 Welcome back to the School of Calisthenics, today we're talking about jumping! Did anyone think actually that was, it was jumping? I didn't know what it was, it was coming from there. We're going to hopefully specifically look at a little bit of plyometrics, which is a fancy word we're getting to that basically means jumping. People ask us about lower body exercises and training in calisthenics. What does it look like for body weight? Because we're trying to kind of have a flexible approach to how we're training, where we don't need a lot of equipment and plyometrics or jumping-based exercises are really effective for that. We use them a lot from a sports performance perspective, but they actually have got great conditioning components, and it also just gives us a lot of longevity. We want strong powerful legs that can actually react and they can move because that's what life is going to entail, and I wouldn't want to be falling off curbs when I'm 70 years old. We know a lot of you are into your running, you're into your obstacle course racing, and this is going to help for all of that work. So there's one way to jump and there's a better way, and we're going to go through the techniques to make sure that you keep it safe and keep those joints healthy and actually making sure that your biomechanics are going to improve at the same time. The first exercise we're going to have a look at is the vertical jump. Now, for those of you that may not know about day's history, this guy's got some hops. So give us a head of hops. I used to when I used to train a lot. Show us a vertical jump. So we're looking for vertical height. How high was that? It's good. You want to measure it? So we're looking into how much vertical height we can get, but it's all built around having a robot squat pattern. So let's cover off the basics of that because if we can't squat body weight without the jump, it's really not going to translate when we try and put more force and power into movement. So we're looking at feet facing forward for our jumps. That's our most natural biomechanical position. Day's going to load the squat. Again, to put his hands upon the side of his temple is a course of prison squat. So when he drops down, we're going to think about the feet and the knees like they're on train tracks. We don't want them coming together at any point. So he sits down and keeps a distance of the knees in line with the second toe. If what we don't want to see is a knees coming in together or the feet turning outwards. If that's going on, we've probably got some muscle tightness that we need to deal with, but we want to make sure we're trying to work through a range of movement where we can keep those in line. So as you go through plyometric training, if you can't do these things and you find some compensations, you're just going to start to work on the range of movement that you can control and then just put some more flexibility and corrective work in there as well. So that's our first stage. Stage number two is going to be just a jump and a hold. Landing mechanics are really important. When the body comes down from being in the air, it's going to hit the ground and it's going to absorb what we call ground reaction forces. We're going to get some force coming from the ground which is going to put some stress on the system. It's really important that we keep the same principles as in the landing as we did in the takeoff, making sure the feet stay facing forward, not seeing those knees collapsing. We're keeping a nice strong stable base. So Dave jumps and he holds that squat position. That's really important. Don't be too much of a rush to stand up. Show us again. So we come up. So they're great reps. Show us one, Jaco, when the knees collapse in, what you're trying to avoid is this position where we're hitting the ground and we get these knees banging together. You can just see that force is being absorbed from the ground and we're just not dealing with it very well and putting unnecessary stress onto the joints as well. So if we can do stage two, we can jump and land. We might be looking to hold their landing for about three seconds when you can put five or six reps of those together and you're feeling confident. You can then start to get some rebounds in. And this is where the magic is really. If we can start to hit the ground and takeoff. Time, the landing mechanics are good. The takeoff mechanics are good. The knees are strong. You can see Dave's really using that upper body as well to start to get as much vertical height as he can. And what did I feel? They're hard. So we're getting a little bit of a metabolic element to this as well. Again, the key thing being that we're holding that technique together, don't jump badly because you're really going to start to put a lot of stress on the system and that's not what we want. But that's a really nice little either conditioning exercise or if you want to work for more power because you're an explosive sport or you're working towards something which is going to require a high amount of force production whether that might be obstacle course racing or something similar. You can do sets of those slightly longer rest in between get the recovery and then go again. Or if you were doing an endurance workout, another set. When you start to get confident and comfortable with those and trying to increase the height you are rebounding at is really important and that's the aim of the game trying to get higher and higher. Something to think about and focus on is trying to push the floor down. Thinking about that is going to help you go higher and then in terms of when you land and rebound trying to reduce that contact time as much as possible. So quickly off the floor is going to give you a better plyometric effect. Help you with your running, your obstacle course racing as well as actually getting you higher so you increase your speed. Vertical jumps are great plyometric exercise and there's research shows that it's a direct link between how high you can jump in a vertical jump to how fast you can go. So working on them is really going to help with your speed. But another exercise to progress on from there once you're confident and come to those knee positions and alignment in your squat is going into a unilateral position aka the lunge. So we'll just go through and build the same sort of principles again but just look at the technique for this. So it's going to replicate more of your running mechanics in terms of opposite arm and legs working together in this position. So first thing to look at in terms of some straight lines we're trying to look again a relatively straight line from knee hip to shoulder and that's only going to come if you've got the hip flexibility here and then that allows us to have a nice straight vertical shin position so the knee on that front side is stacked over the ankle on that front foot. So the same principles as we did with the vertical jump we're going to build this up steadily. So just having control through this lunge position he's going dropping down and then driving back up making sure that he's got control of that front knee. As he's driving up what we want to make sure is that that knee stays directly stacked over the ankle and as he comes in it doesn't buckle inwards and come across the midline of his body. We want to try and keep it nice and straight. Straight is going to be more efficient for force production but it's also going to help protect your knees and stop you from picking up any injuries. Once we've got that we're going to then look to do a little jump from that position and then land under control and then that little pause so he drives that front foot down to the floor swaps over but controls that landing so that he's got the knee in control over the ankle and then jumps to the other side and control that low position. He's going to hold in that position for a couple of seconds just to make sure he's got control of that landing he's happy with his knee position and his balance and then just take note finally before we move on this arm and hand position running mechanics so it's opposite arm to leg forward just as you would be when you're running no one runs along like this same arm and leg but when you're doing these lunges sometimes because you're trying to think about quite a few different things your brain gets a little bit confused and we get some we get some funky things happening like this so you're going to make sure you get those locked in before you start to then spring and wrap these out together so the final part of a tin would be to then link these together and make them nice and explosive and popping up off the floor now when you're doing these don't worry if it feels like it takes you a little bit longer to get off the floor than the normal vertical jump if you think about there's a lot more load going through on the one side that front leg's providing most of your force production and it might feel like there's that contact time is a little bit longer but that's okay because that's actually exactly what we're trying to get out of this with this lunge exercise progressing it on from that vertical jump so there's two lower body exercises guys both plyometric I really like this kind of stuff because it's the sort of thing which we feel like that's what I should be able to do if I've got some athletic capacity I should be able to jump and I think practicing those not only gives you that quality you need to be able to do these different things moving different ways have some tools in the locker but it's also going to help to get a workout done yeah exactly and not only with this actually help you with sort of your running and your efficiency and your economy of running it'll help you also with your speed and then if you're doing it correctly and paying attention to those alignments with your knee, your hip and your ankle it's also going to help you to be a little bit more robust with that lower body in terms of injury prevention for if you're a runner or if you're doing running as part of your OCR obstacle course racing work and training perfect so throw some of these at your program guys they might be using them already just go back and re-look at the technique again move with precision and control and hopefully you're going to feel those benefits of having some climate training for your lower body and hopefully we'll see jumping around somewhere till next time Pasta Smith