When I was a young lad interested in improving my athletic performance, there were limited places to find training information. There was no YouTube in which to type “vertical jump exercises”, or Google to query “best vertical jump workout”.
No no
I had only a few weapons at my disposal to find ways to improve my speed and jumping power.
One was the 1980’s weightlifting manual that came with the concrete weight set my dad had bought from K-Mart. The exercises that seemed to feel good, I did, and the ones that felt awkward, I ditched. Funny enough, barbell squatting did not make my early list, while the more interesting deadlift variations seemed to be more useful.
The back of “Slam” magazine, and whatever ads happened to pop up, was another go-to, and what 13 year old couldn’t be enthralled with the promise of “Increase your vertical jump by 10-12 Inches!”.
To a young athlete, it was like these words were proclaimed from the heavens, calling forth all those wanting to embark on a sacred journey to defy gravity. How could this not be true?
One of the particular programs, in its 3rd iteration, had scrapped up a “secret” exercise, that held untold vertical jump riches to those who might perform it.
That exercise was the “low squat jump”, which involved attaining a low squat position, and bouncing up and down on the ankles for small 3-5” jumps for the number of reps. This exercise is actually utilized by not just those slinging vertical-nuggets to the uninformed masses, but has also been used by some great coaches.
In the video below, Jay Schroeder is shown demonstrating the movement with Adam Archuleta.
Here is another version with a dynamic jump on command, a split lunge landing. In this version, note that Adam doesn’t hit a “parallel” squat, but rather is a few degrees above it, which is probably close to the bottom of his standing vertical jump range.
There are also videos that exist showing the wrong was to do this movement, although it may not appear that way to the untrained eye. The following videos show a bad way to do this drill. Can you spot the fault?
You see, much of the success of this movement lies at the ankle. Jay Schroeder called them “Low Squat Foot Jumps”. The key is in the foot.
In the above videos, the athlete demonstrating was hitting the ground with flat feet, taking all the “slack” out of the ankle. In Just Fly Performance Podcast #52: Bas Van Hooren talked about how muscle slack is the delay from which movement is initiated, and full tension is reached in muscular contraction.
A huge difference in doing the movement “right” (Jay Schroeder) and “wrong” (amateur fitness guy) is that doing the movement with the heels off the ground limits the slack in the Achilles tendon, and its link with the bottom of a vertical jump, or on-field agility and change of direction patterns. There are even implications for early acceleration.
I’ve written about it before, but in vertical jumping, the heels don’t stay flat until the knees and hips extend. This would be a muscle slack nightmare. Rather, the length-tension relationship of the Achilles to the rest of the movement is a crucial paradigm. Check out the final moments of a Joe Ballard jump… and one half-second later, his chin is well over a basketball rim.
You’ll see the same thing with any other elite jumper. I’ve posted similar things like a Gerald Green slow motion analysis.
At the end of the day, traditional flat footed squatting and even Olympic lifting revolve around paradigms that don’t allow the Achilles tendon to operate at the right length at the right time. These movements aren’t inherently “bad” at all, but they just can’t teach this aspect of movement to athletes, and if these means are taken to their “end”, they can cause negative transfer.
The low-squat foot jump, or low squat hop, therefore, is a nice remedial exercise, and movement paradigm, that helps us to better screen and train our athletes. Performing it in higher rep schemes is no problem, since more volume = more learning, and if athletes have deficient lengths at the bottom of a jump or movements on field, they have to put in a little volume of work to get a good result.
If you’ve been hammering the squats and Olympic lifts for a better jump, and low-squat explosion, but feel something is missing, try your hand with this movement ideal.
About Joel Smith
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