Getting back on your feet after injury can be difficult, QSMC Exercise Physiologist, Jenai Sutton offers an insight on using plyometrics and breaking the rehabilitation journey into easy attainable stages.
All humans need the ability to move quickly. You might need to step out of the way of moving traffic, catch yourself after a stumble before you fall, change direction quickly to avoid running into someone, or quickly protect a child from danger.
In the world of sport and athleticism, speed and power are just as important. Think side-stepping an opponent in footy, jumping to catch a ball in netball, and general running and sprinting. After sustaining a lower limb injury and ticking off the earlier rehab phases (we need to crawl before we can walk), we need to introduce plyometric exercises to be able to meet the demands of life and sport.
What is plyometric training?
Plyometric exercises are quick, explosive movements designed to improve speed and power (how quickly you can use the strength). Exercises, where the muscle is actively lengthening and is immediately followed by active muscle shortening, are referred to as the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC). Take a jump for example, as you lower down to the bottom of the jump your muscles are rapidly lengthening, and then as you extend up into the air your muscles rapidly shorten. Exercises such as jumping, hopping, bounding, and running are all examples of plyometric exercises, these all help to develop the explosive capacity of the muscle.
Plyometrics can also improve tendon stiffness. Stiffness refers to the resistance of a tendon to changing its length. Think of the tendon as likened to a thick spring, they stretch less than a thin spring and recoil at fast speeds so there is a quicker transfer of force from muscle to bone. This results in a reduced ground contact time and improved running economy and running speeds.
So, how does this look in real terms? Back to Basics.
Firstly, and very importantly, going from doing nothing to doing high-impact training every day is the perfect way to hurt yourself! Plyometrics are great, but you must work your way up to the top-end stuff.
Your first port of call should be on eccentric force absorption, which is the fancy way of saying how to absorb force and land properly. Remember that feeling when you’re sitting on a bench and jump down, and it feels like you’ve jarred your feet? It’s the opposite of that. Examples of this would be tall to short landings and low box landings.
Once you’ve learned to absorb force, you can learn how to produce it – welcome concentric development (producing force). Initially, this would look like exercises such as pogos and skipping to help build a base. Once you’ve got that down we’re looking to build more power with exercises like squat jumps, box jumps, and hop and stick.
Advanced Movements.
From here, we’re looking for continuous jumps, such as hopping and bounding. For some people, this might be as far as you need to go along the spectrum, but for the more athletic community, the more advanced stage is the shock method. At this end of the spectrum, we’re looking for depth jumps to box, drop to lateral jumps, etc.
This looks very different person-to-person, but a basic plyometric continuum might look like this:
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Tall to short landings + box landings
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Pogos + skipping.
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Squat jumps + box jumps + hop and stick
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Continuous hopping + continuous bounding
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Depth jump to box + drop to lateral jump
Of course, it is more complicated than this and we need to consider different directions (horizontal, vertical, lateral, rotational), previous injury, and the demands of your sport. The best next step for you, if you are wanting to build plyometrics into your routine, is to speak to one of our Accredited Exercise Physiologists to get a tailored plyometric program suited to your sport and training circumstances.