**I’m going to preface this article with the fact that I’m speaking to vertical (and linear) jumping. While there are literally infinite kinds of jumping we can include in our training, we’re going to start off in the sagittal plane for today**

Jumping is a great tool for athletic development. We can manipulate many different variables within jumping in order to fit the goal of any given training session. Jumping is incredibly versatile and here’s some of the ways we can use different kinds of jumps to accomplish different tasks:

• Box jumps - Explosive speed

• Hurdle jumps - Explosive speed

• Depth drops - Strength

• Depth drop jumps - Strength

• Single leg jumps - Strength

• Single leg depth drops - Strength

• Normal jumping - Explosive speed

• Weighted jumps - Power/Speed/Strength

• Band-assisted jumps - Speed

As you can see, there’s many different variations of jumps that we can use in order to accomplish many different tasks. The one thing these tasks all have in common is that they’re all movements and exercises where we want to be as fresh as possible within the session itself. Strength, speed and power all require longer rest periods and lower volumes in order to get out of them what we need. Jumps should be done with MAXIMAL effort every single rep, they’re not something we should just be trying to get through but using to become faster and stronger. Knowing the how and the why behind jumping can help you take your training to the next level!

Why the Box Jump?

Believe it or not the box itself isn’t meant to give you a goal height to get you to jump higher. It can, and at times should, be used for this however the box was actually created for another reason: to decrease the forces involved with landing. **Remember that the speed of gravity is going to increase the forces we’re overcoming on the landing**. For most athletes jumping really doesn’t take a ton out of us, sure it can be tough to maintain speed and jump height throughout a workout but that isn’t what makes us wobble around from soreness the next day. It’s the landing that creates all the damage to the muscle cell leaving us a sore mess the next day. This landing can sometimes create forces of up to five times our bodyweight, and we’re having to decelerate ourselves so we don’t collapse to the ground. This deceleration process involves eccentric muscle contractions (the muscle stretches while creating tension) and without a box we’d be overcoming upwards of five times our bodyweight which creates a TON of damage to the cell.

If I weigh 165lbs and can jump 30 inches in the air, when I land I’ll be decelerating upwards of 825lbs of force on each landing. That’s a ton of force to overcome not just for the muscles and tendons, but for your central nervous system as well. Add to that, we’re going to be jumping in the beginning of my training session because that’s when I’m the most fresh and you want me to squat something heavy after 4-5 sets of that? We’re probably not going to get out of our session what we’re looking for. Enter the box! All I have to do now is set the box up somewhere between 25 and 30 inches (because I can jump 30 inches), and I’ve now decreased the forces I need to overcome by well over half and I can increase my jump volume! It’s a great thing BUT a lot of coaches don’t know how to use this modality and instead use it as either a goal height to jump, or as a conditioning tool.

Using the Box as a Goal Height

Like I said in the previous section, this isn’t really the purpose of the box. It can absolutely be used this way on occasion (very infrequently) and I definitely do when I feel like an athlete isn’t working at 100% of their capability. BUT we need to make sure we’re not making a habit out of this practice because over time it’s going to give terrible cues to the athlete when landing. There’s two parts to a jump: the jump and the landing. That second part absolutely gets neglected by the majority of not only athletes, but coaches as well. Even when using a box, we want to make sure we’re landing in an athletic base, which means keeping hip/knee/angle alignment, a rigid torso, and a proud chest. Having a box that is too high doesn’t allow us to decelerate/land in a good position and over time it’s going to ingrain those terrible deceleration patterns and it WILL ABSOLUTELY CARRY OVER TO THE FIELD OF PLAY.

There’s a time and a place to overreach, it’s how we progress through training. There’s also an acceptable deviation from perfect movement in the gym, but we can’t live in that space. Using the box in this manner all the time will lead to undesired outcomes in the gym, and eventually on the field of play. Remember that the purpose of the box is to decrease forces associated with landing, which will allow us to get more work done!

Box Jumps for Conditioning

This is another unintended consequence of creating new modalities for the gym. Someone’s gonna use it for conditioning. Understanding that the box allows us to decrease the forces associated with landing, some coaches saw it fit to try to justify ultra high volume jumping as a conditioning tool. This is something important to understand, JUMPING IS A HORRIBLE WAY TO CONDITION:

• Jumping requires a high level of coordination, conditioning and coordination don’t mix well together

• Jumping is meant to be done with high levels of speed, conditioning and speed don’t go well together

Now there’s definitely more reasons, but they all pretty much revolve around these two statements. I completely understand the thought process behind it, you want to increase speed endurance? Do something that forces you to stay fast in an exhausted environment. The problem lies in the fact that jumping requires near perfect movement and positioning. They’re HUGE cues for both producing force, and accepting it. Think of jumping like you would squatting. A great tool to increase strength, speed and power. But you wouldn’t use the squat to condition would you? Probably not and why’s that? Because you could honestly end up hurt, you wouldn’t have quality reps as you got exhausted, and there’s better ways to accomplish this task! Jumping is no different and at times we’re dealing with even greater forces than you’re capable of squatting. Use jumps as they’re intended.

Jumps for Speed

Jumps are a GREAT way to train for speed. In fact with Balyi’s Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD) model focusing on speed in the “speed windows” of development, I think jumps get WAY overlooked. Coaches will typically program higher sprint volumes in this window, but I think they’re doing themselves a huge disservice. The speed of movement is actually faster with jumps than it is with sprints. Don’t believe me? Think about it this way: sprints are a unilateral movement while typical jumping is bilateral. What this means is that when sprinting we’re propelling our bodies forward using one leg at a time, with jumping we’re using two. Wanna test this? Go do a single leg jump, then a normal jump and tell me which jump is higher and faster. Jumping on two legs is substantially faster, and higher. Now this doesn’t mean that sprinting isn’t also a great tool for increasing speed, this point just illustrates that jumping is a great tool for speed as well!

In the beginning of this article I listed a bunch of ways to jump for speed, and we’re going to go over them in depth here:

• Box Jumps

  • We’ve gone over these in depth in this article, use them accordingly

• Hurdle Jumps

  • Similar to box jumps in the sense that you have to jump high enough to clear an object. Hurdles just don’t have the added benefit of taking away forces on the landing. These can be programmed similar to box jumps, but your volume will need to be decreased due to the extra work associated with landing.

• Counter Movement Jumps (regular jumps)

  • Again, very similar to both hurdle and box jumps in execution. We just don’t have the object to clear from a height perspective and we don’t have the box to decrease landing forces. It isn’t as sexy as jumping over something, but it will get the job done.

• Band Assisted Jumps

  • This may be a new one to some of you. This involves tying a band to either the ceiling or the top of a rack and holding onto it as you jump. The band builds tension in the bottom and forces you to be explosive in order to keep up with the speed of the band. These are typically utilized in contrast training which is the act of lifting something heavy (typically squatting or pulling), followed by something with high velocity. The goal is to use the heavy movement to recruit the highest number of muscle fibers and use them in the assisted jumps. Typically if we’re decreasing the load (the band makes it easier to jump, obviously) the body will use fewer muscle fibers to accomplish the task, doing something heavy prior to this movement will help recruit more and allow us to eventually adapt and jump higher and with more speed.

These movements all have two things in common: they’re on two feet and either bodyweight or less than bodyweight movements. This means the speed of movement is high enough to create changed conducive to speed at the physiological level. When done properly, jumping can make a world of difference in your performance!

Jumping for Strength?

So we’ve established that jumping can be a great tool for increasing speed, but did you know that we can create changes in strength as well with jumping? There’s two reasons for this: using single leg jumps increases the force output demand pushing it closer to strength development, and landing involves overcoming substantially more forces than even squatting at times making it suitable for strength gains. We can also add exterior loads when jumping which can help push us towards strength, but the majority of the time we want to incorporate weights that are pretty light thus keeping it closer to speed/power development. Here’s some ways that we can work on strength through jumping:

• Depth Drops

  • A depth drop is technically not jumping but we categorize it as a jump due to both positioning and coordination needs. You set up a box to a certain height, step off and land in a good position. In the beginning i typically have my athletes start on a 6-12 inch box or even from their toes. Over time as you get better and stronger we increase the heigh of the box. My highest training aged athletes will do depth drops off of a box that’s upwards of 48 inches off the ground. This isn’t included super often in my programming because it takes so much out of us, but it’s absolutely a tool you can use to help increase strength and to help cue better deceleration over time.

• Depth Drop Jumps

  • This exercise is similar to a depth drop, however upon landing we’re jumping straight up into the air. Now this landing is slightly different from a typical landing in that we’re not going to decelerate ourselves into an athletic base, we’re going to hit the ground in that position. When we hit the ground we’re already in a position to be able to jump without a countermovement. The goal is to spend as little time on the ground as possible (aiming for 0.2s of ground contact time) and jump as high as well can. The higher the drop, the more forces we have to overcome, the bigger effect it has on strength development.

• Single Leg Jumps

  • Single leg jumps are a great way to work on both power and strength. We take our bodyweight and decrease our output by roughly a half by taking away the other leg. I typically like to perform these movements onto a box, because why not control all of the variables when we can?

• Weighted Jumps

  • Just like normal jumps but you’ll be wearing a weighted vest, holding dumbbells or attached to some kind of external resistance (vertimax, keiser, etc). This is designed to have you overcome more external resistance on both the jump and the landing. Volume needs to be controlled a little more than regular jumps due to this fact and we don’t want to use much more than 10-15% of our bodyweight in external weight.

These exercises/movements can be performed a few times per week, and even more if we’re landing on a box and monitoring the volume closely. This next section will go over parameters for these movements and the movements geared more towards speed.

Parameters for Jumping

Ok, so we now know that we can use jumps for a few different stimuli, but how can you incorporate them into your training sessions? Glad ya asked! Jumps, no matter the goal, should always be one of the first things we do in a training session, and it should ALMOST NEVER be the entire training session. Your training sessions should look like this:

1. General Warm Up

   1. Moving around, getting blood flow. Jogging, shuffling, lunging, general mobility work, etc. You can jump on a treadmill, go for a walk, really whatever you enjoy doing that helps get some blood flow and get our muscles warm

2. Specific Warm Up

   1. Targeted mobility work for the session at hand, rehearsal of movements (bodyweight). This helps us make sure we’re able to get into positions necessary for the work ahead

3. Movement Prep

   1. Force transfers (landmine, medball, light oly lifts), jumps, acceleration work, etc. These movements help to prime the CNS for what’s to come

4. Main Lift

   1. This lift is the main focus of our session. Compound exercises like the squat, bench press and deadlift go here. Everything within this session is designed to improve this movement

5. Accessory Work

   1. Lifts and movements that help drive up both work capacity and main lifts. Think bodybuilding and single limb resistance exercises

6. Work Capacity/Conditioning

   1. Pushing a sled, pulling a sled, bike work, etc

7. Mobility/Cool Down

   1. Things designed to “undo” the movement dysfunction that heavy loads throughout the training session can create over time

For me, jumping falls into the “movement prep” category. It’s not so early in the session that we’re not ready, but it’s not so late in the session that we’re worn out before performing them. It also helps to prime the CNS for the work that lies ahead.

Next on the list is volume. How many jumps should I be doing? That depends entirely on your abilities, what kind of jumps we’re doing, and the goals of the session. Here’s a breakdown for each one:

• Box jumps - Explosive speed

  • These are by far the least taxing. Sets should be no more than 5, reps should be no more than 3-5 per set and rest periods should be around a minute, or until almost total recovery.

  • No less than 3 sets of 3 reps, no more than 5 sets of 5 reps. Almost full recovery for rest periods, typically around 60 seconds. Live in-between those and venture towards the edges when need be.

• Hurdle jumps - Explosive speed

  • Hurdles don’t help to decrease landing forces, so we need to be mindful of this. I tend to program these in a 5-6 jump series, with no more than 3 sets.

  • No more than 3 sets of 5-6 reps. Same recovery as box jumps, however it may be closer to 90 seconds.

• Normal jumping - Explosive speed

  • Program similar to hurdle jumps. No more than 3 sets of 5-6 reps.

• Band-assisted jumps - Explosive speed

  • Use in contrast training. Outside of that it won’t really do much to help increase speed or strength.

  • Strength exercise at 90%+ for 1-2 reps, then immediately 3-5 band assisted jumps. No more than 3-5 sets

• Depth drops - Strength

  • Early on in training the volume can essentially be as high as you want it to be, or as much as you can keep someone’s attention. Once your training age gets higher, and you drop from a higher box we need to pull back on the volume. I program these with the same parameters I use for box jumps.

• Depth drop jumps - Strength

  • Although similar to depth drops, there’s an entire new component to these. The jump is us not only accepting the force of the landing, but actively overcoming it to jump. No matter the height of the box, I don’t program reps higher than 3 per set, and never more than 5 sets. FULL RECOVERY for rest periods.

  • 1-3 reps for 3-5 sets.

• Single leg jumps - Strength

  • The increased demand on the jump (and landing) means we need to drop the volume. I will typically program no more than 4 reps per leg, and no more than 3 sets.

  • 1-4E reps for 2-3 sets

• Weighted jumps - Power/Speed/Strength

  • The added weight on the jump and the landing mean that the volume has to drop. We never hold dumbbells when jumping on a box as the benefits outweigh the potential cost of injury. 3-5 reps of no more than 3 sets. Almost full recovery for rest periods. No more than 20% of your bodyweight, but usually in the 10-15% range.

  • 3-5 reps for 2-3 sets, almost full recovery in between sets, typically 60-90 seconds.

There ya have it! That’s how you can incorporate jumping into your existing training plan without destroying or hurting yourself! Jumping is a great tool, but we need to make sure we’re programming it in a thoughtful manner. If you incorporate jump training into your work, you’re more than likely using way too much volume and/or using them in the wrong manner. Scale it back and allow it to work FOR you! When done right jumping can act as a CNS stimulator in addition to helping increase both speed and strength!