"Athletic" training is having a moment. Everybody wants to jump, sprint, throw med balls, and make their training look a little more like sport.
The problem is that a lot of people start in the wrong place.
I tend to see two groups here:
Coaches who want to make their own training, or their clients' training, more athletic but don't really know where to start with programming.
Your everyday gym-goer doing endless box jumps onto the highest box they can somehow get themselves on top of.
Those look like different problems. They really aren't.
For the sake of this conversation, we'll use plyometrics broadly to describe jumping tasks that require us to rapidly absorb and produce force, generally utilizing the stretch-shortening cycle. I'm using the term loosely here. Same with "athletic." If somebody isn't playing a sport, incorporating some jumping, running, and explosive work into their otherwise traditional training is a good enough working definition for what we're discussing.
Now let's start with the first group, because it explains why box jumps are usually a poor starting point for the second.
If someone struggles to squat, you wouldn't expect nine squat reps a week to teach them how to squat. That is, you probably wouldn't start week one with 3x3 at RPE 9 on a back squat.
We would teach the skill first.
This is where we use constraints. Tempo. Moderate to higher volumes and multiple touch points throughout a week. Sometimes even changing the modality entirely. A back squat might become a goblet squat because the goblet squat gives somebody a better environment to actually learn the movement.
Then we build capacity with that skill.
Only after that do we gradually turn up the intensity.
Coaches intuitively understand this with strength training, but often have a much harder time applying the same logic to plyometrics.
A box jump can absolutely have a purpose. It just gives a beginner very little of what they usually need.
Very few overall reps. Managing ground contacts and coordinating ourselves through propulsive movements is a high-skill motor task. Nine total jumps isn't much practice.
Very little exposure to repeated ground contacts. For most people, one of the major reasons we're incorporating jumping is improving how they absorb, redirect, and produce force when interacting with the ground.
The box itself changes intent. Give somebody an external target and they start solving for the target. The goal becomes getting onto the box. It's not all that different from velocity-based training with a novice lifter. Put a number in front of them and they'll happily let their squat turn to shit trying to make the number go up.
The question isn't whether box jumps are good or bad.
The question is whether the exercise supplies the exposure the person currently needs.
Box jumps, and even drills like snap-downs, do a poor job of preparing somebody to handle repeated contacts if that's our actual goal.
Any broad argument for starting everybody with snap-downs can usually be logically dismantled by simply understanding how to manipulate plyometric intensity.
If somebody needs practice managing ground contacts, give them an easier jumping task they can perform repeatedly and well.
I'm by no means a plyometric expert. I'll always be the first person to refer out to somebody like Matt Watson, whose tiered framework has been hugely influential on how I understand plyometric programming.
Having a general understanding of that framework, and more importantly the principles underneath it, has gone a very long way in my own coaching.
I don't view the following as a checklist somebody has to "pass." Think of it more as an example of how I might progress exposure.
1. Start with simple bilateral contacts.
Low-effort pogo hops. Easy jumps in place.
Can they stay relatively organized in one spot? Can they coordinate the upper and lower body? Can they organize the foot before it hits the ground?
Most people are surprisingly all over the place.
They have a hard time managing their center of mass as they move through space. You'll also commonly see somebody reaching for the floor with a limp, plantar-flexed foot rather than creating the appropriate pre-tension before contact.
If the goal is utilizing the stretch-shortening cycle and maximizing mechanical efficiency, we need enough stiffness and pre-tension before we ever hit the ground.
2. Build repeatable quality.
Choose an intensity that allows somebody to accumulate good repetitions.
If we're starting with very high-intensity, high-skill options, we're probably getting worse quality work and less of it.
Higher intensities also come with a larger recovery cost. Now we're not only reducing the number of quality contacts within the session, we're potentially reducing how frequently we can expose somebody to them across the week.
Lower the intensity enough to let them practice.
3. Progress intensity and variety before automatically jumping into a completely different tier.
I tend to think about this similarly to lower-body strength training.
Before I progress somebody to a single-leg RDL, I'm probably going bilateral, then B-stance, then single leg.
Plyometrics give us a pretty intuitive version of the same progression.
Go from bilateral to split stance to single leg and you're progressively redistributing more of the same system load into one leg while keeping intent relatively similar.
From there we can also start layering in more movement complexity.
I like to think about ground contacts the same way I think about a good lead guitarist moving around a fretboard.
They don't need to stare down at their hands to know exactly where a particular fret or string is. They've built such a detailed internal map through repetition that hand and finger position becomes almost automatic.
I think there's tremendous value in doing something similar with the foot and ankle.
Where is my foot relative to the ground? Where is my center of mass? How am I going to organize myself before contact?
Adding some multidirectional work and plyometric variations that require more movement complexity can go a long way toward building that awareness.
This isn't an argument for finding the craziest plyo variation you can on Instagram. It's an argument for eventually giving the system more problems to solve. Zigzags, switches, even something as silly as hopping in a circle.
4. Start moving through space.
Skips and low-level bounds or leaps for distance give us a very accessible way to introduce more demanding takeoffs and contacts.
I'm rarely taking a 60-year-old pickleball player who hasn't jumped in decades and throwing them directly into high-intensity single-leg hops.
I might start them with very light hops in place, potentially even with their hands lightly referencing a squat rack.
That's a constraint.
As they gain exposure, take the hands away. Then start moving those same contacts through space. Instead of 20 light hops in place, we're now doing sets of those same hops over 10 meters.
Skipping is another incredibly remedial way to start introducing takeoff mechanics without making the task unnecessarily intense.
5. Then start turning up the intensity.
Once we've at least considered some of these qualities, now higher-intensity modalities like single-leg hops make considerably more sense.
We can also start building a more meaningful volume of higher-tier work.
The principle underneath all of this is simple:
As intensity rises, the amount of quality volume somebody can perform usually falls.
Beginners often need the opposite.
Lower the intensity enough that they can accumulate useful practice.
Managing ground contacts is a skill. And like most skills, it benefits from enough exposure to actually learn it, eventually expressed across a system that isn't excessively rigid or predictable.
That doesn't mean your clients need to do circus tricks.
It means there is undoubtedly value in eventually giving them enough variability to express the skill outside of one perfectly controlled drill.
Can box jumps be useful for expressing concentric power?
Absolutely. I know plenty of intelligent coaches who could make a great argument for their inclusion in a program.
Are they doing much to teach the qualities I just spent this article describing?
Not really.
If you don't feel confident programming plyometrics for your clients, don't start by looking for a more advanced exercise.
Start the same way you would teach almost anything else in the gym.
Give them a task they can actually perform well enough, and often enough, to learn.
Then make it harder.
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