The Volleyball Approach

The approach is one of the most important aspects of the sport. It's one of the first things athletes are taught as they get into the sport. The 3 step and the 4 step are the most common ones, and it's something engrained in volleyball athletes. The approach has many small differences between athletes, a result of numerous factors, but the general principles are the same.

The approach is taught in a way that is very simple and has some cues that most of you are familiar with, so I won't dwell on the basics too much. To sum it up, the things I mainly see and hear are:

• Right-Left-Right-Left for right handed hitters, and the opposite for lefty's in a 4 step approach

• First 1-2 steps (depending on 3 or 4 step) light and slow, meant for timing

• Accelerate on the last 2 steps (step close), very fast and aggressive, gets your feet to the ball and generates momentum for your jump

• Swing your arms back on the step close, and then up together as your last step plants and you initiate your jump

The approach, via Wiley Online Library

These are the main cues that coaches and online sources teach when learning how to do the approach. There are a lot of additional cues out there, but these are the main fundamentals that are taught.

Here's what I would add to those.

1) Be relaxed

This may seem counterintuitive, and a lot of new players struggle with this. While our muscles produce more force when contracted and tense, they slow down and prevent fluidity in movements. A jump is a motor skill, one with coordination and timing that can be learned. Often times, new players struggle with relaxing and develop bad habits of having very rigid approaches. This is inherently easy to develop due to the nature of the sport, where hitters have the last contact and must jump and hit a falling ball while everyone watches. Of course it's common for us to be tense and nervous when learning. Nobody wants to be the one to mess up.

Being rigid causes excess energy expenditure and inhibits the proper timing of using our muscles to achieve our goal of jumping and hitting. Rather than that, athletes should focus on being relaxed and utilizing the right muscles at the right time. This can be seen in sports such as sprinting and Olympic Weightlifting, where there is a correct balance between relaxation and contraction. Much like these other explosive movements, the approach and subsequent jump should be fluid, with the right muscles being utilized to save energy and maximize limb velocity. This blog by Kyle Davey has a good analogy, where the muscles act similar to a tug of war game. When one side lets go, the other goes flying.

An example of this for volleyball would be the arms on our approach, sometimes called the double arm lift. Often we are taught to throw them back and then up hard so that we create momentum in our jump. While this is correct, this cue can cause athletes to overdo it. We initiate the arm lift backwards with our mid back, triceps, and rear deltoids. Then they try really hard to throw their arms back in front of their body as quickly as possible, muscling through the movement. Our posterior muscles are still working to pull the arms back and haven't fully relaxed. This slows the whole movement down and prevents synchronization of our arm lift with our jump. At the correct sequencing, our jump and arm lift should be going up together to maximize vertical, transferring our momentum from the approach upwards. If we're rigid and trying to muscle our way through the movement, this difference in speed causes our arms to be late, causing more horizontal momentum.

This issue can make the athlete look like their timing is off. They'll be broad jumping too much and be more out of control compared to an athlete doing it the correct way. The ball will end up behind them, limiting power in the swing as well as vision of the blockers and the court. They won't be able to adjust to sets as well, operating overall at a disadvantage offensively.

Stay Relaxed!

2) Stay Low (Without excessive hip hinge)

When athletes are taught to stay low, oftentimes newer, weaker and less coordinated athletes will bend at the hips and dip down into a hinge.

A few issues with this is that it causes our center of mass to be too forward on our approach, leading to similar issues as a tense double arm lift. Additionally, most athletes that default to this position aren't utilizing the right muscles, rather bending at the lower back and not engaging their posterior chain. This is the most likely scenario for newer athletes, along with the implications of increased sitting time in this age.

Ideally, we would want to get low along with our hips, staying stacked and balanced. Our knees should have a decent amount of bend, glutes and hips working. This way we can keep our center of balance more backwards and not blow through our approach. If this position is very difficult for the athlete, then they likely are too weak and/or don't have the mobility for it, in which case we would have to train those aspects. A good and specific exercise to target this would be low walking lunges.

Being lower overall allows us to control more speed and spend more time on ground, maximizing the forces our legs and hips can generate. With our hips high, we're forced to get off the ground faster due to minimal knee flexion, and we lose out on a lot of potential forces.

At the higher levels, there are many athletes that do dive more, but they have trained for many years and can optimize that position and stay in control. They are strong and can sweep their hips underneath them before taking off. The hip hinge adds to their speed in the approach, and they can handle that. Higher level setters also give these hitters more confidence to utilize more speed and hip hinge. Even so, these athletes still have relatively low hips and higher degrees of knee flexion. The hip hinge adds to their approach, and isn't a byproduct of weakness and instability.

These are my 2 additional cues to try out when practicing your approach. They could also be something that you can implement even as a seasoned player. Jumping is a very difficult and intense motor skill that has a lot of intricacies to it, and there are parts of it that aren't exactly intuitive, especially if you didn't jump a lot in childhood.