Robert schmitt wrote: it is amazing to see the deficits even normal people display and the ways they compensate for them.
[This is a very quick and simplified thoughts thrown done cause I feel this is an important topic to discuss and help get the ball rolling]
Methods of instruction (training) and what to actually instruct and train are two separate issues.
Methods to me come down to the coach not the athlete. What and how does the coach/athlete teach themselves. If the question you're really asking is should women be trained differently than men? Than I come back with the question should a teenager be trained the same way as a grown man?
Motor Learning: the process of improving the motor skills, the smoothness and accuracy of movements.... The act of making the mind – body connection; the mind teaching the body conscious control of a new movement or motor program; motor performance.
Motor Skills: a learned sequence of movements that combine to produce a smooth, efficient action in order to master a particular task. * Gross motor skills include lifting one's head, rolling over, sitting up, balancing, crawling, and walking.
In the pure sense of Man vs Women when it comes to Motor Learning. Does a gymnastics center or diving have an issue teaching women how to move their bodies in comparison to men? In fact I would say women have a greater ability in most cases to feel what they are doing and make adjustments logically due to earlier maturity levels at younger ages.
As it relates to the pole vault all this is thrown out the window IMO. Put a man and women on a tight rope and have them walk. Let's say the women shows grace and walks with ease and the guy struggles. Put the same man and women on a mechanical bull. The guy grips on tight and shows connection and stability to the bull while the women gets thrown like a rag doll. The vault itself and the fact a fiberglass pole bends and creates tension that must be controlled through the use of muscular stability warrants a second look into how we train men vs women. Or better yet what to expect as the difference between training men and women.
A secondary question would be in the vault are movements CREATED or are movements allowed to OCCUR?
If we see a guy do something and ask a women to do the same movement and she fails, is it because she couldn't create the same movement or the movement was never going to occur so how could she duplicate it. From a motor learning standpoint is the model and technical components being taught based on the creation of a movement/action or allowance of a movement/action to occur?
If the model is based off the creation of a movement/action than yes, I believe from a motor learning methods of instruction (training) women must be trained differently if we want the same action to occur. In the simplest way possible the average women can not muscle things like the average guy can. Either train the women to be freakishly strong or find a short cut to achieve the action.
If the model is based off the allowance of an movement/action to occur than no, I believe from a motor learning methods of instruction (training) women should be trained the same as men with the understanding that some movements/actions may never exists in a women's vault that we see in a man's vault. Good or bad is for each coach/athlete to determine. Energy in and energy out are not the same neither is the elastic abilities of the muscles, ligaments and tendons. The reactionary responses to stimulus for a male will inherently be higher than for a women.
The deeper I get into coaching elite men and women the more I am realizing my elite women as very similar to the many weak (from a strength and muscular development perspective) high school 15' boys I had coached over the years. Many of the inabilities to hit positions the women are having those boys had as I watched old videos of them. Are the women not hitting a certain position due to the inability to learn how or the inability of the movement to even exist?
ONLY TIME WILL TELL!!!!!!!
