Box jumps are an excellent exercise choice for increasing your vertical jump because they are a low impact exercise. What does this mean? It means that when you land from the jump the impact forces you have to absorb are much lower than a regular jump. For example, imagine you have a 30 inch standing vertical jump. This means that every time you jump with maximum effort you have to absorb the impact of landing forces from around a height of about 30 inches. Alternatively, if you jump up onto a 25 inch box, then you only are absorbing landing forces equivalent to a 5 inch jump. This is substantially easier on not only your joints, but also your muscles due to the reduced eccentric stress. These two factors have a couple of positive benefits for your vertical jump training in that it allows you to perform a higher volume of jumps and also it takes less time to recover. Another benefit of box jumps is that generally they are done from a standing still position (dead stop). This makes them very good for improving explosive concentric strength and rate of force development .... BDF
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:51:55 +0000