007 Vertical jumping

in a standard kind of um two legged jump test that you might do in a sporting situation or in a you know for a sports test situation or just in a gym just to kind of uh monitor your progress over time. Uh, we will talk about more complex situations like one leg jumping and jumping with some run ups and that kind of thing later on. We're gonna limit ourselves today just literally to

make sure that we kind of only talk for, you know, kind of thirty, forty minutes,'cause if we start introducing variations, we will be here all day. So, um, that's the plan.

Um, as always, I'm going to do a little bit of physiology intro. It's not going to be hopefully as long as the previous intros that I've done because we can build on all of the stuff that we've uh already talked about. And then obviously we'll start talking about programming straight after that. So starting at the beginning. Biomechanically, um our ability to do a vertical jump in the context that I've you know kind of um described.

is essentially uh defined by the impulse that we can generate in the vertical direction relative to body weight. So straight away an impulse obviously is force times time. So straight away that tells us that when we're thinking about the vertical jump, we've got to be aware that a heavier body weight is going to be disadvantageous in that specific situation. So um and I'm not saying that that means we all need to go on a diet. I'm just saying that, you know,

you know, for the for the purposes of a a vertical jumping test, body weight is going to matter. So if body weight is going up for other reasons, so for example, you know, um in a in a in a context sport like rugby or in American football, uh there's been a a a request by the coach that a certain player, you know, increases their their muscle mass, you are you're probably going to find that vertical jump height doesn't improve

you know, naturally over the course of the training programme, even though the training programme might be working pretty well. And that could simply be because they're adding mass and that is then making it harder to, you know, kind of uh, you know, achieve the same jump heights as previously. So straight away when we just look at the basic biomech biomechanical determinant

of vertical jumping. We've got this, you know, relative relative being relative to body weight, um, vertical impulse, that's telling us obviously that uh the w the weight of the athlete is going to uh going to going to matter. So after that basically we're gonna say, okay, so we've got this um force times time what is time in this scenario? Well time is basically the um period of uh time in the concentric phase from the point

the bottom point of the counter moon. So essentially the athlete is going to um sort of dip down in the counter moon and then launch themselves upwards. And the space of uh or the distance that they've got from the start of that counter movement to the to the to the takeoff point is really like the runway. Now in that runway obviously takes period of time and that force times time is going to give you the impulse that determines the jump height at the end of the um you know the takeoff phase.

Now, what's really cool is that what we see in certain um uh after certain types of training like assisted jumping is that those uh counter moment depths tend to drift downwards in order to give the athlete more um runway in order to take advantage of the speed gains that they've achieved that haven't arrived

you know, in concordance with increased strength gains. So if we just do assisted uh jump training, what happens is either the maximum speed improves, and of course we've talked about maximum speed in the previous podcast and how it works. If your maximum speed improves but your maximum strength doesn't, What's naturally going to happen is that you're going to start to dip lower in your counter movement to take advantage of your new maximum speed that you can't reach.

in the same period of time as previously or the same distance as previously because you haven't got a greater acceleration capacity. If you have a greater acceleration capacity and a greater maximum speed, then you're probably not going to adjust your counter movement depth. Because you've got the ability to get to your new higher maximum speed, you know, uh more quickly.

So ultimately we can see some interesting stuff going on whereby maximum speed improvements, which are kind of going to allow us to reach a higher speed at takeoff and allow us to reach that uh greater, you know, kind of uh jump height ultimately.

You know, old the the the two things are separate. So accelerating fast sor improving strength but not improving speed, what's gonna happen is we're gonna just naturally accelerate to our old maximum speed and then just carry on at that old maximum speed. So probably your counter movement depths will start to get slightly shallower.

but you'll still reach the same maximum speed at takeoff and you'll still end up with the same jump bite as previously. I'm not saying that I'm not saying that's gonna happen because naturally when we do heavy strength training, we tend to improve motor unit equipment, which does tend to improve speed, as we talked about all of this stuff in previous podcasts.

So you generally find that with heavy strength training, it's not just uniquely producing an improvement in strength. It is producing a little bit of improvement in speed. So naturally what tends to happen with heavy strength training is you tend to get improvements in strength and speed at the same time, but much bigger increases in strength than in speed. Um it really depends on which adaptions are being generated. Uh with speed training it tends not to be quite so um kind of uh

generous in terms of the spillover from speed back to strength. So we tend to see a much more marked improvement in speed. And therefore you get this uh strangeness occurring where the athlete starts to adjust their counter movement depth to take account of the new maximum speed without the greater acceleration that would, you know, ideally go with it.

So you've got to be aware that these are two totally separate characteristics that are uh kind of being improved, those separate sets of adaptions, a little bit of spillover with Motina Crewman, but we've talked about that as I say in previous podcasts. So please go back and check those. uh the intro one we did at the very beginning, plus the maximum speed and maximum strength podcasts individually. So that's kind of the the overview of the um

you know, from the outside, looking at the system from the outside. Looking at the system from the inside, we've obviously got the proximal to distal sequence, the hip is kind of working initially and then the knee and then the ankle. When we look at the vertical jump, it's actually a lot slower a movement than many of the other

sort of movements that we see in the literature like sprinting especially. As a result, we do have the ability to produce um quite a meaningful contribution to the vertical jump from the knee extensors. And in fact, when we look at percentage terms, the knee extensions Mae'n cael eu cymdeithas o 50% ymdeithas ymdeithas ymdeithas ac ymdeithas ac ymdeithas ac ymdeithas ac ymdeithas ac ymdeithas ac ymdeithas.

essentially making up the other the other fifty between them. So the the knee extensors are a really, really important component, but of course they are second in line after the hip. So when we go go back and think about how the proximal todistal sequence works. reminds us that with the hip being first, we can essentially get much more out of heavy strength training when we're trying to improve vertical jumping because

it is much more force oriented, even in the context of a very fast vertical jump. The hip is still going to reach slower maximum speeds than the knee and the ankle. The knee is going to be much more balanced, largely going to improve as a result of um, you know

strength training and speed training. The ankle is going to be at the speed end of the spectrum and as I generally just don't bother with it because um you kind of most of its contribution is happening due to kinetic energy passed down the chain from the hip and the knee.

So ultimately what we've got then is a an interesting kind of set of um kind of or framework here, an interesting set of parameters that tell us that we're gonna gain a benefit for vertical jumping both from a greater acceleration from the heavy strength train that improves um you know the force production, therefore the acceleration. but also the maximum speed and that allows us to reach a faster maximum speed at takeoff points.

you know, at the end of each uh uh kind of concentric phase and therefore achieve, you know, greater jump height. So taking all of that together, what it tells us is the vertical jump is actually a very, very balanced

you know, kind of movement that actually benefits from a number of different types of training and a number of different muscle groups being trained. And this is one of the reasons, if not the reason why, vertical jump height is one of the most improvable um sporting metrics or athletic uh performance metrics that we can actually test because ultimately it can be improved by

Heavy strength training for the hip. It can be improved by both heavy strength training and, you know, uh fast movement training for the knee. And it can be improved. ultimately, um, by a combination of those factors and some of them even spill over, you know, kind of to affect each other. So There's a lot that we can actually do in context of vertical jumping that is actually uh we're much more limited in terms of um other activities by comparison.

So that's the kind of basic framework that uh it's the physiology. As I said, we've leaned quite a lot on previous uh kind of podcasts. Um we can now kind of jump in and talk a little bit about how programming might look based on these observations.

Rob, talk us through a couple of training programmes that you're writing at the moment that are designed to improve, you know, specifically the you know, the kind of the the standard vertical jump test if you'd like, the the counter movement jump test.

I guess one of the one of the ones I can give you an example of currently that I'm that I'm working with is a semi pro volleyball player. So I mean with her, you know, like you just said, really important to have that heavy work for the hip.

Um, previously, you know, prior to working with me, she had not been doing a ton, um, which was unfortunate. She had a lot of like just squatting movements and that, which weren't bad. But so we added in, in her case, hip thrusts, um, you know, the gym that she has access to. I see you laughing. You know, really nice hip thrust machine. And um, you know, that's been kind of her like main heavy work. She's also in the past done some like hex bar deadlifts and stuff like that.

I do have her back squatting as well. So just because she enjoys them and she wasn't terribly strong to start. So for her, it was basically hip thrust. um barbell back squat and then she has some speed work like early in the session, just kind of the normal stuff we mentioned. Um unloaded jumps and very light loaded jumps.

Um, in her case, if she does them with any kind of light load, just holding like dumbbells by her side, something like that, very, very light. Um, but you know, a lot of unloaded stuff. Uh the the heavy hip work has definitely done a good bit for her. Um hip throw strength has gone way, way up. You know, she started maybe I think it was

Two forty five amp plates and or so per side, two or three. Now she's doing four plates and a twenty-five um with good technique and the the vertical jump has really shown a good increase um squat strength.

Same thing. She's gone from maybe 165 pounds for some decent reps to well into the two hundreds. Um so that's both of those things have proven really, really nice for increasing her jump height um on their own, I would say. And then for the speed end of things, like I said, the unloaded jumps.

early in the session, just a couple well reps as fast as she can, you know, tracking it with the Majump at for the max height. And then you said, you know, and we talked about it before, not really doing much for the ankle. She does do some calf hop. just trying to, you know, dorsiflex as hard as she can in the air and kinda hit the ground as hard and fast as she can with uh the ball of her foot pretty much.

But nothing really too much for the Cavs. No real heavy work for the Cavs. Again, we mentioned a couple other episodes avoiding that. But that's uh that's kind of the way I've gone about for her. Jump height has really, really increased. To this point.

when they started didn't have um really high levels of squat strength and obviously because they'd not been doing any hip thrusts at all, they didn't have very high levels of hip thrust strength either. Um and I think it's really important that um I think it's a fairly well documented observation, um

at least among strength coaches, that um when somebody has a relatively low level of of of kind of squatting strength or, you know, kind of any lower body strength, they do tend to see pretty big improvements in vertical jump height as a result of doing those heavy strength training movements. And then um it the improvements start to get smaller and smaller and smaller and you kind of get to that sort of intermediate, higher intermediate level with with lower body strength.

And improving takes a lot of effort to kind of move forward on those things. But it doesn't seem to transfer quite so much into vertical jump heights. I'm I'm not I'm not saying that that's gonna be the case for everybody. It just seems to be kind of one of those things that most people are kind of yeah, that's more or less how things have gone for me or how how they've gone for my athletes. And I think really

That's big that plays perfectly in line with the physiology that I was describing earlier, which is that when we see um, you know, when we look at the transferability of different exercise or training types to vertical jumping, everything kind of looks on paper like it's gonna transfer. The issue is that if the limiting factor becomes the speed aspect

then there isn't actually any amount of heavy strength chain that's gonna change anything. Because ultimately the takeoff jump height sorry, take off jump height, the takeoff jump velocity, sorry, is the determinant of your ultimate jump height. So if you have, you know, a certain maximum velocity that you can't get past.

then ultimately increasing acceleration, as I said earlier, all it's gonna do, you know, F equals M A, all it's gonna do is get us to a point where we reach our maximum velocity earlier And then just carry on travelling at that same velocity until we reach the top of the concentric phase, at which point we've kind of just wasted like, you know, kind of ten centimeters worth of runway. Um what we need to do is have a higher velocity that's

you know, higher maximum velocity and then use a a greater acceleration to take us to that new maximum velocity. And I think what happens with, you know, people over time is that they do a bunch of heavy strength training exercises like the hip thrust, like the squat and what have you.

And they're like, Yeah, this is fantastic. I'm improving. It's brilliant. And then they s sort of notice it stops working and they're like, Oh, I need to double down and do this harder. And I'm like, No, you actually need to look at the opposite end of the spectrum and go, Why is it that I can't reach a high maximum velocity?

is because I'm actually I've stopped focusing on the speed aspect of things because it's so seductive to get kind of into the numbers with hip thrust numbers and and v and and kind of squat numbers and be like, Oh, if I can just push those numbers up then my vertical will go up and it might do.

It might do. Um, but it might not. I if the velocity limitation is the hard and, you know, fast thing that's stopping you getting any higher, then you there's no amount of acceleration that's gonna get you, you know, past that particular point. Um Do you have any uh programs at the moment where people are doing assisted stuff? So we talked before about how, you know, there's like

you know, the vertical jump itself obviously is a is is is a fast movement, but it's not a really fast movement like sprinting is. So we've actually got this interesting capacity to actually talk about, you know, maybe looking at improving the speed by doing assisted type training.

and then hadn't prior to working when they'd been doing really any specific speed work. So initially it was just unloaded jumping. And then after that we had moved actually to some uh assisted jumping with the bands and that. So like you were saying, that that really had a big impact and definitely, you know, when it came to his jump, like you were saying, it improved his counter movement depth.

and definitely made a a big difference in the jump height overall. Um he's been running those for quite a while now. Same setup. Um that's the beginning of the program, you know, for the speed work and then the heavy strength work and that is after that. Um in his case had also moved to a more concentric only squat, um, just from uh from pins. So pins more up, you know, towards the top of the range there.

didn't really feel like he needed so much in uh in the bottom end of the movement and he does a lot of sport training in that as well. So didn't want him getting overly tired and fatigued from full range squatting and working to longer muscle lengths and things like that.

So I think for for him at least that combination has proven really, really useful. And uh you know, of course in the jump too, you're not at a super long muscle length, you're not squatting all the way down, even when you're hitting that kind of optimal counter movement depth. So didn't necessarily need the four range squatting at this point, I felt like.

sink into the, you know, counter movement jump deep as you can, and then use the bands to propel yourself upward significantly faster than you'd otherwise be able to go. Super easy to set up, honestly. That's the way I typically do it.

Power racks. Power racks are probably going to be pretty much perfect for that as they're as they're bolted to the floor and you can kind of loop the bands either side of you and that gives you some really good um you know kind of uh a really good zone in which you can work where you've got nothing above you but you've still got the support. Any hands. Um yeah, so if so I guess it's just requires a little bit of a safety audit before you start. Yeah.

There's no way I can do that. It requires a harness and you know, you look at the setups in the literature and they've got these people in these bungees with you know climbing harnesses on and they're flying around like, you know, trapeze artists. having a great time. And like, okay, so that's not really feasible to do in my gym. That's actually it might be. If there's if there's scope to do what you what you've described there, that could be really, really valuable, I think, to a lot of people.

You know, but assistance is just gonna be so much better because you're actually providing a stimulus that they're never gonna get anywhere else. I mean the athlete is not going to get those stimuli from any other scenario other than, you know, when you provide that assistance because it's just not a it's not something that happens. You know, gravity doesn't change around us as we're walking around.

you know, we can't just nip over to the moon to do some training for a bit and come back. It's not like, you know, altitude training where you can go to, you know, three thousand meters and do some, you know, different types of aerobic exercise. It's this is kind of really uh a unique stimulus that as you've described is quite easy to implement in in certain situations as long as there's a a a bolted down power rack, it it could be doable for most people. Um

So that I think is really important. It's like yes, a an unloaded vertical jump is potentially going to give us that, you know, speed under the spectrum training. But to be honest, most athletes will have already done, as you've been saying, years of that kind of stuff. They've been doing years of heavy strength training, years of

you know, kind of unloaded vertical jumping. You know, what can we do that's different? Well I think, you know, really on the on the strengthening side, the hip thrust is, you know, obvious thing that we can do. It's very balanced between and we say this every single week, don't we?

Well, an athlete that's already got a decent squat, you know, for that athlete class. You know, I think my my I I say that because there's so many strength coaches who kind of like have dabbled in powerlifting or even competed in powerlifting. And they kind of look at anything that's not their numbers as being weak. And I'm like, Now hang on a minute. That's

for the for the knee extensors and his squat type variations is probably not going to be the thing that makes a big difference. Uh whereas some assisted jump training I think could be really cool, as could the the hip strength training, you know, in things like the hip thrust.

Uh and then the other question, which again you've already answered, which I get so many times, is you know uh and in fact after uh after my run last week I had even more of the questions, which is can I really do speed training in the same session as strength training?

you know, you're not gonna need much to be fresh from a single jump. So you just do it for a few minutes in the studio session and then move on to the rest. And yeah, like you said, it's a great warm up. Takes like no time, no reason not to do it. And certainly no reason to periodize it out of your program purposely, you know, when you're when you're off season, just stop jumping. Cause yeah, I mean, I've seen people get their jump better not jumping, you know.

You know, great great work, you know, whatever however it happened, doesn't matter. But that doesn't mean that I'm ever gonna take it out of someone's program. Just doesn't make any sense.'Cause I can guarantee you're gonna improve your job way more if it's in year round than if you take it out for a few months at a time'cause it's Quote unquote. Off season, something like that.

Just uh, you know, a little less fatiguing to start off with and that's more the main focus. Back squatting afterwards, which I've I've had people ask me about when I programmed before, you know, why would I squat after the hip thrust? But squatting first is gonna take a lot more out of the hip thrust than vice versa.

So, you know, even keeping some reps in reserve on both, that tends to work really well. Um, and then after that she moves on to her upper body work, which is not, you know, so consequential here, just basic stuff. And then um in her case she finishes up with some eccentric quad work. We'll get into uh the reason why in a future episode. And then some uh eccentric work for the hamstrings as well, just'cause she, you know

Sprints a lot, runs a lot. But yeah, the main jump work and everything that's trying to drive that up is in her case just at the start of the program, since it's most important, you know, when she's fresh, um long rest and all that between. So

She's just trying to get stronger and improve her jump height. Not really using those so much for hypertrophy. I mean she'll get a little bit of of work out of that, you know, obviously being a couple rep shot failure, but not too much. Um so yeah, just primarily low reps and then just increasing very gradually maintaining reps in reserve and kind of the the quality and the speed that I want

uh kind of exercises with the hip thrust, uh, which is gonna have least uh negative impact on other things afterwards. Then you've got your squat which is a stretch position exercise, so it's gonna have some more negative impacts on anything that goes after. And then you finalize the workout with that, those eccentric uh only training exercises, which are basically just going to completely kind of prevent any further benefits from being achieved.

you know, uh once they've been done. Um, you know, and we talked uh last week about, you know, sets and reps for those kind of things. So we don't need to to dive into it too much here. Um, and in terms of when you're working with somebody who's doing assistance, does it change at all or is it basically just you're kind of replacing the the kind of the unloaded work with with assisted work?

If someone really, really enjoys it, I'll do three for sure. But two you get pretty good improvements consistently. You don't get too fatigued. It doesn't really impact the the sports training and the games and that.

So to finish off today, um, can you uh and I deliberately asked you not to tell me before you we came on the podcast today, I said please don't tell me the silly things that you've seen you know, in the industry about training for vertical jumping. Just throw them at me and get my honest reaction to what you've managed to, you know, find. So tell us tell us some mistakes that you're seeing, you know, out there at the moment in terms of vertical jump training.

has a great back swap. And he does. I think he back swats, you know, really nicely around like two hundred kilos. So this guy's, you know, example then was if you wanna improve your jump. Just go do a ton of back squatting. And yeah, if you're doing six sets of you know, six to eight or whatever it was on a on a barbell back squat, um yeah, like you said, maybe a beginner or someone who's not very strong yet.

It might give you something, but someone who's already been strength training, already been doing those things for quite a while, that kind of a program is not going to give you anything for your vertical jump. It's gonna make you very tired. Gonna make your actual jump.

You know, speed training, um, you know, requires us to for pretty much all of the adaptions, we described them in a previous podcast, but for pretty much all the adaptions on uh that underpin speed improvements, we need to be hitting really high levels of speed.

Um, if you kind of turn up at a workout when you're gonna do some speed type work, where vertical jumping practice, and you've got fatigue mechanism in place, it's pretty much impossible to trigger any of those adaptions at all. So, you know, when What what I think a lot of people don't realise is that when they push the boundaries of what's recoverable um, in the strength training side of things, it really does obliterate our ability to trigger any other adaptions that we might want.

related to the sporting coordination patterns, related to the speed aspects of the adaptations that we're trying to achieve. And it just kind of isolates everything down to being literally just about the strength training. And even then not very good because, you know, kind of

six sense of eight is really not going to be the best powerlifting programme in the world for improving maximum back squat strength. So there's a I mean we will do a podcast on what we think that kind of training, you know, should look like if you want to improve your back squat as quickly as possible. But You know, I think uh certainly, you know, w in anybody's book, six sets of eight is not it. Um So give a g give us another one. Are there any more that you've missed?

for a you know, quote unquote jump squat where they, you know, basically like squat into a little bit of a calf raise and their toes get a little bit off the ground. Um, I've seen that. I've seen ridiculously heavy work like that. That doesn't really make

Or you could just train, you know, speed properly, which is, you know, kind of unloaded or assisted type work. And this kind of just references back to the very beginning with our first podcast, which is that you can't train power directly, you know. And so many people are running around going, Oh, we're training power I I literally had a question on it today. People are going, How do I train power? or can I train power at the same time as something else? I'm like

Power is a second order effect. It literally gets trained whenever you train strength or whenever you train speed. It's an automatic output of increasing either strength or speed because it is literally strength multiplied by speed.

you know, there's no other terminology in there. It's like if you look at power, it's literally four times velocity. So people go, Oh, I can train power directly. Well, how? How are you getting there if you're not getting there via strength or speed? So it's very, very frustrating for me when something can be so simple as to be like basic, you know, kind of math.

And people are looking at it and going, This is complicated. I'm like, No, it's not. It's is actually really simple. Um and so yeah, um I think

those heavy jump squats or any jump squats really are massively overrated. Um, I think we'd be much better off tra training either under the spectrum with speed or or with strength, as we talked about in the very first podcast of this series. So Um were those the were those the were those the most egregious examples or do you have anything else on your sleeve?

There was a big group of coaches who for a long time and still actually as far as I'm aware, promoted like a long stance deep split squat as like the the cure all for everything athletic. Um is gonna cure your knee pain, make your hips better, make you jump higher. Um and when they're talking about improving your jump with it, I've seen guys say because it, you know, trains your quads, trains your glutes, trains your adductors, blah blah blah. Um

physiologically. I'm losing, you know, motor unit recruitment, you know, because I'm devoting effort, perception to this stability requirements I've now got. Um, you know, and that's that's something that's really well established in the literature and people just don't want to hear it.

Um, you know, and and also the coordination improvements that you might get in those situations is just untransferable to our sporting activities. So again, it's it's really not um something that I think makes any sense. Much better to train you know, kind of uh uh sort of muscle groups in specific context. I mean that's why we just keep coming back to the hip thrust. It gives us such an amazing, you know, kind of glute training stimulus that transfers to so many things. Um you know

the only exercise that m we could put into almost anybody's programming it's gonna have a positive effect if it's not already been put in there. Um you know, I think it's uh you know, just in terms of the biomechanics of many of these movements, it has enormous potential to to contribute. So yeah, thank you for that, Brett. It was a great contribution to it.

Strength and conditioning. Um well let's end on that positive note. Um, you know, kind of moving away from the criticisms of what um other coaches happen to be doing at the moment. Um, let's end on that positive note. Hopefully that's given people a uh good introduction and some practical uh applications for vertical jump training. Um, thanks for all that uh that you've given us that uh today, Rob. It's been brilliant. Um and we will be back next time talking about throwing in the uh kind of

The second major movement that we kind of group together with vertical jumping, and then we'll finish this little mini series by talking about sprinting, you know, the week after. So we will be back next time. Hopefully you guys will all join us.