Forever Young – Are Plyometrics the Fountain of Youth?

Being able to jump powerfully and with grace is a sign of vigor, athleticism, and youth. It is well known that out of all of the physical attributes, speed (moving quickly) and power (moving quickly against resistance) are the first to succumb to entropy.

Humans start losing power at 30 years of age, and it’s downhill from there. That’s what the science says, anyways.

I know many of my readers are 30+ like myself, so what are we supposed to do? Pack it up and take up poker? Absolutely not.

Working as a trainer at a commercial gym, I noticed many middle age clients would refuse to do simple box jumps, claiming it was “not for them” or that they didn’t “like it”.

Consider that Chinese weightlifter Lu Xiaojun won his third gold medal at the 2020 summer Olympics at the age of 37 – if at that age, Olympic gold medals can be won in a sport that so heavily relies on raw power, don’t tell me you can’t maintain the ability to jump onto a box into your thirties and beyond. Weak.

It is my belief that with correct training, a high level of performance in all physical attributes can be maintained for a long time. The old adage “use it or lose it” applies to power training as well. This is not mere wishful thinking: There are 60 and 70 year old men running a 100 meter dash in under 13 seconds – very few of them, but the point still stands. It would all behoove us to train to maintain elastic tissues and a powerful nervous system.

Therefore, I believe jumping is a basic life skill that should have a place in everyone’s training, no matter your age or the sport you chose to compete in. There are no prerequisites, anyone can start jumping, as long as we stick to some common sense rules.

Important Concepts

In sports, we often make use of the stretch-shortening cycle. As a muscle gets stretched, the so-called stretch reflex kicks in – the nervous system reflexively contracts the muscle to protect it against injury.

That’s why pausing a bench press or a squat at the bottom makes the exercise harder – you can’t make use of the stretch reflex as effectively.

Expanding on this concept, we can roughly group our jumping exercises into three groups:

Static – here we start the action of jumping from a dead stop: for example, jumping up from a seated position or pausing in a quarter squat for several seconds, to allow the stretch reflex to dissipate, before jumping up. Having to overcome this inertia means this type of training biases strength.

Dynamic – a great example of this would be your standard standing vertical jump: from an upright position, you bend at the hips and knees and jump up without pausing in the bottom position. This allows you to make use of the stretch reflex and jump higher.

Reactive – here, we can make the most use of the stretch-shortening cycle: common sense examples include rhythmically performed hurdle jumps in a series, or the infamous depth jump.

All exercises across the static-reactive continuum are valuable for becoming more powerful, so make sure to do movements from each category from time to time.

Applying the Principle of Gradualness to Plyometrics

In physical training, we always want to adhere to the principle of gradual exposure to stress. Jumping is no exception – doing depth jumps when you can barely do a bodyweight squat is a surefire recipe for injury.

simple → complex

This one is self explanatory – for example, this week I did this knee to box jump combination. Obviously, one would have to learn both the knee jump and the box jump in isolation before attempting to string them together.

low intensity → high intensity

This is the most important rule to keep in mind. As a rule of thumb, the more reactive an exercise, the higher the intensity, however, this is not always the case. For instance, jumping rope would be a relatively low intensity movement that is still reactive. On the other hand, something like a weighted box jump is not very reactive in nature, but would still considered high intensity. Use your common sense here.

Volume Parameters

To train raw explosiveness, we want to target the anaerobic alactic energy system. It is very powerful, but unfortunately, not resistant to fatigue at all, and can provide energy for only around 10 seconds.

It follows that we want to keep the number of repetitions per set low – up to 5 for very intense exercises, for less demanding movements we’re going to cap it at 10.

Furthermore, we want near complete rest between sets to ensure consistent quality – your output should not drop from set to set, and ideally increase, as your nervous system gets ramped up more and more. Two to three minutes is going to be the general recommendation.

To get in sufficient volume, we’re going to do multiple sets – around 5-10 on average. The total volume can range from 20-100 reps, depending on intensity and preparedness.

Here are some common sense examples of set/rep schemes:

• 10x3

• 5x5

• 10x10

In regards to training frequency, I recommend a minimum of once per week, but someone who is well prepared is going to be able to jump almost daily. Two to three times per week is probably the happy medium for most.

What About High Rep Plyometrics?

A lot of strength & conditioning coaches smugly belittle anyone who trains or programs jumps for high repetitions and under fatigue. Meanwhile, the jerk event in competitive kettlebell lifting is basically jumping … for high repetitions, and under fatigue.

It is very common for kettlebell sport athletes to jerk a pair of kettlebells for 100+ reps in 10 minutes. I’d pay good money to watch some book smart sport scientist attempt to replicate that…

Here is clip from a workout I did in preparation for a kettlebell sport competition – high volume reactive box jumps with incomplete rest, everything the dorks say you shouldn’t do.

Not only is there a time and a place for high rep plyometrics, I’d argue power endurance – the ability to repeatedly move against resistance with speed, under fatigue – is the most impressive attribute of them all.

That being said, I believe most of your jumping should be done in adherence to the classic recommendations, especially if you’re new to it.

To sum it up, I believe everybody should include some form of jumping in their training at least once a week. Find an exercise that scales to your level and do 5-10 sets of up to ten reps. It’s not complicated, you just have to do it.

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Have a great weekend,

Alexander