Louie Siimmons and Jumping

[Gary Gibson]

I'm inclined to agree.

Football players need explosive power in the lower body and nothing works that like jumping. We include weighted jumps using ankle weights and or dumbbells in their regimen. We have several athletes who can jump onto a 20” box while holding 2 x 70 lbs dumbbells!

Trust me, when you get to being able to jump on a 20” box holding 140 lbs your unloaded explosiveness and jumping ability will be everything you want it to be.

This was mocked a bit in Rip's Q&A. Power cleans were pointed out to be more scalable.

But wait!

Power clean numbers can go up with skill and timing and without an increase in leg strength or explosiveness. Higher numbers may not reflect any real increase in RDF or power generation.

Jumps onto boxes can indeed be scalable. You just have to hold a parameter or two constant and have one parameter that can be, ya' know, scaled.

If you pick a reasonable box height (reasonable is something the trainee can reach easily unweighted and safely with some extra weight), and just keep adding to the weight used during the jump, then voila! you have a scalable exercise that will likely indeed translate to more powerful and higher jumps.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that power cleans don't help vertical; too much anecdotal evidence says that they do. I just wonder about how optimal they are for their purported purpose in training.

Edit: And I'm not suggesting that athletes should do box jumps with their squat weight. This is a case where you want to use a weight that's not that much more than the implement you plan to be accelerating (in this case the athletes body in the field of play). Working up to maybe 25%-50% of bodyweight added seems like plenty.

Also, jumping onto boxes IS part of weightlifter training.