High jump in the context of World Athletics Indoor Championships

Track and field is a sport that includes athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name used in North America is derived from where the sport takes place, a running track and a grass field for the throwing and some of the jumping events. Track and field is categorized under the umbrella sport of athletics, which also includes road running, cross country running and race walking. Though the sense of "athletics" as a broader sport is not used in American English, outside of the United States the term athletics can either be used to mean just its track and field component or the entirety of the sport (adding road racing and cross country) based on context.

The foot racing events, which include sprints, middle- and long-distance events, race walking, and hurdling, are won by the athlete who completes it in the least time. The jumping and throwing events are won by those who achieve the greatest distance or height. Regular jumping events include long jump, triple jump, high jump, and pole vault, while the most common throwing events are shot put, javelin, discus, and hammer. There are also "combined events" or "multi events", such as the pentathlon consisting of five events, heptathlon consisting of seven events, and decathlon consisting of ten events. In these, athletes participate in a combination of track and field events. Most track and field events are individual sports with a single victor; the most prominent team events are relay races, which typically feature teams of four. Events are almost exclusively divided by gender, although both the men's and women's competitions are usually held at the same venue. One exception are mixed relays, in which two men and two women make up the four-person team. If a race has too many people to run all at once, preliminary heats will be run to narrow down the field of participants.

Jumping or leaping is a form of locomotion or movement in which an organism or non-living (e.g., robotic) mechanical system propels itself through the air along a ballistic trajectory. Jumping can be distinguished from running, galloping and other gaits where the entire body is temporarily airborne by the relatively long duration of the aerial phase and high angle of initial launch.

Some animals, such as the kangaroo, employ jumping (commonly called hopping in this instance) as their primary form of an locomotion, while others, such as frogs, use it only as a means to escape predators. Jumping is also a key feature of various activities and sports, including the long jump, high jump and show jumping.

Pole vaulting, also known as pole jumping, is a track and field event in which an athlete uses a long and flexible pole, usually made from fiberglass or carbon fiber, as an aid to jump over a bar. Pole jumping was already practiced by the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks and the ancient Irish people, although modern pole vaulting, an athletic contest where height is measured, was first established by the German teacher Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the 1790s. It has been a full medal event at the Olympic Games since 1896 for men and since 2000 for women.

It is typically classified as one of the four major jumping events in athletics, alongside the high jump, long jump and triple jump. It is unusual among track and field events in that it requires a significant amount of specialised equipment in order to participate, even at a basic level. A number of elite pole vaulters have had backgrounds in gymnastics, including world record breakers Yelena Isinbayeva and Brian Sternberg, reflecting the similar physical attributes required for the events. Physical attributes such as speed, agility and strength, along with technical skill, are essential to pole vaulting.

Raya Bronstein (Hebrew: רעיה ברונשטיין; 1 October 1929 – 4 May 2023) was an Israeli athlete, sprinter, high jumper, shot putter, basketball player (the first Israeli national women's team, 1950), weightlifter, discus thrower and javelin thrower, Israeli champion and record holder, Maccabiah Games champion, and teacher in physical education.

She was born in Berlin to a family of the owners of a bookstore and "Kedem" publishing house. Her family emigrated from Nazi Germany to Eretz Israel in 1938 and eventually settled in Tel Aviv, where she lived in the same apartment until her last days.

Combined events at the Summer Olympics have been contested in several formats at the multi-sport event. There are two combined track and field events in the current Olympic athletics programme: a men's decathlon (100 metres, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 metres, 110 metres hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, and 1500 metres) and a women's heptathlon (100 metres hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200 metres, long jump, javelin throw, and 800 metres).

The first men's events came at the 1904 Summer Olympics: a triathlon had long jump, shot put, and 100-yard dash events, while an all-around championship saw athletes compete over ten events, forming the basis for the decathlon. No combined events were held at the subsequent games, but the 1912 Summer Olympics saw the introduction of the modern decathlon event and also a men's pentathlon (which lasted for three games). The first women's event came in 1964 in the form of the women's pentathlon. This was amended to include two more events, becoming the heptathlon at the 1984 Summer Olympics, reflecting the development of women's sport.

Plyometrics, also known as plyos or more generally as jump training, involves exercises in which muscles exert maximum force in short intervals of time, with the goal of increasing power (speed-strength). This training focuses on learning to move from a muscle extension to a contraction in a rapid or "explosive" manner, such as in specialized repeated jumping. In this case, it involves applying more power during the exercise in a way that increasingly activates the body's stretch shortening cycle. This enables the faster achievement of all stages of the jumping movement, including the jumping phase, the landing crouch and shock absorption phase, and the amortisation phase which is when the change between the landing and jumping phases takes place. The ability to increasingly apply power during all of these movement phases, and thereby perform more powerfully and rapidly overall, has transferability to many other sporting and athletic pursuits where similar repetitive movements are required e.g. the general training effect of plyometrics improves sportspeople's ability to sprint. Progressive plyometric training can help to reduce the chances of injury, especially to the lower leg, ankle and foot.

Plyometrics are frequently used by athletes, especially martial artists, sprinters and high jumpers, to improve performance, and are used in the general fitness field to a lesser degree.

The Fosbury flop is a jumping style used in the track and field event of high jump. It was popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City brought it to the world's attention. The flop became the dominant style of the event, surpassing the straddle technique, Western roll, Eastern cut-off, or scissors jump to clear the bar. Though the backwards flop technique had been known for years before Fosbury, landing surfaces had been sandpits or low piles of matting and high jumpers had to land on their feet or at least land carefully to prevent injury. With the advent of deep foam matting, high jumpers were able to be more adventurous in their landing styles and hence more experimental with jumping styles.