Why Your Power Training is Dangerous - Plyometrics
I'm just getting back to my house after practice. We had a rainy day today and of course when you're outside training in the rain, you always have to make concessions primarily concessions for the purpose of safety. As I said in a previous video. Injury prevention is the most important part of our training program and so any time we have adverse weather conditions or any situation that increases the likelihood that we're making sure we're making smart decisions as coaches and trainers and athletes as well. I think that's is a great segue for what I want to talk about today and that is talk about power training particularly using plyometrics to develop strength and power. These are great exercises to use. The jumping and bounding and hopping exercise we use to develop that power and become more dynamic athletes but they're also very dangerous so we want to make sure when we're using these exercises we use them in the safest possible way. One of the main problems I see with a lot of programs and this is universal across sport and across age levels is that coaches and parents and trainers and athletes are jumping in with plyometrics that are far too advanced for the level of skill that they have. Plyometrics involve a lot of coordination and body control and strength and a lot of athletes don't have that yet or haven't developed that yet so to go in and start using plyometrics right off the bat is very dangerous. I've seen a lot of athletes get hurt or develop overuse injuries because of this. One of the most poplar ones I've seen coaches doing very early in the season right off the back are things like depth jumps. Depth jumps are you have athletes up on a plybox and they drop down and jump up onto other boxes or jump over hurdle or drop down on the box and do a standing long jump or jump onto a box then down. These are advance plyos. We really have to watch what we're doing with these because I see a lot of coaches jump into them right away. What I want to do today is show you a series of more baseline fundamental plyometric drills that we can use to develop the body control and body awareness and ability to handle the forces that more advance plyometrics are gonna put on our body because we want to make sure that we can absorb force. We want to make sure we can put ourselves in a good body position where we're not jumping and landing on the balls of our feet with our heels on the ground and putting a lot of force on our knees. All these things are gonna cause injury or have the potential to cause serious injury and of course that is not something we want to put our athletes in a position to do. Oftentimes coaches are doing this not because their obviously trying to hurt athletes, they really just don't know. So let's take a look now at complete speed training program and take a look at what you should be starting your athletes off at even though these aren't the most exciting things to use, these aren't the most exciting things to perform for athletes, they're important. We have to look long term in developing our athletes not just see what we can cram in the next six, ten, eight weeks.
Look at how we develop these athletes over time so they become the best possible athletes they can be. Let's take a look at the video and I hope you start using these drills and take a second to sit back and reflect on what you're doing with your athletes and whether or not that's the best way and best use of your time and best use of creating a safe, positive training environment for your athletes. So here we have some basic double leg stabilization exercise. This is a very beginner plyo that I think everyone should start with. You can use cones like the athlete's doing here. Banana hurdles, but the important thing is the athlete is getting extension as it goes over the hurdles or goes over the cones I should say. But the important thing to teach here is the landing. You can see the athlete is landing and he's absorbing the landing with his muscles. He's collapsing down as much as necessary to make sure that he doesn't have a stiff landing. He's not absorbing it with the bones and the joints. It's not a hard landing. You wouldn't hear the athlete really pounding his feet onto the ground. He's going through a little bit faster so you can progress through. Instead athlete lands softly, stabilizes then takes it to the next jump before he progresses to the faster version. This is the way you have to do it with your athletes at the beginning because you're going to find that athletes land very stiff. Some of the times they're gonna collapse all the way down to the ground. Sometimes they're not gonna absorb the landing at all. They're gonna land on the balls of their feet with their knees jutting out way past their toes. They're gonna be off balance. They're gonna land on one foot instead of the other so we have to make sure they can do this basic movement with good technique like you see the athlete doing here before they begin to start doing some of the more complicated versions of exercise like you see here where they're going to increase the likelihood of injury. So start off with a double stabilization, double leg stabilization exercises before you start doing the more advance depth jump, single leg movements, et cetera. This is how you want to begin progressing your plyos. Keep the ground contacts very low. Maybe twenty total ground contacts beginning the session until athletes get it down. Do not progress until athletes have mastered these movements. If you do this and take care of this, you'll be in good shape as athletes develop and strengthen power and all the other things you're doing that I've talked about so far and continue to talk about than athletes will be able to become better overall athletes and handle higher volume of more advanced movements.
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Related Articles: Speed, Agility and Quickness | Agility Ladder | Secrets of Power Training | Multi-Directional Speed and Agility | Dynamic Flexibility | Plyometrics | First Step Quickness | Strength Training for Speed, Power and Agility
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