reckonerBroad jump
A standing jump forward as far as is comfortable. Swing your arms, drive from your hips, and land softly on both feet. Each jump is a single effort, so reset before the next one rather than bouncing into it.
Swing, jump forward, land soft.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Glutes, quads
- Kit
- Bodyweight
- 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
Feet hip width, room ahead
Stand tall with your feet about hip width apart on a surface with room ahead of you to land and stand up.
Swing and load the hips
Swing your arms back as you push your hips back and bend your knees. Loading the hips is where the jump gets its distance.
Jump forward
Swing your arms forward and drive through your whole foot, jumping out rather than up.
Land soft and reset
Land on both feet with your knees bent and over your toes, absorbing the landing. Stand up, walk back and reset before the next jump, so each jump is a full effort.
What goes wrong
Landing on straight legs
Straight legs feel like sticking the landing. A stiff landing slams through the legs. Bend your knees and hips as you land.
Chasing distance you cannot land
A longer jump feels like a better one. A jump you land falling forward is too far. Jump as far as you can land under control.
Chaining jumps together
Bouncing straight into the next jump feels efficient. It turns one good effort into several tired ones. Reset each time.
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 better?
Jump training raised jump height across twenty six studies1. That meta-analysis measured jumping up, not forward, so read it as a guide for the broad jump.
How many should I do?
Few, with full rest. Each jump is a single maximal effort, and reps done tired land badly.
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 box 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 pooled improvements of 4.7 to 8.7 per cent in vertical jump height after plyometric training. Over five years old, and still the meta-analysis that pooled it