Should You Do Box Jumps In Your Workout?

Should you do box jumps in your workout?
Or better yet… should you do plyometrics in your workout?

Over the years this questions has come up at EarthFit Body-Mind Transformation Center a bunch of times.

“Hey! So should you do box jumps in your workouts? Yes or no? Well this video is specific to help you find out the answer to that… watch this video and at the end I’m going to have you do a test to determine if you should be doing not only box jumps but plyometrics and I’m going to get into the science of what a plyometrics is so if you are doing it, It will help you reduce your injury and increase your performance. The first thing we want to talk about is what the end goal is because every single program should just be base on working backwards from what the end goal is.

In our training facility one of our missions is to help working professionals get into optimal health and fitness in the safest, fastest and most effective way based on efficiency, burn fat and gain lean muscle. Now, safety is one of our number 1 things. When you get into plyometric movements, the risk goes up and the reward for what our goal is goes down a little bit. There’s better ways to optimise that type of training to get the reward. There’s progressions of plyometrics so I’ll demonstrate some of those shortly as well and you can test yourself out to see if you are ready to do even those basic movements.

First thing, you gotta ask yourself is “Do I move correctly?” when I do something as simple as a squat or a pushup. If you are not moving correctly then you are opening your chances for injury and if you are not absorbing the force it’s going to end up in your joints and that is where deterioration comes down. So the science, there’s 3 phases to a plyometrics – the eccentric downward, the amortisation phase which is the in between (the eccentric and concentric) and then the concentric. So that would be for box jump. You go down, and then up and then you jump on to the box and when we go down we are actually tapping into an elasticity into our muscles so it stretches the muscles and the amortisation phase is in between the concentric phase which is the upward motion and for you to tap in to the stretch shortening cycle of the muscle which is where the elastic energy is created on the downward motion and then on the upward motion, in between there’s a very small amount of time and it’s a fraction of a second and if you miss that fraction, it’s no longer a plyometric, right? because you are not tapping into that elastic energy in the muscles.

What is your goal? Are you an athlete? So athletes really benefit from this so the risk is worth the reward because they are going to get more explosiveness, they’re going to jump higher, they’re going to be able to push faster if they’re playing football and they’re a lineman, they’re going to be able to push harder so it’s very very powerful exercises in training for athletes. Now if you are not an athlete… Is it going to be extremely beneficial for you? Well, that’s the question that you need to ask yourself so now we are going to go out the floor (please watch the video) Can you tap into that stretch-shortening cycle, can you just jump and land correctly right? Because plyometrics are meant to be seen and not heard. What you will see is people jump and boom! All that force gets dissipated into the joints so if I don’t land nice and soft then all that force creates heat in the joints and your are now wearing down the joints rather than strengthening the muscles in the plyometric exercise so you’ll see if I go down and up and jump and land nice and soft, that is how you want to land, you want to absorb the force. If you can’t do that and you can’t do a few reps of that most likely you should not be doing box jumps because this is the very basic. I’m just jumping up and down.

If you want to test yourself right now and again with every exercise especially plyometrics you want to be fully warmed up so you do warm up before this is can you do:

• 5 squats with 60% of your body weight within 5 seconds. Alright, so you are calculating out your bodyweight, you are putting 60% of that on you and then doing 5 squats really fast within 5 seconds. Again if you don’t have a proper form on the squat, don’t attempt that.
• And then the other one is can you do 5 clap push ups in a row. Can you do 5 clap push up. If you can’t then you should not be attempting plyometrics. You need to regress back and start with basic strength and conditioning and so we’re talking about endurance training, strength training, hypertrophy or hypertrophy then strength and then power plyometrics and that takes phases of training to get somebody there.

So, I hope you found this helpful. If you have any comments or question, go ahead and leave them below.”

Ian Hart is a Body-Mind Transformation expert, the creator of EarthFIT Training Systems, co-creator of BACK PAIN RELIEF4LIFE, author of HEALING HACKS, and founder of BEAUFORTPERSONALTRAINING.COM and MYBACKPAINCOACH.COM. Ian and his team help people get into optimal shape in the safest, fastest and most effective way possible, using cutting edge science.