Q2 2026 VERT Update

Training Insights, Applications, and New Innovations

VERT Movement Clinics

Movement Clinics:

What Athletes Are Learning

VERT’s Performance Lab has been traveling the country running volleyball movement clinics focused on the foundational skills that shape on-court performance: jumping, landing, and acceleration. After working with athletes in dozens of sessions, three consistent findings have emerged- all driven by what happens when athletes can see their movement data live.

1. Athletes have objectively learned the pitfalls of complacency. Part of the vertical portion of the clinic reviews the function of tendons in regards to jumping explosiveness. With every athlete being monitored live, in every session athletes have been able to see the real change that takes place when putting forth the effort using proper mechanics when jumping. For example, we express how important foot placement is when block jumping, or the importance of the back swing on an approach jump. When athletes are able to immediately see a 1”-4” increase when they focus on applying basic principles with intent.… it sticks. 

   
   

2. Learning to land is never as fun as learning to jump, but the two can never be separated. This has been the most impactful (pun intended) portion of the clinics. Athletes are shown how VERT measures landing impact. They’re also told roughly how many times they’re jumping on-court between high school and club seasons. Whenever they hear, 19,000-22,000 jumps a year, it’s a number they tend to remember (as evident by the athletes that have completed the clinics twice, many knew the answer when asked that question). We are able to show the athletes how hard they're landing, run them through a number of drills designed to carry over to the court, then show them their immediate improvement. If an athlete is landing at 15Gs (the higher the number the more impact is making its way up the kinetic chain), and we’re able to get them to 7Gs, the entire group cheers, high fives and we start to see some light bulbs illuminate. If you’re landing 20,000 times at a 7 rather than a 15, what’s that going to do for your health and longevity? Easy to answer. 

   
   

3. Athletes have learned that training with intention can have both rapid and lasting effects, like making them immediately more reactive. The horizontal clinic focuses exclusively on acceleration. We work linearly then laterally. The linear portion is where athletes have shown tremendous growth. We do NOT teach athletes to never “drop step”. We do, however, run them through a sequence of drills that have eliminated the need for drop stepping in most circumstances. At the beginning of the session, athletes are lined up and told to accelerate from a parallel stance. In this instance they are not allowed to drop step. For well over 80% this is an incredible challenge, and for many who are able to do it without the drop step then have a significant delay as they lean forward to accelerate. By the end of the linear portion of the session, 90-100% of the athletes are able to accelerate rapidly from their defensive position without the drop step. They’re slightly confused as to why, but begin to understand the importance of the drills we ran them through and many have since implemented them into their warm up. We pride ourselves in being able to teach the science behind movement along with the process for getting rapid improvements that we know will help players improve their overall development, but most importantly, their health. These clinics are extremely limited. To schedule a call please select and date and time HERE to speak with a member of our Performance Lab about scheduling a clinic for your club.

Causes of Injury:

They Might Be Right in Front of Your Face

When coaches discuss injuries, the conversation usually centers around training loads, recovery protocols, or strength programs.

Yet the only piece of equipment athletes interact with on every single jump and landing is often overlooked entirely: their shoes.

No, there is not a “one size fits all” shoe that works best for all athletes. 

Yes, athletes are RIDICULOUSLY particular about their shoes, and especially at the club/high school level, care more about how it looks than how it performs. 

No, there is not full choice for college athletes (especially on match day) to wear a shoe of their choosing, unlike with the professional leagues where athletes can wear the shoe they feel best in. 

Yes, shoes can have an impact on player health. For some it’s minimal, for others it can be dramatic. 

Many of the conversations I have with coaches around player health, especially lower extremity, I try to bring up footwear, especially if there was a sudden spike in shin splints across multiple athletes. On numerous occasions when I hear about a multi-athlete occurrence of “sudden” nagging injuries, it has coincided with a change in footwear. Of course, I review training protocols in the weight room, and with individual cases some video analysis of jump and landing mechanics, but oftentimes the culprit is the shoe. 

We know this because when either changing back to the previous shoe or picking an entirely new one, the issue, on many occasions, resolves itself. Unfortunately, at the collegiate level at least, that’s a variable programs find far too challenging to control. 

While this particular challenge has been fairly well documented, there hasn’t been much movement regarding a solution, at least not until very recently.

There are various smaller companies investing heavily in the female sports space, but doing so from a different angle than the larger, more established players in the market. One of those companies, RIP-IT, I saw at the AVCA convention in 2023. At that point they only had a prototype, but I was excited to see a company was creating a volleyball shoe created from a female lass (meaning the model used was exclusively created from the scanning of female feet).

Why this matters.… Male and female foot anatomy is rather different. Females have a narrower heel to wider toe ratio, the angle of their shin meeting the foot is deeper and even the arch for females is slightly higher. However, with all of these differences athletes have all been playing in shoes designed from a male lass. Virtually all of them at least. 

The result of wearing the wrong footwear? There are many, and his isn’t to say that all male shoes worn by females are doing equal damage, but here are some of the main issues:

1. The heel-to-forefoot width differential. All the lost toe nails throughout the seasons can, in large part, be a result of a shoe that can’t hold the heel in place. The foot inevitably slides slightly forward in a shoe that may also have a toe box that could be too wide, thus leading to unwanted movement within the shoe and toes slamming against the front. 

   
   

2. Ankle range of motion. Men’s shoes are designed for the lip to fit higher up on the shin given the rising of the foot and ankle. Females have anywhere from a 3-5 degree difference in their tibiotalar angle. What does this mean? For starters, more dorsiflexion in the ankle, which, if limited or restricted too much, can negatively affect landing absorption or defensive movement (especially for liberos). The impact of landing range though would have to be from fairly extreme dorsiflexion limitations. 

   
   

3. Sport specificity. Many shoes being worn by our volleyball athletes have rather still soles. Some have fairly dense and heavy soles for impact absorption from front to back. While “tightness” can lead to explosiveness, it can also lead to harder landing impact. 

In 2024 we did a study specifically with the RIP-IT shoes. You can view the study here to read through all of the details, but here are the main points. 

Compared with the landing performance (measuring landing impact, or how well the athletes attenuated landing forces up to their center of mass) with club/highschool athletes in on-court training. We already had data from their previous shoes, all of which were basketball shoes (male). The results were clear. There was no statistically significant change in jump height, however, there was a change in landing impact across the board. As we’ve continued to track athletes with these shoes the results have varied. Depending on the reason for stiffer landings some athletes would see a dramatic improvement in landing impact, while others might be more subtle. 

To conclude, there will never be a single shoe that works best for every athlete. There were athletes using the RIP-IT shoes with chronic back pain and bilateral shin splints, both of whom, after around 4 weeks, were pain free. Did they stay with those shoes after feeling better and landing better, or did they move onto the next brightest new shoe their friends were wearing?I’ll let you take a guess. 

We’re finally at a time now where companies are investing properly in women as athletes. As unique physical specimens who train just as hard and want victory just as much as their male counterparts. I hope reading this helps both to educate and continue to, if only slightly, push us all to fight for gear that helps our athletes succeed. As I said in the beginning. There’s only one piece of gear that truly impacts player health and performance. Those athletes we tracked in the study, they jumped on-court, between a single high school and club seasons, between 19,000-22,000 times. That’s 19,000-22,000 landings. Reducing those landing impacts by even 5% can have an incredible cumulative impact. 

Welcoming Jenna Rosenthal to the VERT Performance Lab

VERT Solutions: A Perspective from Jenna Rosenthal(Pro Volleyball Player).

For most of my career, effort was never the issue. I trained hard, worked with great coaches, and followed the right programs.

What took longer to fully understand was how much the smallest details in movement add up over thousands of repetitions.

At higher levels of volleyball, everyone trains hard. What separates athletes over time isn’t who works more, it’s who moves efficiently and consistently enough for their bodies to tolerate the volume the sport demands. How you land, how you accelerate, and how well you absorb force matters just as much as how high you jump.

That perspective becomes clearer the longer you play. Not because something was “wrong” before, but because the tolerance for inefficiency slowly shrinks. The same movements done slightly better (or slightly worse) thousands of times add up in very different ways.

That’s why I believe so strongly in giving athletes meaningful feedback early. When players can see, in real time, how intent changes their movement, or how better mechanics reduce stress on the body, it changes how they train. Improvement stops being about doing more and starts being about doing things with purpose.

What excites me about the work we’re doing now is that athletes don’t have to wait years to gain that perspective. They’re learning that training smart doesn’t mean training less, it means understanding what actually helps you perform and stay available.

I was a good athlete at a high level. If I have one advantage today, it’s knowing that the details you repeat every day don’t just shape performance, they shape how long you get to compete..

For more information on the VERT Team System,

please schedule a demo HERE.

Join Volleyball Technology