Mark Ottobre explains why most athletes ruin plyometric training by doing too many reps instead of focusing on explosive quality. Ground-contact time matters more than volume. Plyometrics need to change with the season, not stay the same year-round.
So you do a lot of jumping for your sport?
Yes, I didn't used to do it, but you need a lot of explosive movements, fast reaction times.
So I've started working a little bit on plyo training. What would a workout look like for you?
It's like plyo training directed to footvolley. There's a lot of leaning on one knee and moving a leg forward quickly. So to work on your reaction time to get to the ball. There's a lot of jumping, putting this leg up on a box and jumping with this leg up to try and explode higher.
In terms of sets, reps, how many sets and reps do you do? 3 sets. About 12 reps. I wouldn't do what you're doing, okay, for multiple reasons. When we do plyometrics, we don't just go, okay, we're going to do 15, because plyometrics is about explosion. So we don't want conditions of fatigue, because there's difference in plyometrics in terms of training the tendon versus training explosive. In most sports, it's the person first 5 seconds to the ball. So why do we need to get you explosive to do 15? Answer is we don't. We need to get you more explosive, which means that when we analyze your plyometric, we're analyzing your contact time on the ground. So when we're looking at your plyometrics We're looking at quality, we're not looking at repetition. Okay. So that's why we need to think of it as kind of like a pyramid we're layering on. And obviously in different seasons, in different breakdowns, there's going to be different seasons for doing things, if that makes sense. Yeah, definitely.
