JESSE LIMA

High Jumping is about details. You can keep training hard and get much stronger. But what really matters in the end is execution. It’s about combining your mind, strength and technical execution. Using these points and exploring your individual characteristics and capitalizing on them, is what will make your jump better. Each athlete is an ocean of individual factors and variables to be aware of. That’s when great coaches come in to play.

It’s was early 2008. I had done great training preparation from October 2007 to March 2008 at that time.  The season was just beginning. Hugo invited me to the Kangaroo High Jump Festival. It was a great time for sure!

Then, I even though I was a still a bit loaded from the preparation period I was struggling in many points in my technical execution, from the run-up start until curve execution to be more precise. In other words some critical points for jumping. Your take-off depends on that. Hugo gave me some points of view and suggestions about my technique. It helped me a lot at the Kangaroo Festival. And those points were great. We did not have much time for training or to practice them in Minnesota (at the festival and then we jumped again on Monday before I flew back to Brazil). The corrections that Hugo helped me with were about my approach and how I was leaning into the curve and rhythm as well. As you may already know, those points will interfere positively or negatively in your take-off. I was pretty sure that those points would be very important to be aware of and improve in the upcoming season. And so it was. I kept training back in Brazil with my coach Kiyoshi Takahashi as normal. I just kept pushing forward to improve my technique to improve those points Hugo helped me with and some more I had to improve on the journey.

I can tell you that Hugo participated in the most important moment in my career. The year 2008 was the year of the two best results in my life and after the Kangaroo Festival. That year I made my best performance ever, 2,32mts / 7’7-1/4) but not only that. That year I competed at the Beijing Olympics and was an Olympic Games finalist (10th). Two weeks after the Olympics, on October 31st, I went to Padova (ITA) meeting and jumped 2,31mts / 7’7” (my PB that time) and on September 2nd in Lausanne Meeting (SWI) and jumped 2,32mts / 7’7-1/4” (my PB again). So, to jump two PB’s with only two days interval and reach 2,32mts / 7’7-1/4” was the best I ever did as a High Jumper.

Hugo has the coaching experience merged with athletic experience. It’s a powerful combination. Because he has been there jumping before. He knows what the feeling looks like, the execution, the challenges we face when jumping. He knows how is to do a High Jump take-off (and believe me, there nothing else like that in the world). Now merge this experience with a skilled coach. So there he is.

For many years I have been fighting for good technique. How can I jump higher? I changed coaches many times. I know how a good coach is important to improve jumping skills and consequently, therefore, the performance. Sometimes we keep training over and over again and we have some mistakes we cannot figure out. We don’t even feel them or know they exist. Those errors are there. Dragging your jump down. Like I said before, it is about details.

When you have an opportunity to train with a good coach like Hugo, please do not waste it. He is a great coach and an amazing person. He can provide you with great facilities and technical support to help you to improve your High Jump skills.

NOTE: To see Jesse’s video training at KTC, please click HERE