting fatigued. And worst of all, I wasn’t taken seriously by my peers, who were ahead of me at the time — they were already doing it for an entire season before I came in. At that point, all I had to do was continue the same action on repeat, promising myself that somehow continuing to do that will eventually lead me to my result. An entire week flew by like this.

On April 8th, 2024, I finally saw my result.

Just as I was finishing my daily pole vaulting routine that day, Coach asked me if I wanted to try using the ramp. I noticed instantly how doing that routine on the grass for over a week helped me. I had no issues with the form and knew exactly how to swing — I only needed to overcome my fear, which was more of an “upgrade” challenge from what I was previously doing rather than a newbie’s struggle. Most surprising of all, I progressed faster than I expected, simply because I got an idea of a certain action that I needed to perform continuously in order to improve, and I just made it my life during each vault practice to do that action, and the results showed faster than I expected. In fact, when I got to do it on the ramp, it felt really weird since vaulting on the grass had become very comfortable and I was being pushed out of an area of comfort by using the ramp.

Once a certain problem is identified, it is best to isolate the problem, develop a certain repetitive action, and repeat it until it becomes natural.

From there, any next steps will feel more like climbing a staircase rather than struggling one’s way up a steep ladder. While this technique will not work in all situations, it is a great way to learn something that has multiple steps that need to be performed quickly and need to become second nature and the action itself would be the finished puzzle. One only needs to think about performing the larger action rather than thinking about the small, individual steps that have already become mindless. But not all situations meet these criteria, and for these it may be best to approach them more directly, and there are many more situations where this technique is simply too slow for it to offset the benefits it provides. However, pole vaulting is an activity complex enough to benefit from this technique, and is an activity that needs extreme practice to master. For such activities, this process is the way to go in order to improve, as I have learned through my experience trying to pole vault. I do understand that even though I can now vault on the ramp, I have just begun what will be a long staircase up to actually being able to compete with other pole vaulting teams. I plan to continue using this technique in order to continue my pole vaulting journey and further my abilities.

Thank you for reading this blog.

-Vishal Janamanchi