Depth Jumps For Vertical Jump Training: Part 2

Okay, now just a few other things to consider, I’m not gonna go through a whole treatment of volume of depth jumps. But once again, if you are measuring your vertical jump, than you will know when you need to stop doing a particular exercise. Not only depth jumps, but any type of exercise, that involves jumping in the air. And, if your jump intensity lowers, so if you were jumping 36 inches every time you did the depth jump and you could verify that by your measuring device, and you are now jumping 32 – 34 inches every time you should know that you’re beginning to train below your optimal level. And so, you don’t want to be training anymore, or you need to give yourself more recovery time. People do these depth jumps, and they just get…they just go back and forth they do them so quickly with no rest time, that the energy they use per jump is so much lower they’re not jumping very high each time. You want every single repetition of your depth jump to be at your maximum jump height, if you do that you will notice that, that starts to go up that you start to push that limit. Whereas, if you are doing a low quality high quantity, you’ll notice that instead of doing 20 jumps at 20 inches you can do 40 jumps at 20 inches, which is really a little benefit. And of course the high repetitions can increase your tendon stiffness, it can increase your plyometric response, but it will not do so, optimally as will training for high quality per repetition. And I know I repeat that a lot, but really people just don’t quite get it. I have people who e-mail me daily telling me, “Hey I decided to double the program, double the repetitions because I need results now.” And basically that’s counterproductive.
Okay, also just want to give a word on form here. When you are absorbing force, you want to make sure that you are aligned, so you want to make sure your knees are going the same direction as your ankle joints, and your hips and your knees are all aligned. So, that structure can correctly transfer that force through your body and there’s more on this in The Jump Manual and in some of the plyometric videos, but alignment during the depth jump is extremely important. Now, for those of you who have had knee problems or do have knee problems email me or let me know because I have a very, very, very effective Patellar tendinitis regime, that really works very well, people who have never had…who have always had Patellar tendinitis are now telling me that their knees feel 100% better. And anyways, let me know and I can send you to that. But, one thing that you can do is jump onto a box, this is kinda of a depth jump, jump off the box, land absorb the force and then jump back on to the box, and the reason that you want to jump back on to the box, is so that you minimize the impact that’s going to the knee. Because a depth jump alone, is not going to be the best idea if you’re having knee pain that’s above you know a 3 or 4. If you’re having knee pain or knee problems depth jumps are probably going to be ill advised especially at higher volumes. But, you know if you’re just, if you’ve had problems before and you’re fine now and you want to safe guard against having problems with Patellar tendinitis in the future, something you can do is jump, do the depth jump on to another box to reduce the impact going into………..
……..I just want to leave off with a word about shock drops and drop jumps. Those are um…There’s a lot of prescriptions that you can use for your drop jumps or shock jumps one way is just so that you properly learn to absorb force, which is really a prerequisite to learning to transfer force. So, if you can’t properly absorb force, you’re in no position to jump off a box and then jump in the air, because you can’t even absorb the force in the first place. What you want to learn to do with shock drops is you want to learn to absorb the force completely with your muscles. If you jump off a 4 foot barrier and hit the ground, you think that you’re training your muscles, but what you’re really doing is degenerating your joints. Its’ very important that the jumps are absorbed by the muscles and not the joints which means that you’re going to be hitting the ground and very quickly recoiling and absorbing that force with your muscles. The reason it’s so important to do that with the muscles, aside from the fact that you will degenerate your joints if you don’t properly learn to do that, is that when the force is absorbed by your muscles the stretch reflex is increased so that eccentric energy and that eccentric activation is increased when its absorbed through your muscles as appose to where you just jar the joints and you’re only going to be increasing the wear and tear of their joints with very little transfer back up into the air. That’s why you want to learn to transfer with your muscles and not with your joints. It’s the best for performance, it’s the best for injury prevention, it is just the way to go. And so, I’m not going to do a complete… This was really suppose to be just about depth jumps so based on the questions that you may have about this video I may make another one to clarify points that I have spoke about in a peripheral manner. Please leave your questions and comments below and I will follow up if need be. Thank you for listening bye bye.