reckonerBox jump and step down
Jump up onto a box, land soft, stand up, and step back down. The step down is part of the exercise and part of its name: you never jump back off. Pick a box you land on easily, not one you scrape.
Jump up, land soft, step down.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, box
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, ankle
Muscles worked
How to do it
Pick a low box
Choose a sturdy box you can land on comfortably with both feet. The jump is the training, and a low box lets you jump hard and land well. Height comes later, if at all.
Swing and jump
Stand close to the box, feet hip width. Swing your arms back, dip, then swing them forward as you jump up, so the whole body drives the jump.
Land soft and stand tall
Land with both feet flat on the box, knees bent and over your toes, as quietly as you can. A quiet landing means the legs absorbed it. Then stand all the way up.
Step down one foot at a time
Step down to the floor one foot, then the other. Reset your feet before the next jump.
What goes wrong
Jumping back down
Hopping off feels quicker and more athletic. It adds a hard landing every rep. Step down, every time.
A box that is too high
A tall box looks impressive. It ends with you tucking your knees to your chest to scrape onto it, which measures how high you can lift your feet, not how high you jumped.
Landing stiff or with knees caving
Stiff legs feel like a solid landing. A loud landing on straight legs or knees falling inward means the box is too high or you are tired. Land soft with the knees over the toes.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 | One more set 4 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five sets next week. |
| 5 | 5 x 8 | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 3 x 8 | Holding steady No changeYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and there is no more weight to add to this lift. It stays at eight reps while we find the next way to make it harder. The lighter week is over, so this is back to five sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Does jump training make you jump higher?
Yes. Across twenty six studies, plyometric training raised countermovement jump height by about nine per cent1.
How high should the box be?
Low enough that you land softly with both feet flat and your knees bent only about as much as when you took off. Raise it slowly, and only if landings stay quiet.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Not by itself. Jumps are a choice, so the engine never chooses one for you. Choose it in the lift picker or as a swap for the broad jump. Knee and ankle are recorded against it.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Markovic, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2007. Does plyometric training improve vertical jump height? A meta-analytical review a meta-analysis of twenty-six studies with a pooled improvement of 8.7 per cent in countermovement jump height and 7.5 per cent with an arm swing after plyometric training. Over five years old, and still the meta-analysis that pooled it