Trampolining S&C Part I: Hip/Glute Drive

Trampolining S&C Part I: Hip/Glute Drive

As many of you may know, I have been a professional trampolining coach for over 6 years, and I have spent a great deal of time in those years learning what my performers typically lack and struggle with.
One issue that comes up quite a lot, and that I was reminded of very recently, is the inability to initiate a somersault (particularly tuck back somersault) with a forceful hip drive once the coach’s external cue (usually the back of the hand in the lower back) has been removed.
There could be several reasons a performer struggles with this issue, including a neuromuscular signalling problem (e.g. lack of mind-muscle link or motor unit recruitment), an anatomical propensity toward poor back tension/flexibility/strength, or just a poor understanding of the difference between a hip drive and an arched back.
As stated, I recently had a performer who was struggling to initiate her tuck back without the external cue of my hand pushing her in the right place, and I want to share how we managed to begin resolving this issue easily, within a few hours of practice and gym-work.

Firstly, many people assume (wrongly) that a hip drive is simply the motion of pushing the hip-area forward, but this is a poor assumption as performers will often allow their back to simply arch, rather than activate the appropriate musculature. As we all know, too much lumbar extension is not a good thing.

Source http://course1.winona.edu/pappicelli/Anatkin/assign/JOINT%20ACTIONS_files/Image19.gif
Notice the arch evident in fig. C – that’s not what we’re looking for.

What we must be wary of is the propensity of our performers to travel in their back somersaults due to poor head positioning, often caused by poor posture and muscular activation during take-off (see above). The head often falls backwards (as seen above, where the head is no longer in-line with the shoulders) to create rotation, due to a lack of rotational power produced from the hips.
When developing the hip drive as a part of the back somersault, it’s imperative that the hip drive is properly explored and explained, and that begins with talking about the contractions that must take place in order to produce appropriate force and direction therein. A lot of the skill here lies in the coaching style and ability of the coach themselves, using external cues and understandable language is a must, but over-simplification is not helpful.
I too, in the past, have been guilty of saying “push your hips forward” without giving a clear explanation of what that means and it’s something I’m working on, as well as encouraging my other coaches to work on too.

So let’s get into the anatomy of the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex really briefly.
As you can probably guess the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex is comprised of the five lumbar vertebrae of the spine, the pelvis, and the hips.

Source: https://drparenteau.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/weight-lift-low-back-5.jpg

The complex works in sync to produce movements such as a squat or a hip drive, so it’s important to know that when you’re looking for faults in your performers’ hip drives etc., you need to be looking at the whole package, not just one of these areas in isolation (until an issue that requires it has been identified).
Furthermore, postural analysis of the performer can be useful, based on the very common weak links that can be found in these areas:

Source: http://i1.wp.com/outandaboutnycmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bad-posture-spine.jpg?resize=407%2C376
Note the wild variances in posture and consider how these can affect a performer.

For instance, if your performer has a posture more given to the stance labelled ‘Kyphosis’ in this picture (such as one young performer I have currently), then you might find they are given to leading with an arched back, and struggle to maintain a neutral spine at any point. This is important to note, as this will directly affect their ability to utilise appropriate hip drive if not spotted and worked through.
Excessive anterior pelvic tilt is also something for the coach to be mindful of, as when the pelvis is too far anteriorly rotated the glutes (more on them soon) can’t fire to their full potential in comparison to a neutral position (Worrell, et al., 2001). Additionally, anterior pelvic tilt is not conducive to the second part of the hip drive – driving the hips up (because we want to stay in the middle of the trampoline).

So, after we’ve assessed our performers’ posture and stance, etc., what’s next? Assuming everything is in order and you don’t need to work on neutral spine positioning or anything like that, it’s time to swat the gym door down.

Training Stimulus

Hip drive comes down to a few different areas, as we’ve discussed, but the main contributor to the ability to produce hip extension torque is the glutes (Contreras & Beardsley, 2012).

Source: http://www.directlyfitness.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Glute-muscles.jpg
Pictured: Glutes - the only SFW version on google.

Don’t believe me? Okay.
Consider some of the more popular exercises people use for glute activation. You’ve probably thought of squat and deadlift, right? Well, what if we compared their hip extension torque angle curves to an exercise that handily mimics the hip drive required by our somersaults?
Check this out (via bretcontreras.com):

Boom – Hip extension moment-angle curves during 500lb squat, deadlift, and hip thrust.

That’s right, the hip thrust is king of hip extension torque. This is important to note because, whilst squats and deadlifts are fantastic tools for the coach to have in their locker, they do not produce quite the same activation in the glute muscles, or potentially engender the same mind-muscle link and response (due to the hip thrust’s specificity in targeting the appropriate muscles). Furthermore, consider how you’re asking your performer to drive with their hips – they’re not coming from a squatted stance (I would hope), nor are they coming from a point where their head would be close to the trampoline (I would double-hope) such as in a deadlift, you’re simply asking them to drive those hips.
Additionally, the squat and deadlift essentially cause the hips to rest at lockout (with the exceptionally minor hip extensor tension seen in the deadlift) meaning they’re not highly loaded at the top of the movement, whereas the hip thrust is very highly loaded at the top of the movement. This is important, because we’re asking our performers to push beyond that resting lockout position seen in a squat and deadlift. This aids in maximising vertical and horizontal power production, which is exactly what we’re looking for.

So onto how my performer and I solved this issue in such a small amount of time.

Exercises

Obviously I’ve been talking extensively about the hip thrust, but some coaches may not know what that is, or how to progressively introduce their performers to the movement.
Here’s a video of what a hip thrust actually is (once again courtesy of bretcontreras.com):

One benefit of this exercise is that the potential for glute hypertrophy is huge, and having big, strong glutes should be something we as coaches should always want our performers to develop, and doing so without the use of hip thrusts will inevitably be less than optimal.
Here’s another Bret Contreras graph, showing his theoretical chart of hypertrophic adaptations in a year of resistance training:

So we see that one of the leading guys in glute strength and hypertrophy is a massive advocate of the hip thrust, and his professional opinion is that yes, you need to work on all three lifts for the best hypertrophic results, but if you could only do one lift for glute size it would be the hip thrust.

So, we’ve seen the rationale for using the hip thrust – not just because of the hip extension torque creatable, but also because of the hypertrophic response achievable.
However, there is the small matter of how to introduce this to your performers. For instance, when I took my performer into the gym, I did not give her a bar with 100kg on it and say “hip thrust it”.
I began with some basic exercises to introduce the concept of contracting the glutes to produce hip movement, then I introduced the concept of the hip movement being forceful enough to create momentum, and then we moved on to producing contractile force.
Little steps were necessary, and I’ll now go through the movements we did to produce those little steps.
I won’t go into detail on how you coach these exercises, maybe I’ll save that for another post or maybe I’ll let you find out for yourselves, all I want to do is introduce the slow and steady method that I used.

Firstly, getting the idea that the glutes contracting will produce any sort of hip movement; for this, we simply went through the technique required of a kettlebell (KB) deadlift. This forced the performer to contract her glutes in order to get straight at the top of the movement.
Here’s a video on how that should look:

However, we already know that the hips are mostly resting at lockout, so secondly, we introduced the idea that the contracting of the glutes could set the hips in motion with enough force to produce momentum. This was easily achieved with the introduction of the KB swing, which of course forces the performer to ‘snap’ their hips forward with enough force to move the KB up into the air in front of the performer.
Here’s a video of how this one should look:

Thirdly, we used a weighted bar to go through early phases of the Olympic snatch movement, where the performer used only the ‘snapping’ hip movement developed in the KB swing to move the bar forward. This is called the ‘hit’ portion of Jon North’s ‘Hit & Catch’ drill. You can see that video on YouTube here:

Finally, we began working on the hip thrust!
As I said earlier, we didn’t just throw her under a bar and see what weight she could shift. Firstly the movement had to be understood before any variables were changed (such as weight, points of contact, stability, etc).
So we started her off with some basic hip bridges. This is a great intro to the hip thrust because you’re already into a very similar position on the ground, and you’re producing a virtually identical movement through the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex.
Here’s a video of what that looks like:

We then progressed to having her put her feet on a swiss ball, just to ensure she was producing force in the proper fashion. This was simply a short stop to ensure proficiency in the movement itself, and could be skipped if it seems unnecessary.
Here’s a video to show you what it looks like (poor quality, I need to start doing my own videos):

We then finally moved onto the hip thrust itself, which you have already seen and I have already explained, so I won’t go over it all again now.

Just remember that, although this learning the correct method of activating the glutes and producing hip drive will show results quite quickly, especially once an early mind-muscle link has been established, the development must continue. This can’t be a one-off thing, otherwise the pattern and motor recruitment will not become reinforced for the performer.
Follow this through for some time with the performer, and ensure they are keeping up the progression in the exercises in their own workouts and training.

So, we’ve finally managed to get through the bulk of the article, and hopefully now you’ll have a better understanding of how the hip drive is produced by gluteal contraction, and how to implement various exercises to reinforce the pattern required of the performers you work with.
I just want to finish off with a brief discussion on how to assess the necessity of implementing these exercises, and how to then coach the skill post-hip drive development.

Back-arch or Hip-drive?

One thing I would encourage you to always be assessing when performers are working on their tuck back somersaults (in this case) is 'how much of the initial movement is hip drive?'.
When working with a performer, ask yourself “was that an arched back, or was that an appropriate hip drive?”
Look for the tell-tale signs of the arched back, and be ready to coach them through the appropriate beginning of their somersault. Watch out for things such as the head being out of line with the shoulders, the feet and head being in-line but nowhere near the line of the hips (classic banana), arms being swung violently to produce momentum, and excessive backward travel, to name a few.
If you notice these things then be prepared to work through how exactly the hip drive is achieved in this skill.

Setting External Cues

When coaching through the tuck back somersault, ensure you are giving your performers the correct external cues. External cues are a coaching instruction designed to direct the focus of the performer to something external, rather than internal, so toward the effects of the movements they produce rather than what specifically the body is doing. If a performer knows how to contract their glutes and drive their hips, telling them to drive their hips could be useful, but it could also cause them to think too much about their body and not about what the movement is actually trying to achieve. Telling someone who has no idea how to drive their hips with appropriate gluteal contraction to drive their hips would at best be a minor enlightenment for the performer (“oh, my hips need to move”) and at worst a completely confusing experience (“I don’t understand what you want from me”).
Porter (2010) found that external cues led to improving the objective performance of the movement, and this is exactly what we want as coaches when we only have a short time to work with each participant.
This may seem counter-intuitive after I’ve just spent around 2,000 words telling you to ensure your performer can understand a body movement they must create, therefore being an internal cue, but hang in there.
When I went back to the trampolines with my performer, she did a tuck back, and it went really well. She then did another that was not as good, so I responded with the dreaded “push your hips out”. That didn’t help, so I reconsidered my tactics and coached her with “drive ‘em like you need to move that bar!”
Lo and behold, that was an immediate difference, because she was no longer internalising her performance as something lacking in her hip movement, and instead just trying to produce the same force she had done earlier to move the weighted bar through the air. It took away the internalising of the form of the movement, and simply got her to focus on the outcome of the movement.
Since then that coaching point has become “drive that bar” or “swing that kettlebell”, and it has made a marked improvement, alongside her continued development with her hip drive exercises.
I won’t go any further into this as it could be a long point, and not one that is entirely necessary – just an interesting extra to the anatomical and biomechanical stuff.

So, there we have it, guys! The first part of my trampolining strength & conditioning observations and recommendations.
I have planned to do a couple other common faults, but if there is anything you feel I should look at that perhaps you or your performers struggle with, then let me know!
As always, you can get me on Twitter, Instagram, e-mail, and here at Guts & Glory Athletics.
See you soon…