In the newest installment of the “plyometric of the week” series, we’ll cover one of the oldest and simplest, but also the best, plyometric exercise that forms the basis for nearly all double leg plyometric jumps: The serial hurdle hop.
To perform the serial hurdle hop, 2 to 12+ hurdles are lined up anywhere from 4 to 6 feet apart, and athletes will rebound jump over them in sequence, “bouncing” on the landing with minimal contact times, and both feet contacting the ground at the same time.
It is important that these jumps are progressed over time to be challenging, and stretch the athlete to the limit of their reactive abilities, rather than just being “there” in the program, as they often are.
An example of serial hurdle hops is shown below
The problem with many manifestations of this exercise is that the exercises is either:
- Not maximally performed
- Hurdles are too close together
- Hurdles are too high
- Hurdles are too low (and the athlete doesn’t try hard to maximally clear them)
- Athletes don’t understand the concept of pre-tension when performing the exercise
- If not used for maximal power development, they are not used for FT fiber hypertrophy or capacity based training, a nether-region of training that is just done to be done
Let’s address each of these errors, and how to make sure your programming reflects principles of biomechanical specificity and overload regarding serial hops.
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Not maximally performed
This is an easy fix. Just make sure that athletes are not merely trying to clear the hurdle, but to maximally clear it, and/or do so by spending as little time on the ground as possible. To do this, and do it well, athletes will have to optimize their pre-tension before ground-strike.
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Hurdles are too close together
Something I see coaches make an error on repeatedly is placing hurdles too close together, to the point where athletes cannot finish an explosive push-off before they are forced to bring their knees up, or out and around in an awkward manner to clear the barrier.
Here is an example of hurdles that are placed too close together to allow an athlete proper, powerful takeoff mechanics, and you’ll notice the athlete has to take power off the jump and move the feet backwards to clear the barrier.
Simply place the hurdles 4 feet or farther apart to remedy this situation. For young athletes, or when intentially jumping over lower hurdles for the sake of quick contact times, 3 feet is usually fine. See below for an example.
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Hurdles are too high
If the hurdles used are too high, at the limit of the athlete’s ability, there are one of two negative situations that could arise. One is that the hurdles are no collapsible and injury could result. I’ve seen this happen far too many times, even at high-level training facilities with Olympic athletes! With non-collapsable hurdles, the risk isn’t worth the reward, unless you just want to be a bad-ass like Janick Klausen in the video below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BD1gkN0SlBw/?taken-by=justflysports
These aren’t serial hops, but this guy has some guts to do this.
What happens also when the hurdles are a bit too high, at the limit of the athlete, is that the ground contact times get longer. For non-track athletes, this is OK to do fairly often, but for single leg and track jumpers, only 10-20% of total hurdle time should probably be spent with hurdles at the limit of what one can clear.
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Hurdles are too low
This is more of a common error when coaches don’t think of overloading the exercise. Low hurdles are nice for teaching quick ground contact times, and pre-tensioning, but once this is attained, you can move to higher hurdles, and/or farther spaced apart hurdles. The video below is an example of well-performed low hurdle hops focusing on teaching pre-tensioning. Notice, they are still performed at a maximal intensity.
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Athletes don’t understand the concept of pre-tension
For hurdle hops, athletes should have a basic idea of how to hit the ground with stiffness and resilience through the feet. If they can’t do this, then the result of the movement will be limited in terms of building stiffness in the takeoff.
Athletes who struggle with pre-tensioning concepts can do well to perform more rudimentary “stiffness circuits” where they will hop in place and learn to put tension into the feet and lower leg that is re-used with each takeoff.
The big key in this movement is that, after takeoff, the toes go from a plantar-flexed (downward pointing) position, to a dorsi-flexed (upward pointing) position. Think of the two as yin and yang. Dorsiflexion stores energy and plantar-flexing releases it. The circuit below is a nice change to give athletes some exposure to learning this idea in various outlets on a more remedial level.
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Using serial hops in the “nether region”
One of the big “sins” of training is mistaking activity for achievement. It is also known as working out, instead of actually TRAINING. Activity, and merely working out is going through the motions of various exercises with an expectation that they will produce continual fruit of gainz, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The most dangerous place in training is in the middle. Therefore, if you are using hurdle hops, you must be using them for very distinct purposes, such as:
- Teaching coordination/pre-tension on the initial levels
- Minimizing ground contact times
- Maximizing power output in a position of shallow-knee bend
- Increasing the pool of FT muscle fibers
This represents the ideas of Taleb’s “barbell” method, where you generally want to stick to the extreme ends of things in life. You’ll see the same thing in Charlie Francis’ ideas on sprint training, as well as what is generally seen in inno-sport style training methods. The middle is a dangerous place indeed.
One thing I haven’t talked about yet is using hurdle hops for development of the Organism. “Organism Strength” is basically a fancy term for the base power capability of the athlete, i.e. their fast-twitch power and neural output that can be filtered into athletic abilities.
To improve fast-twitch quantity, it is recommended to perform 3-9 sets of 10-20 contacts. This is a lot of hurdle hops, and would definitely represent a “capacity” type training cycle that shouldn’t be undertaken for too long of a time period. You would also need to build into it to not fry one’s soleus muscles and irritate the Achilles tendon.
This type of workout would only be performed 1x/week, although you could do 3x a week if only doing 3 sets or less. I got this information from “Train Adapt Evolve” and agree with the idea of using higher rep maximal jumps to build capacity of the frictional (and non-frictional) elements of movement.
If you enjoy this series, and want to see how to put these exercises together in context of a complete program, check out our books and training groups, particularly “Vertical Ignition” and “Legendary Athleticism”. Be a part of the revolutionary training systems that are getting dozens of athletes to lifetime bests in speed, jumping and explosive power!
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