Ben Greenfield demonstrates nine plyometric exercises to build explosive power for swimming, cycling, and running. He covers execution cues for each drill, suggests 8-10 reps or 20-yard distances, and recommends doing the circuit once weekly with full rest between exercises.
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield, and today I want to show you how to get faster nerves. I'm going to teach you how to trick your muscles into generating higher amounts of force so you're able to generate more power. When you're swimming, you're cycling, or you're running. I'm going to show you my top nine favorite moves for accomplishing faster nerves. And these are moves that you can do with equipment just about at any gym or even at home. So we're going to start off with an exercise called single leg hops. For single leg hops, you can use the back of a treadmill belt. If you want to, you can use a step in your house. You don't have to have something like a step bench, but it's a very straightforward exercise. You want to maximize the speed of contraction so you focus on the quality of the movement, not on the quantity of the movement. The maximum number of these that you do is maybe 8 to 10. But basically you get down into a position just like this one. Leg up. The leg that you're going to jump with is down. You get yourself set, you load, and then hop. That's it. You step off and continue. So as you can see, it's a quick, forceful movement that you're trying to produce as quickly or as explosively as possible. Okay, the next exercise is a depth jump. For this exercise, you can step up onto a platform. This platform is about as short as I'd want to go for a depth jump. For someone of my height, I would prefer for a depth jump to be from a platform that's about the height of my thighs or higher. So this is slightly short, but that's okay. All I'm going to do is step off, land with both feet. That's important that you land with both feet and then reverse direction as quickly as possible and jump. So here's what a depth jump looks like. Step.
Hop and jump. Okay, super quick. You hit the ground, you go, you get back up, and you do it again. So again, you do about 8 to 10 of those. Alright, next exercise. These are two exercises that you may want to get a little bit wider view of the camera for, but it's bounding and skipping. Okay, first of all, skipping is just like you do on a playground, but you're trying to drive your knees as high as possible and minimize ground contact time. Maximize the time spent in the air. So for skipping, we're up, up, up.
You only need to do about 20 yards of skips as part of your plyo program. The other exercise that you do over a space is called bounds. For bounds, you want to again, maximize the amount of time that you spend in the air. It's just like running, except you're overemphasizing the stride. So it looks like this you'll run.
It may have been a little loud, but that's what bounding looks like. Hopefully you get an idea of how that looks. And hopefully I didn't break anything. Okay, next one is clap, push up. This would be more of an upper body plyo exercise. The next three exercises that I'm going to show you actually are upper body plyo exercises. Clap, push up is just what it sounds like. You're going to drop. Push up explosively here, clap and land. You can also do these from your knees if you would prefer. From this position. I push up, clap, and land. Okay. You can put a little mat underneath your knees if you need to. For those next two exercises are with the medicine ball. These can really help the explosiveness of your swimming, help you generate more power with your upper body. The first is a slam. This is great for a little bit of stress relief, too. Raise the medicine ball up as high as possible, slam into the ground, catch and repeat. Slam into the ground, catch and repeat. Okay. Super straightforward exercise. The other one is a medicine ball throw. For this exercise, it's just like a chest pass. You'll take two steps and release the ball as hard as possible. One, two, throw.
Okay, again. One, two, throw.
Few reps and do those explosively. Okay. Last few exercises we want to do are a hurdle hop and a hurdle hop and one more. So for a hurdle hop, you want a lower platform or something like this. I would take this off, put it down. I could use a line if I wanted to, a cone, any object. But basically it's side to side as fast as possible. So I'm here. Hop, hop, hop, hop, hop. Okay, again you do about 10 reps, or if that's too easy, you can do about 20, 30 seconds or so. Getting as many in as you can in as short a. Okay, last exercise is basically just a jump rope. Now, when you're jumping rope, your goal is to again, minimize ground contact time. This is a simple but extremely effective plyometric exercise for cycling and for running. So I want to jump as fast as possible, minimizing ground contact time. You can also do this with alternating legs. If you do it that way, try and lift your knees up towards your chest. So it looks like this.
Minimizing ground contact time. Same thing. So those nine exercises, in my opinion, are the easiest one to implement. The easiest ones to implement that cover the widest range of muscles as possible. For your plyo exercise, you start doing those once a week, strung together as a circuit with full rest in between each one. And you're going to train your body to get faster nerves and generate more power. Try it out.
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