Plyometric Training And Vertical Jumping

While online doing some online plyometric training research I came across the following informative article that discussed Plyometrics And Vertical Jumping. I found it easy to understand and light reading!

So I put the contents of the article in the space below so you can find out for yourself. Just make sure that when you’re done, you come back up and check out this info about Vertical Jumping And Plyometics, too.

Plyometrics are often a fun way to train and because they originated in the Soviet Union there is some mystique surrounding plyometrics. For these reasons plyometrics training is often misused and overdone.

The truth is that most of the plyometric exercises that we use today weren’t part of the original plyometrics exercises. Originally there were only two exercises, depth jumps and depth drops. Today we tend to group any exercise that involves the so called “stretch shorting cycle” into plyometrics. But one of the originally two (depth drops) didn’t even involve and reaction to force. It involved dropping off of a height and merely holding the landing pose.

Regardless it doesn’t really matter, people now group a lot of other exercises into plyometrics and misuse them. In easy terms you can think of plyometrics as basically exercises that convert raw strength into power. Power is force * speed. You can have a great deal of muscular strength but your muscles might only be able to produce this force relatively slow (for vertical jumping we are talking about tenths of a second). Doing plyometric s (in easy to understand terms) essentially “teaches” these muscles how to produce force much faster. This improves speed and jumping height.

However if you don’t have that much strength in the first place then what good is it to “convert it”? Think of it like converting dollars to euros. If you go to Europe and you have American money then you can convert those dollars to euros. But it does you no good to get little or no dollars converted to euros, because the money exchanging station isn’t giving you money they are merely converting money from one currency to another.

Most people can get good results from a plyometrics routine, even if they haven’t done any previous weight training. These people already have some strength or else they wouldn’t even be able to walk. But then after they get good results from this training they want to do it again and again. Then they are surprised when these techniques that worked for them in the past stop working. The truth is that these people need to increase their strength base before they will be able to benefit further from plyometrics. Plyometrics and strength training should go hand in hand.

This article was written by: Justan Wear

Effective information, huh? I thought you would like it. Check out this info for MORE on how to increase your vertical.

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