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Isaiah Rivera, pro dunker, and John Evans discuss anything related to maximizing athletic performance, and in particular, jump training. Strength and conditioning, jumping technique, weight room practices, and general fitness and health tips and advice are shared on this podcast.
Welcome back, guys. Welcome to the teach b strength podcast. My name is John Evans, and I have helped thousands of athletes jump higher, run faster, and get healthy knees in the last seven years. This is an example of that. Isaiah Rivera, when he started with me, he had roughly a 43 inch vertical, and now he has a 50.5 inch vertical and healthy knees to boot.
John:So good news for him. And today, we're gonna be talking about plyometric volumes because this is something that I think a lot of people blow out of proportion. I've seen it a lot in high jump training and on the track with track and field athletes. Before we do that, if you guys are interested in coaching, click the link in the description or the pinned comment. And if you purchase a year, it is half the price if you paid for the month to month service.
John:Dom's in the background here
Isaiah:doing some Is he here grunting?
John:That's what that is. Oh, you can grunt as loud as you want. Yeah. So let's go through I guess I'll ask you, maybe prior to me giving my opinion here. How many plyos have you done over the entirety like, of your career?
Isaiah:70.6.
John:No. Of of like, at what points in your vertical leap progression did you do playas? Let's start at, like, 36 to 50. Okay.
Isaiah:First play I ever tried was a depth jump, got Achilles tendinopathy, didn't touch them again for a long time. Aside from my favorite playa, which is dunking, that's the only one that I did. And early on, I honestly saw them as a waste of time because I saw that as time I could dunk. So it's like why my reasoning was why would I drain my dunking battery when I love it so much. So that was the first few years.
Isaiah:The next time I did plyos were January 2019. You can actually go to my YouTube channel and see those raw workouts. And they were in the form of squat jumps, I believe. Barbell squat jumps.
John:Let's stick with unloaded.
Isaiah:Unloaded. Unloaded. Oh. Dang, boy.
John:Probably 2020. '29.
Isaiah:'29. No. No. North Carolina.
John:You're right. You're right.
Isaiah:2020, we did I love it. Yep. Double dip plyos. That was when we were in the sidewalk. You remember that?
Isaiah:Sidewalk?
John:Oh, in my It was like At North Carolina or? Yeah.
Isaiah:It was like a school.
John:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Isaiah:Yeah. So if you wanna see those, go to my channel, April, May 2020. Me and John do them together. Yeah. Then we ran them again later that year.
Isaiah:So this is, I guess, my third time ever doing unloaded piles, second time doing them healthy. And that was, like, load management four. Mhmm. That same setup, z one, two. Yeah.
Isaiah:I remember them. Cycles. And then I didn't notice a big difference with them during that time. The next time I did them is actually Definitely. When I think I first hit 50, just not tested.
Isaiah:And that was 29 Palms late twenty twenty one during the winter. I was doing a lot of bounding. I was also doing a lot of long sprints. This is a five, I think. Zay four or Zay five in there somewhere.
Isaiah:And then the time after that was 2022. So I've done about about twice a year ever since 2021. And then the yeah. 2022 was leading up to 50.5. We did a, like, a few psych like, maybe, like, two weeks of plyometric volume.
Isaiah:Those were depth jumps. Yeah. That was, like, the main the main plyo we did. Depth jumps, double dip, standing jumps.
John:We've we've briefly touched on those. Yeah. But so in in my experience, I did them a ton when I was 14 and 15. That was exclusively what I did. I didn't even touch the weight room really.
John:Maybe some half squats, light power clean, stuff like that. This was when I was in the developmental stages and I was kinda hitting puberty and stuff. And I saw really good, really, really good gains from that, but they quickly dropped off in performance as I got quite a bit older. I did them in 2022 during that period of time that I was living in California. Did pretty low intensity ones outside of bounds for distance and height, and then I did some single legged up jumps.
John:During that period of time, I actually was not jumping well whatsoever. Even through probably the next two or three months, I was not jumping well whatsoever. Briefly touched on them during a period that I was jumping really high, but in very, very low volumes, and I was mostly dunking. I say this all to create some context into what plows are and how they should be used. Because I think a lot of the time, coaches, and myself included in the past, will overdose the amount of volume.
John:And someone asked a question, because I had put this on my story, what do you guys want us to cover? So we cover we're we're covering really specifically the volume that you need to do of these and intensity and really the frequency. And I think, again, the biggest mistake people make is they do too many plyos too frequently. And the older that I get and the more experienced I get as a coach, the more I realize you need to use them sparingly. They are not something unlike what used to be taught for tendon stiffness.
John:They do not improve tendon stiffness. You cannot do a bunch of plyos and see major changes in the tendon. At least that's not what any of the research is indicating. What you will see is that
Isaiah:tendon When you're doing puberty, you're jumping
John:say, during during development, you can see changes to the tendon. And if you're looking at longitudinally, if you were to look at volleyball players, if you were look at some of these athletes that do a lot of jumping, you'll see tendon changes. But when you're past the point of development, you're not really gonna get any changes to the tendon. If anything, you're gonna get hypercellular, and you're gonna have negative adaptations in the form of tendinopathy. If you wanna get stiffer tendons, you need to have time, and you need to have tension, and you need to have a lot of it, and you need to have it at pretty high intensities, similar to a muscle.
John:To do that, strength work is going be the best way to achieve that goal. Where plyos come in is connecting the dots between all of those structural changes that you have in the muscle and in the tendon, being able to teach your body to use that force quickly in the form of stress shortening cycle. And because of that, I've really kind of moved away from using pretty high volumes of them. I think outside of just increasing the neural drive and the frequencies that you get, it really can be detrimental and even deleterious to your health. Like, you you really see guys move the opposite direction in health.
John:You generally don't see them jump higher, and when you load them too intensely, too frequently, people's vertical will typically drop because the nervous system the requirements for you to perform a good plyometric, something that's under two hundred milliseconds, is really, really fast. There's insane levels of motor recruitment happening in the high threshold lunar units. And the central nervous system is going to get fatigued from doing them too frequently, and then on top of that, you typically form bad habits as a result of doing them. When I was high jumping my best, and it's very predicated your success on how short that ground contact time is, your ability to store release energy really, really fast, even faster than dunking, the volumes were almost zero or zero. I did them maybe twice prior to when I jumped my highest ever.
John:When I was doing them a lot, I would pretty consistently see that my performance would would come down. And that's because you're fatiguing something that is very, very sensitive for performance. You cannot rev up the nervous system that frequently. It would be like redlining our cars all the time. Right?
John:Eventually, you're gonna cause some sort of damage to the engine or the transmission, if it's not designed for that and you're not ready for it. And so in the same way, if you're doing crazy plyo volumes, you're you're probably doing something that's not gonna help you jump higher, especially if you're past the point of development or puberty or something like that. So what recommendations let's go through kind of some ideas or volumes. In general, less is more. Yeah.
John:I would say less is definitely more. And the type of plyo you do also really matters. So things like depth jumps, things like bounding for height, or even speed bounding, those are gonna be really, really high intensity. The faster you move, the stiffer the contact, the shorter ground contact time, whether it's single leg or double leg. Single leg, it's gonna be more intense.
Isaiah:Yeah. So let's take them through usually, we'll use them about twice a year, and then I feel like it's, like, two months where you build them out. So let's say you're doing two plyos, one variation on Monday and one variation on Wednesday. How would you progress it? What so let let's pick two plyos, and then how would you progress at month one and then month two?
John:So if I were in a power phase or something like that, what Isaiah is moving into, he's actually a really good example of this because we're gonna be building some of them in in really, really low volumes. One, because, again, it's gonna take them the other direction if we push the volumes of those up. And two, the purpose is to train the nervous system. That's why we're doing them. It's you're not seeing very many changes to the muscle.
John:You're not seeing very many changes to the tendon. So the purpose of them is the nervous system. So I'll probably do maybe two contacts in his first, maybe three in his first mesocycle. So on a Monday or something like that, it pairs really, really nicely with heavy cleans or heavy squats. You could superset them in the form of either a broad jump, a standing jump, a squat jump, something where you're getting deeper ranges of motion.
John:Even a double dip would probably be good. And then maybe three reps if it's, in succession, maybe upwards of six if you really wanna start to get the benefits of hysteresis taking over and the tendon kind of functioning potentially a little bit more efficiently as you as you go through your reps. Power also works somewhat a similar way. And, yeah, I'd I'd probably do like three to four sets of that, really low volumes. And then on the other day I would pick something that complements that.
John:So whether it's a step up jump, you could do split jumps where you're hitting a deeper range of motion, you could do double dip split jumps or lunge jumps or something like that in the first month. Again, gonna keep the volumes really low. Maybe we do four sets of four alternating lunge jumps on that Wednesday session paired with a unilateral lift. Then, in the second mesocycle, we're gonna increase the intensity of those, but the volumes don't really change. We're gonna keep the volumes really, really low.
John:So if he was doing, let's say, a three hop in bounds or something like that, maybe now I have him stay a little bit more reactive and say, okay, Isaiah, I want you to be relatively quick on and off the ground in these. And when I say three hop, I mean three broad jumps in succession. Then in the Wednesday session, I might give him a similar goal in the lunge jump. So I might say, look, instead of getting a deep range of motion here, I want you to move faster through this range of motion. I want you to bounce off the ground a little bit more, shorter ground contact times, a little bit stiffer, get a little bit more height on these, be more reactive with the ground.
John:And that's all assuming that his tendons are good for it. If his tendons or his joints or something is indicating, hey, this isn't you know, I don't feel good doing this, I'm feeling pain doing this, we're definitely gonna cut those out. And then in the form of the dunk sessions, you also have to I probably wouldn't even do two days of it. Because if he's dunking and he has a a long session or typically we're around thirty minutes of high intensity jumping, he's getting I probably see he did 20 jumps today Yeah. At max intensity.
John:And that's a skill. Now if guys are sprinting as well, sometimes I won't even do that, right? Because they're getting those hard contacts with the ground, especially in acceleration. You're getting bigger ranges of motion. Depending on how fast you are, they can be a little bit more reactive.
John:They're not quite the same, in my opinion. I think the forces are a lot higher in plyos, especially when you're getting really, really high drops and things like that. And so that's kind of why I, for two foot jumpers specifically, I prefer to do more plyo volume and deeper ranges of motion than for a one foot jumper, where they need to have really, really high stiffness. Spring can be a good tool for that. We talked about a tempo running can also be a good way to kind of develop stiffness and coordination, body composition, ground contact times or similar.
John:So it can also be a really good tool. And that's not necessarily the neural aspect, but if you did too much of it, it would it would definitely start to take you the other direction. So, yeah, any other questions you think we should cover?
Isaiah:They're fatiguing. So if you're if you're doing them at high intensities twice a week
John:Don't expect to jump high.
Isaiah:Yeah. Like, each week, you're probably gonna get feel flatter and flatter unless you're dramatically reducing volume, like, elsewhere. But yeah. The yeah. Like John said, don't expect to jump high.
Isaiah:And then when you unload, that's usually when you see the the positive benefits from it.
John:And that period really depends on how long you're loading. If you're loading them for a really long time, it's gonna take a long time
Isaiah:to bounce back. Usually, can only survive, like, a three week cycle when doing plows instead of the typical four weeks that we usually do.
John:And I think a lot of the research when it came to tenon adaptations and stuff like that from the Russians and stuff like that back in the day is not necessarily accurate in terms of what the tenon's doing. It's not at least it's not validated in your research. We're not seeing that extensive plyos or doing a lot of multi jump circuits for time are gonna cause changes to the tendon, not meaningful ones at least. You're gonna need really, really high tension for a really, really long time. That's why we do heavy slow squats.
John:That's why we do isometrics, because that's what makes tendons adapt, and that's what makes them move in the right direction. I think those things are good for building general capacity, and so a lot of the time we'll use that stuff and the adaptive reserve that you build through that stuff later on when we pull it out. And again, we use that stuff to allow us to get more specific and use that adaptive reserve that we built up to adapt to other stuff in the future. So that's the podcast, guys. If you enjoyed it, sign up for THP or keep watching.
John:We really appreciate it. And we'll see you guys next time. Bye.