jumping - Moreira Performance Training

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Darrin Moreira Moreira Performance Training moreiraperformance.com Training for the jumper Introduction It’s a fairly common desire for volleyball players to want to increase their spike touch. Short of growing taller the only way to do that is to increase your vertical jump. Due to my background in volleyball I tend to work with a lot of volleyball players as their strength coach. In this regard, I have gone through considerable effort to find the best way to make athletes jump and touch higher. Who is the winner in a marathon? The winner is the athlete who can apply the most horizontal force to the surface relative to their bodyweight with the least vertical displacement. Winning a marathon is not complex. Rather it is very simple albeit not easy. The formula for jumping high is equally simple. You can jump high by exerting the most vertical force to the playing surface in the shortest amount of time relative to your bodyweight. The mystery of improving your jump Jumping high is not a mystery nor this special talent that only a select few can attain. It takes careful programming, dedication, and adaptability. Strength + Speed - Bodyweight = jumping ability. It is clear that the first requirement is an appreciable level of strength. Following strength development you apply that into producing as much speed as possible. Then you need to lean out, which will make

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you faster and give you less mass pulling you down to the earth. As my brother would say “it’s just physics.” However, in this manual we will not discuss fat loss. “But to be stronger I would have to gain size!” Not so. Size or hypertrophy equates to added weight. There are many ways to gain strength. Hypertrophy is only one way and is not ideal for athletes who have to keep their weight in mind. Rather you have to learn to train your muscles to “fire harder” as it were. The process is known as myelination and it basically allows you to sap more strength out of the muscles you currently have. A real life example of this is Lamar Gant who deadlifted 683 lb. at 132 lb. bodyweight. We can do an easy test that will show you that you have more strength than you know. Use a grip strength testing device, grip dynamometer, and test your grip on your non-dominant side while keeping your other arm relaxed. Record the result. Shake it out and prepare to test again on the same side. This time tighten your glutes, use a valsalva maneuver (forcefully exhaling on a closed airway) and make a tight fist on your dominant hand while you test again. Is your result any different? Likely you were able to express more force. Did you suddenly gain more muscle in your testing arm? Unlikely. You were able to use some techniques to unlock extra strength. Your muscles are already strong enough to lift a car. They just don’t know it yet. The reason strength comes before speed and fat loss when our objective is to jump higher (or really any physical objective) is that strength makes everything else easier. Imagine you can bench press 500 lb. (or don’t imagine if you actually can). You can almost certainly do 50 pushups, no problem. However, the reverse is not true. Everyone who can bench 500 can do 50 pushups but how many people who can do 50

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pushups can bench 500? Having more strength means you have more speed, endurance, stamina, power, etc. Strength has been compared to a cup. The bigger your cup —the more strength you have— the more qualities you can put into your cup. More strength means you have more room for everything else you want to do. How do you attain more strength? If you look at some of the eastern European training systems you would see that they chose to program an incredible volume into each training block with a relatively low intensity. Meaning, you don’t need to kill yourself in the gym such that you’re so sore you can’t walk only to rest for three days before repeating the process. That is a good way to build muscle but not the type of strength we want. Remember, in the interest of speed and jumping we want to have the maximum amount of strength with the lowest mass possible. At Moreira Performance we tend follow a practise similar to the eastern European systems; prescribing a very high weekly volume with a low enough intensity to allow practising strength skills often. It is volume and consistency over time that brings strength and success. Strength is comparable to any other skill. Practise your strength just like you practise passing or blocking. Strength standards I believe it is (typically) important for jumpers to push their front squat & deadlift to get those two numbers as big as possible. Ancillary (assistance) exercises would be used to improve those but they are the lifts we really care about. A military press and pullup are also important for jumping success. We use the following standards: Men’s Standards

Womens’s Standards

Deadlift

1 rep at 2X Bodyweight

Deadlift

1 rep at 1.75X Bodyweight

Front Squat

1 rep at 1.5X Bodyweight

Front Squat

1 rep at 1.25X Bodyweight

Pullup

10 reps

Pullup

3 reps

Military press

1 rep at 2/3X Bodyweight

Military press

1 rep at 1/3X Bodyweight

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Those standards don’t mean that you just just do those four lifts all the time and expect to be better at the end of a few weeks. You will do other exercises with the intent of improving those. You do other things besides gameplay in practise to improve your success. I think the most important ancillary exercises for volleyball players are the kettlebell swing & the turkish getup (as long as they are both executed with mastery & grace). If you aren’t doing swings with a smooth crisp hinge that is reminiscent of a crisp Romanian deadlift and without any degree of a squat don’t waste your energy. Poor training wastes training capacity and does more harm than good (Stu McGill). Once you have those numbers it doesn’t mean you start ignoring those lifts. It only means you can start focusing on manipulating your strength into speed. Consequently your focus moves from strength to strength-speed, then speed-strength and finally speed focus. Here is a nice little graph that shows this continuum:

fig. 1 Force-velocity curve. From bodyrecomposition.com

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A good periodized plan will go from the right to left on that graph. You start training qualities with high force and throughout your training blocks or mesocycles you will move left to train qualities with a higher velocity and less force. You go in this order because having strength improves all the other qualities, having strength-speed improves all the others except it has a smaller impact on strength. Basically, improvement of each quality will have a positive impact on those to the left of it on that graph. After we have those strength qualities at a respectable level we would move onto strength-speed. The best way to think about this is that you’re still using relatively heavy loads but moving the bar fast. A good example is weightlifting: Clean & Jerk and Snatch. The numbers here are not as important as the strength numbers as long as the athletes are improving. I like athletes to push these hard for one training block then to move on to the power and speed-strength. I sometimes block these two together as I think they can be so closely related. This is now using a relatively light load and moving it as fast as possible. There are many good examples of exercises here. For example, heavy kettlebell swings or snatches, kettlebell jumps, power jerks, light squat jumps, etc. The velocity is more important than the weight with these exercises. Throughout a speed-strength block or mesocycles we don’t necessarily need to be seeing our athletes using heavier and heavier weights. We would instead measure improvement over time by how much the relative velocity increases. For example, if it took at athlete 10 seconds to do 10 kettlebell swings with a 24kg kettlebell, after two weeks in a speed-strength block we wouldn’t necessarily want to see that athletes using

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the 32kg bell and swinging 10 times in 10 seconds. It would be more beneficial if the athlete were able to swing the 24kg bell 10 times in only 9 seconds. This differs from strength or strength-speed blocks as success in these blocks would be measured in the total weight moved. Lastly, we work on pure speed. Load is minimal to nonexistent. Exercises like sprinting, shock jumps, bounding or other special preparation exercises are used. We might test an athlete’s 50M sprint time at the beginning of this block and retest at the end. Even if we aren’t doing a lot of sprinting, we could be focusing more on bounding or reactive ability, we would still hope to see an improvement over time. After we have made it through each phase on that strength-speed curve we can do one of two things. We can go around again, try to keep our strength at appropriate levels and then draw our attention back to velocity. Or we can assess all the qualities of the athlete and see at which point on the strength-speed continuum they are lacking and then focus on that area before reassessing. On Exercise selection How do you know what exercises will be the best for you specifically? Everybody has unique biomechanics and kinetics. The best thing to do is work with a good trainer or strength coach that will help you make these decisions and guide you along your training path. However, assuming you aren’t injured and are moving well there are a few things to consider. Kinetics and kinematics are two factors that go into exercise selection. Both involve movement. Kinematics is the description of motion without the consideration of the cause. Kinetics is how the movement is created. Most trainers only take kinematics into account when selecting exercises. That is, they choose an exercise

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that looks like the sport skill they are working on without consideration to how that movement is created. I believe that kinetics is more important in exercise selection than kinematics. Kinematics are still important. However, which muscles are firing is very significant to achieving the desired training result. Sometimes you can achieve a motion but you aren’t activating the correct sequence of muscles to get there. Charlie Weingroff would say “biomechanics don’t lie but they don’t always tell the whole truth.” So how do we apply the concept of kinetics to our exercise selection? First we need to understand that a jump is not always the same. For instance, if you look at how a leftside hitter jumps to attack the ball you will see that before they jump their torso is more angled, their tibia is more vertical and their hips are slightly back behind their centre of mass. Conversely, when a middle block goes up to block their torso is very upright, their tibias are more angled forward and their hips are below their torso. These difference can be very slight but they are there. When you do a lower body motion with a vertical tibia and hips back it is a more hip dominant movement. Meaning, you are using more of your glutes and hamstrings than quads. When you have an angled tibia and a more upright torso you are doing a more knee dominant movement and activating more quadriceps. Therefore, you need to apply that concept to your training.

fig. 2 Different types of squat. From Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

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If you look at the above picture you can see three different types of squat. From left to right: front squat, high bar squat, low bar squat. Now that we know something about the kinetics of jumping we can make appropriate exercise selection for our athletes. The front squat might mimic the kinetics of a middle blockers block jump while the low bar squat with the angled torso and more upright tibia might be more closely related to a leftside hitters attack. That low bar squat doesn’t really look a whole lot like jumping to hit the ball on the outside but generally the kinetics are similar. That said, we don’t always need to use a totally different exercise; kettlebell jump squats are a speedstrength exercise that I might have one athlete execute with their hips back and another athlete have their hips moving lower down rather than back behind them. That’s not to say that you only do the exercise that you chose based on kinetics. It doesn’t mean that leftsides shouldn't do front squats. The kinematics are still important but but slightly less so. This is the art of program design. You can do a similar analysis for most sports movements. For instance, basketball players are jumping off one leg more often then volleyball players so you need to take that into account. I could go through examples on how to choose exercises for each spot on the strength-speed curve based on kinetics and kinematics but I think you get the point. On training frequency As I said, when I am programming for my athletes we use a very high weekly volume at a relatively low intensity. I have some volleyball players doing 7-10 workouts a week during the off season to make sure they are as fit as possible for the season. Fitness is the ability to do a task. In this case that task is volleyball, not general fitness

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—if you want learn more about this: http://www.moreiraperformance.com/might-already-fit-enough/. However, the programs we make are very individualized and I can very easily monitor an athlete’s progress and level of fatigue day-to-day. Unless you’re working with a good coach who will help you with your programs I would try to make things as simple as possible. As such, I recommend that you train three times a week. You will split your training into light, medium, and heavy days. Monday, Wednesday, Friday might be a good split —or something to that effect depending on your schedule. You will do full body workouts. If you are an athlete and you're still splitting workouts into different body parts then you’re 10 years behind the game here; train movements not muscles (Gray Cook). Initially, I recommend doing a heavy day on Monday, light on Wednesday, medium on Friday. The reasoning behind that selection is that on Monday you’ve had two days of restoration to go hard on your heavy day. You should still be a little fatigued for you light day which will help you recover to go relatively hard again on your medium. It’s really tempting to go hard all the time because we might feel pretty good on a light or medium day, but remember that if your light days are heavy eventually your heavy days will be light (Pavel). Just make a plan and stick to it. On training volume Each day will have a push, pull, squat, hinge, as well as a one or two ancillary exercises and a warmup. My basic warmup for my athletes is 100 kettlebell swings —we vary the reps— and 5 sets of 1 turkish getup on each arm. Each athlete might have additional exercises that he or she needs to warmup with, however, I think swings and getups are important

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movements so we do them everyday. If it is important, do it every day. If it's not important, don't do it at all (Dan Gable). If you don’t know how to masterfully perform a swing or getup then don’t just wing it. Find a suitable professional to teach you. Basically, at the end of your warmup you should feel ready to lift weights. That said, it should include something dynamic and related to what you’re doing; going for a jog and static stretching won’t cut it. Try to warmup by doing an weighted actively that may mimic what you’ll be practising that day. You can select the ancillary exercises by judging which movement you are weakest in and choosing an exercise which will help with that. If you have a great deadlift but your squat is lousy you might do rear foot elevated split squats to help your squat improve. If your pull-ups are lousy you might do bent over rows to help your pulling strength progress faster. You could also change the ancillary exercises for the heavylight-medium days. Heavy suitcase walks would be a fantastic ancillary exercise if you don’t know what else do to. You could also choose a good trunk exercise like a high tension plank or dead bug if you aren’t sure what to include. As for sets and reps for strength and strength-speed, no more than 5 reps in a set. Anything more than 5 reps is no longer strength or power. You’re training something else at that point. It terms of total reps per workout you should be somewhere between 10 & 25 per exercise. I believe that a beginner would do best with 5 to 8 sets. There are a lot of set-rep schemes that you can dream of with those parameters. You might go 5, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2 and fluctuate the weight as you change the reps. Or 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 adding weight each set. I am a big fan of 5x2. You can be creative here. 10 reps total might not seem like a lot but you should remember: more isn’t better. It’s just more.

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For speed and speed-strength you might use more total reps as well as more reps in each set. For instance, a kettlebell swing is effective in sets of 10 reps. 3x8 box jumps or something similar would be an acceptable speed or speed-strength exercise. When you progress to speed if you’re doing bounding exercises or sprinting you wouldn’t use the same parameters. One of my favourite sprint workouts is 50M, 3 minute rest, 30M, 2 minute break, 10M. Followed by an extended break after which we would repeat that series 2 or 3 times. You can be creative with these but make sure you are focusing on quality not quantity. You don’t get faster by sprinting until you can barely run. You get faster by sprinting fast which means you need to have long periods of restoration to make sure you’re ready to go. The central nervous system (CNS) plays a large role in these quick movements; the CNS can take six times as long as your musculature to recover from a bout of exercise. Long restorative periods are okay. Additional thoughts One thing you should consider with your training is doing work outside the sagittal plane —meaning forward-back movement. There are three planes of movement that we concern ourselves with in training: Sagittal = forward or backward, frontal = sideways, Transverse = twist or rotation.

fig. 3 Planes of movement. From ignition-fitness.com

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Most of the exercises we do are sagittal plane; bench, deadlift, rows, etc. We need to make sure we are strong in all planes of motion when we are training for sports —needless to say, most sports are multiplanar. Be sure to keep this in mind when you are selecting exercises. Single leg exercises do this well because you are forced to resist the forces pulling you down to one side. By doing a one arm bench press you are doing an “anti twist” which allows for some transverse plane work. Similarly you could warmup with a one arm swing instead of a regular two arm swing. That’s one of the many benefits of turkish getups. They challenge your strength in all planes of motion. “Plyometrics” Plyometrics are generally considered to be jumping exercises. They are often touted as the holy grail of jump training. Don’t jump on the plyometrics bandwagon. They aren’t the best thing in the world and you need an appreciable level of strength to start them —which is why, if you use them, they are the last stop on the curve. It seems like there was a movement a few years ago that if you want to jump high you just needed to perform so called plyometrics and you’re off to the races. I don’t believe this is necessarily true. It is important to note that as volleyball players you will be doing a fair bit of jumping during practise. Doing additional jumping activities during your off court training may not be the best decision. It may even be counterproductive. Furthermore, the term plyometrics a misnomer. Yuri Verkhoshanksy, the so called father of plyometrics wrote in the addendum to the book Supertraining: It should be noted that in the USA they sometimes call me the ‘father of plyometrics’. […] but [this] is incorrect. […] The word ‘plyometrics’ is very nice, but could be confused with the term ‘pliometric’. The pliometric or ‘yielding’ regime of mus-

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cles work was reported long ago in Dynamic Human Anatomy. […] The specific characteristic of my method is expressed in the shock stretch of the muscle under tension. Basically, pliometics or yielding exercises are actually eccentric exercises. That is, doing a squat with an enormous weight, lowering down to the safeties and not getting up. Thereby exposing your muscles to more tension than they could handle concentrically. This is not bad but it’s not what people think. There is nothing wrong with Verkhoshanksy’s shock method but you should be cognizant of when you choose to apply it. We do use it at Moreira Performance but only towards the end of a macrocycle when an athlete has had significant preparation. Movement One thing that I didn’t cover that is of paramount importance is that before starting any training you must first be moving well. I could write another article on exactly how moving well and using proper technique is of vital importance. However, for now it is important to keep in mind that without good movement you are putting yourself at risk for injury. Training hard has certain prerequisites. For example, just as you would not teach somebody to jump serve while they are still underhand serving, you cannot do a heavy front squat without first being able to do a solid bodyweight squat. The more complex the movement the greater the perquisites. You should start easy and progress fast rather than starting too hard and having to stop for injury. In high level sports there seems to be a general belief that injuries will just happen. This is not the case. Most non-contact injuries are preventable with proper care and attention to movement skills. As Gray Cook says: First move well. Then move often.

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I hope that this manual will give you a good idea of how to make yourself a training program to jump higher for your next season. Make sure that you don’t rush anything. Create a plan and stick with it. You won’t see results right away. You need to maintain your program and be patient; consistency over time is where results come from. Lastly, as my athletes know, I love my quotes so I will leave you with one that I try to embody in my life, business, and in all the work that I do for my athletes: Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein. If you have any questions please leave me an email. I am always happy to clarify anything to do with my work and provide training advice. Darrin Moreira [email protected]