Of all plyometric exercises available for athletes, there is one that stands above the rest, and in many ways, was the original plyometric exercise designed for explosive vertical jump development. This training exercise is, of course, the “depth jump”.
What is a Depth Jump?
The depth jump involves dropping forwards off of a box, and upon hitting the ground, jumping upwards rapidly and with maximal force. Depth jumping was a training movement devised by legendary Soviet Union sports scientist, Dr. Yuri Verkhoshanky, originally in the training of high jumpers, and brought much success with it.
Unlike many “repeat” plyometrics, like tuck jumps or hurdle hops, a depth jump is a “single shot” movement, meaning it focuses on one single, powerful effort, compared to a series of repeated, rhythmic efforts. This is similar to the “single shot” nature of many jumps in sports, such as a volleyball spike, or a dunk in basketball, except now the “drop” can be overloaded, based on the height of the box one drops off of. When dropping off of a box, one’s body weight is compounded as they fall towards the earth. If you placed a scale on the landing point, dropping off of a 36” box, many athletes would register well over 500 lbs on the scale! This overload, combined with the upwards jumping action specifically overloads the jump in a way that is powerful and effective for improving vertical leap.
Benefits of Depth Jumping
The benefits of depth jumping are a profound increase in one’s vertical jumping ability, especially in jumps done with a running start. It is not uncommon to see increases in one’s jump by 4-6+ inches (10-15+cm) in a 10-week depth jump training period. Athletes will achieve greater gains if they haven’t performed the method before, and have many of the “pre-requisites” that help make the training more effective (we’ll get to that shortly).
Optimal Depth Jump Height
As gravity offers an important overloading effect, the specific height of the box in depth jumping is an important factor in the training result. As with so many things in training, we often think “if some is good, more is better”. It’s very easy to use a box height that is too high for the level an athlete is at.
A general rule of thumb is to select a box where an athlete is still able to achieve a rebound jump height that is within 1-2” of their standing vertical leap (you can measure the rebound jump by having an athlete jump up and touch an over-head object like a basketball rim or a vertec measuring device). If you hear, or see the heels slapping down against the ground forcefully at any point in a depth jump, then the box height is also too high, as the athlete isn’t able to transfer energy well in this case.
Typically, this all adds up to using a box that is somewhere between 18” (45cm) and 40” (100cm) in height. It may be possible for some very elastic athletes to use a box height greater than 40”, but in these cases, it is unlikely they will be able to still hit the ground in the rapid time frame that is transferable to jumping in sport.
Ground Contact Times
In any plyometric exercise, depth jumps included, the time when the feet are in contact with the ground is called, appropriately, “ground contact time”. The ground contact time in any plyometric movement should have a level of respect for the ground contact time in sporting activities. A sprint stride is around .10 seconds, while a single-leg takeoff in basketball is around .20 seconds. A standing vertical jump is around .5 seconds from the moment an athlete initiates the jump, give or take a few hundredths.
Depth jump contact times should respect the fact that the vast majority of sports movements are extremely fast. It’s impossible for a bilateral depth jump contact to be as fast as a running single-leg sprint stride, or even a fast single-leg jump takeoff in many cases, but it does pay to be able to keep the ground contact time respectively low regardless.
When building “power” (think more standing vertical oriented jumping) the contact times for depth jumps can be longer, up to 3/10th of a second, or slightly more, but for more reactive training goals (think fast running jumps) the contacts should be closer to 2/10th of a second. It is difficult to go much under .2 seconds landing time in a depth jump, and when going this fast, it is going to start chipping into one’s rebound height. In short, and as a general rule, athletes should get off the ground quickly and smoothly in depth jumps, but they don’t have to absolutely minimize the ground contact time either.
Horizontal Distance
When dropping off of a box in depth jumping, there is a certain amount of horizontal distance that needs to be covered, as well as in the jump action itself. Athletes shouldn’t simply drop straight down off the box, and then jump straight up. This is largely due to the way the body uses elastic energy. Athletes should drop at least 2-3 feet horizontally down from the box, or as far down from the box, as the box is tall.
The reason for horizontal distance in a drop is that it allows an athlete to load the levers of the legs in a way that is similar to a running jump in sport. In sports, running jumps are preceded by a substantial horizontal distance covered in the final, or second to last, stride, into a takeoff. As such, a level of horizontal distance in a depth jump allows for the jump to be more like a running jump in sport, and less like a standing vertical jump. When we consider that most strength and conditioning programs improve one’s standing vertically much more than a running vertical leap, it is important to continually be looking for exercises that can help to improve motions that are more elastic and specific to the majority of sports movements.
Depth Jump vs. Depth Drops
Depth jumping involves a drop, a landing, and then an upwards jump. A depth “drop” is when a jump from a box is only landed, without a jump back upwards. In some ways, humans have been “landing only” this for decades in the form of parkour (such as in a precision landing) or for millennia with children jumping off of rocks or playground apparatus. The main difference with a depth drop, as a training exercise, includes the fact that a depth drop is usually performed with a minimal amount of extra bend at the knee and hip joint, once the feet make their initial contact with the ground. The landing should also be as “silent” as possible, which indicates an effective ability to deal with the forces, without over-using one’s skeleton and “passive structures” (i.e. heel bones crashing into the ground).
Drops from height come naturally in the scope of sports like Parkour, or to a lesser extent, children playing on the playground
A simple “drop and stick” trains the connective tissues of the legs and feet in particular, as well as a high activation of muscle motor units, but it doesn’t train the motor pattern of jumping quite as much. In order to train the jump pattern maximally, one eventually should do some form of actual depth jumping with a reversal, rather than doing only drops. If athletes are doing plenty of jumping and sprinting in their sport, it could be somewhat viable to only use depth drops, but I would still recommend at least 70-80% of the total depth jump/depth drop volume to be in favor of depth jumping.
Depth Jump Sets and Reps – Depth Jumps Per Week/Volumes
A true depth jump is an intense exercise and therefore should be done in lower volumes than more typical, “lower level” plyometric movements, such as tuck jumps or skips for height. Where recommendations of lower-level plyometrics could reach up to 200+ total contacts (individual jumps) in a session, the maximal range for the more intense depth jump is going to be around 40 contacts total, with typical sessions involving 20-40 contacts.
In its’ original training prescription by the Soviet inventors, depth jumps are typically performed 2-3x a week in a traditional “concentrated” format. The Soviets would often run training that focused heavily on a single particular quality during key points in the year. Although 2-3x a week will deliver a substantial “depth jump” stimulus, many athletes won’t be able to recover fully from a depth jump session in 48 hours. The window to fully recover from 40-depth jumps may be closer to 4-6 days for many individuals.
Athletes often have a good deal of training on their plate, between practices, games, and strength training. Putting sessions of depth jumping on top of this isn’t often a great idea, and if an athlete has a poor physical “base”, it may be a recipe for over-training or injury.
In situations where athletes have a lot of other workloads to deal with, such as in-season for basketball, for example, a depth jump workout could be done once only every 2-3 weeks, such as described by track and field coach Boo Schexnayder. This method where the high intensity is touched on “just enough” can elicit good results, even in the midst of a competitive season.
As a general principle, using a depth jumping session once, to perhaps twice a week, is a good starting point. It is better to “undertrain” this method than to “overtrain” it, and make sure athletes have not only adequate recovery between sessions but also room to adapt and improve throughout the training year. Finally, depth jumping should only be used in select periods throughout the year, typically after a general strengthening phase that gives athletes a good level of preparation for the movement. Depth jumps should generally be integrated for 4-8 week blocks of time, with 2-6 week periods of removing the method from the total training program before integrating it back in.
Priority in Training
In the process of an overall training program, the first priority is that an athlete has adequate recovery time through the course of their training week, as well as between sports seasons. Unfortunately, the modern athlete has become so specialized, doing the same movement patterns repeatedly throughout the year, that injury rates are rampant, relative to 2-3 decades ago.
As such, the first priority in any training program is that an athlete has adequate rest in each training week to recover from the demands of their sport. When depth jumping is included in a training session, it needs to be done in a manner where an athlete is either fresh or at a high level of neurological responsiveness. The depth jump portion of a workout should be done early in a training session, after a good warmup, or at a point in the training where the athlete is at their highest state of performance. Depth jumping shouldn’t be done when an athlete is fatigued or tired. Throwing depth jumps in training after an individual has done 5 sets of squats and leg presses is not going to be an effective strategy.
How to Maximize Plyometric Effectiveness
To maximize the effectiveness of depth jumping, it’s important to make sure athletes have the pre-requisites “checked off”, to get more out of it all. Many coaches throughout history have thought that a high level of squat strength (such as 2x one’s body weight) is needed to do plyometrics (including depth jumps). Although a level of strength is certainly important, I wouldn’t say two times one’s body weight is needed, and the irony is that many athletes who are built well for jumping are not built very well for squatting.
In the process of forcing a jumper to deep squat double bodyweight (if you can even get to that point), you can actually be compressing their skeleton, and making their muscular system rigid. For me, I would simply look for around 1.25 to 1.5 times body weight in a good deep squat as a precursor to depth jumping. I also look that an athlete has a solid overall background in jumping, jump-based sports (basketball, volleyball, parkour, etc.), and overall physical education and competency (think of all of the rolls, crawls, climbs, etc. they made you do in gym class).
Many people look to depth jumping as a “shortcut” to vertical gains, when in reality, they haven’t put much of the groundwork in, and are poor overall athletes (in this case, they won’t get very much out of it). In many ways, depth jumping is a “cherry on top” of a good overall training and movement program.
“Classical” physical education offered athletes a lot in preparing them for more intensive training exercises for sport and is something we often take for granted in the long-term developmental process
Athletes should also be at least 16 years old when they start “true” depth jumping off of higher boxes (boxes of at least 24”/60cm), not just because of the physical demands, but also to keep the training process from intensifying too soon (early intensification of training happens far too often in the process of youth development).
Plyometric Jump Surfaces
Depth jumping, as well as any intensive plyometric exercise, is going to yield substantial ground reaction forces of multiple times body weight. Although the human body is robust (think of parkour athletes doing jumps on and off of concrete ledges repeatedly), it is good general practice to perform depth jumps on a surface that has a small level of “give” to it, such as grass, turf, a track, or a rubber gym floor. Surfaces with too much give, such as sand, won’t allow for a rapid ground contact time and reversal, while surfaces with too little give, such as wood or concrete, may trend an athlete towards over-use issues with joints over time. As such, I’d recommend the majority of plyometrics be done on those grass-turf or rubber surfaces, if possible.
Depth Jump Variations
The main variations of depth jumping are found in the rebound action of the exercise. For the best training effect, there should be some sort of objective to accomplish in the rebound jump after hitting the ground, as an objective can improve one’s output by 10% or more. In my master’s thesis research, I studied using a barrier to jump over in the rebound, compared to leaping up to touch an overhead target, as well as “control” jumps where athletes would just jump as high as they could in space. What was found was that “barrier” jumps allowed for the fastest ground contact times, and more force output at the hip and ankle. Overhead target jumps used more force at the knee extensors. Both the barrier and overhead jumps caused athletes to jump substantially higher than simply jumping upwards in space for maximal height.
The bottom line here is to use objectives, and base those objectives on whether you want to maximize reactive ability (use a barrier) or maximize one’s power specific to more of a standing or slow-moving two-legged jump (use an overhead target).
Sample Training Constructs for Depth Jumps
The best training programs are generally the simplest ones. Here are a few basic ideas on how to integrate depth jumping into one’s training for a beginner who has the pre-requisites of a 1.25x bodyweight back squat, and has engaged in a good variety of jumps in sport and movement practice.
Weeks 1-3: Training depth jumps 2x a week
- Day 1: 2×10 depth drops from an 18-24” box. 4×5 depth jumps from a 12-24” box
- Day 2: 2×10 depth drops from an 18-24” box. 4×5 depth jumps from a 12-24” box
Weeks 4-6: Training depth jumps 2x a week
- Day 1: 1×10 depth drops from an 18-24” box. 4×5 depth jumps from an 18-28” box
- Day 2: 3×8 depth drops from an 18-30” box. 2×10 depth jumps from an 18-24” box
Week 7: Break from depth jumping
Weeks 8-9: Training depth jumps 3x a week (in smaller daily volumes)
- Day 1: 1×10 depth drops from an 18-24” box. 2×5 depth jumps from an 18-28” box
- Day 2: 2×5 depth drops from an 18-30” box. 2×5 depth jumps from an 18-30” box
- Day 3: 1×10 depth drops from an 18-24” box. 3×8 depth jumps from an 18-24” box
Variations of Plyometrics
Looking for creative new ways to get the most from plyometrics? Below are some of my favorite plyometric variations. Each one links to a segment from the “Plyometric of the Week” series that covers instructions and best uses. Enjoy!
Depth Jump Viking Throw for “All-In-One Power”
The Serial Hurdle Hop Compendium
Penultimate Medicine Ball Throws
Toe-Drag Bounding for Single-Leg Jump Performance
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