Rugby Lineout Elevation Test: Apex Height and Time-to-Peak as a Selection Tool

Preseason combine day, and the second row you're grooming for the tail posts a 62 cm vertical, 4 cm better than the incumbent. Six weeks into the season he's still losing the '4' ball, arriving late and reaching instead of catching clean at full extension. The combine number said he was the better jumper. The actual lineout, two hands under his hips and a hooker on a three-count, said something different. A standing vertical jump says almost nothing about how high a player gets or how fast once he's being lifted, and that gap is exactly where selection decisions go wrong.

An elevation test fixes that by measuring apex height and time-to-peak inside the actual lift. This guide covers the equipment, a step-by-step 5-lift protocol, why flight-time jump math doesn't apply to an assisted lift, benchmarks by position, and how to turn the readout into a selection call and a throw-timing adjustment.

A standing vertical jump isolates one athlete's own leg power. A lineout jump is a three-person coordination task: a front and back lifter drive the jumper's hips upward on a called count, and his own leg drive is only a fraction of the total displacement. Two players with identical combine verticals can produce very different lineout outcomes, since the lift depends on grip point and drive timing as much as on the jumper himself.

A jumper who tests well alone sometimes can't stay tall through a real lift, bleeding height as his hips drift forward. One who tests only average sometimes locks out beautifully and gets an extra 15-20 cm nobody predicted. The only way to know which is which is to test the lift itself, with his actual pod.

Apex height is the peak vertical displacement of the jumper's hips or center of mass, from standing to the highest point of the lift. Time-to-peak is the elapsed time from the first upward movement, the instant the lifters' drive begins, to that apex. Coaches watch both without naming them: a jumper who gets up there (apex height) and one who's there on time (time-to-peak), and a lineout can fail on either axis even when the other looks fine.

A tall apex with a slow time-to-peak forces the hooker to throw earlier and higher, giving the defense time to read and contest. A fast time-to-peak with a modest apex is easy to time but easy to compete against, since a flatter trajectory gives more contact time to disrupt the catch. The combination, not either number alone, is what selection should weigh.

A lift moves fast with three bodies close together, so timing it by eye or stopwatch is close to useless. Automated capture is the only reliable option session to session.

A calibrated pole works, but it demands a perpendicular camera with no drift between reps, and someone digitizing frames afterward. A hip-mounted IMU skips both problems.

Setup

1. Use the jumper's actual matchday pod, not whoever happens to be free. Grip point and lift chemistry are specific to that trio.
2. Warm up 10 minutes: mobility, two or three submaximal practice lifts to sync the count, then full rest before recording.
3. Mount the IMU at the jumper's hip or waistband, snug enough that it can't shift during the lift.

Data Collection

1. Run the real call: hooker gives the count, lifters drive together, jumper reaches for a thrown ball rather than a fixed target, since a moving ball changes body position at the top.
2. Perform 5 maximal-effort lifts with the same pod, resting 90 seconds between each. This is a peak-effort test, not a fatigue test, so full recovery matters more than volume.
3. Record apex height and time-to-peak for all 5 reps. Take the single best rep for selection; the ceiling matters more than the average.
4. Discard any rep where the two lifters' drive initiation is more than roughly 150 ms apart. A mistimed lift corrupts both numbers.

One jumper's actual 5-lift session, recorded on a hip IMU during a Tuesday training block:

Rep 4 gets discarded at 180 ms of lifter desync, past the 150 ms threshold, which explains why it's the worst apex and slowest time-to-peak in the set. The jumper's selection number here is rep 5: 106 cm apex, 0.70 s time-to-peak.

Standard vertical jump height comes from flight time, converted to height by a projectile equation. That assumes takeoff and landing happen in the same body position, which a lineout jumper does not; he's set down by the lifters, so there's no clean flight-time window. Moir (2008) compared flight-time, velocity-based, and impulse-momentum methods for calculating jump height and found they diverge meaningfully whenever posture differs, with velocity-based holding up better. That's why this test reads apex height and time-to-peak from the jumper's own IMU velocity trace, apex identified where vertical velocity crosses zero, not from a flight-time formula this test can't produce.

The other open question is reliability of the timing side. Cormack, Newton, McGuigan, and Doyle (2008) tested reliability of countermovement jump variables in elite junior Australian footballers: jump height was highly reliable (ICC around 0.97, CV near 5%), while derived timing ratios were noticeably less stable (CV in the mid-teens). Their data isn't from rugby, and no published study has yet validated these metrics in a lift-assisted lineout jump, a real gap in the literature. That pattern, height holding up better than a derived timing number, is why the protocol takes multiple reps rather than trusting one lift.

These ranges come from field testing with club and academy pods, not a peer-reviewed norms table, so treat them as a starting reference. A jumper's own baseline with his specific pod matters more than where he sits against a general band.

Lineout position shifts what a good profile looks like. A front-of-line jumper needs the fast end of time-to-peak even at a mid-pack apex, since front ball is a speed call. A tail jumper going for a driving maul can trade a slower time-to-peak for the taller apex.

The value shows up most clearly when two jumpers look interchangeable on paper. If jumper A posts a 108 cm apex at 0.78 s and jumper B posts 96 cm at 0.66 s, they're not competing for the same role. A gets the tail, where extra height buys separation. B gets the front on a quick throw, and the 12 cm apex gap matters far less than the 120 ms timing margin.

The time-to-peak number also belongs to the hooker. Once a pod's time-to-peak is set at, say, 0.72 s, the throw should arrive at or just before that instant, giving the jumper a still, locked-out position rather than forcing a reach on the way up. A hooker throwing off feel works until pressure changes his rhythm; one working from a tested number has a fixed target that holds up.

Swapping Lifters Between Sessions

Apex height and time-to-peak belong to the jumper-and-pod combination, not the jumper alone. A substitute lifter makes last month's session an unfair comparison.

Testing Against a Fixed Target, Not a Thrown Ball

Reaching for empty air changes arm and torso carriage versus tracking a real throw. Test with a ball in flight if matchday timing is the goal.

Trusting a Single Lift

One lift is closer to a coin flip than a measurement. Run the full 5-rep protocol and check the synchrony column first.

Confusing Apex Height With Standing Reach

Apex height is displacement from standing, not total hand height above the ground. Mixing the two up when briefing a hooker is a common, avoidable error.

Full pods aren't always available, so this doesn't fit a weekly rotation the way a solo jump test does.

For set-piece strength, our rugby scrum push force guide covers a related approach, and our reactive strength index guide is useful background for a jumper's own leg drive.