Recently, I’ve taken up an interest in Parkour and I was wondering what anyone on this site knew about the effects of very high, 10+ feet, drop jumps?
My thinking is that this would be even more effective than regular drop jumps if my legs can handle it.
I vaguely remember hearing something about Mel Siff saying that drops jumps from the highest an athlete could be convinced to jump would be the most beneficial. After seeing David Belle do his thing, this sounds right to me. I mean, anyone who can take a twenty foot or more fall onto pavement and keep on going has to have something going for him.
those guys are pretty skinny and light as well. Same for most kids that drop off 6 feet, like me back when I was 5 years old without feeling anything bad, and without a warmup
try that when your closer to 200lbs and it doesn’t feel so good…
[quote]CoolColJ wrote:
those guys are pretty skinny and light as well. Same for most kids that drop off 6 feet, like me back when I was 5 years old without feeling anything bad, and without a warmup
try that when your closer to 200lbs and it doesn’t feel so good…
[/quote]
A valid point, although I don’t think that there is any true practical limit for the height of depth drops. After seeing the research that says that the higher the box the better training effect, I thought ok, so high is good, but you still can’t go too high. Then I saw the trick ski jumpers at the Olympics. Those guys jump off a ramp and go like 50 feet in the air while flipping, etc. and land, some with hardly any compression. Obviously you have to work your way up, but if you’ve got the balls to do it, the higher the better.
I started doing this recently at my comercial gym…I have nothing all the high to jump down from so I alternate from jumping up(to the highest I can go on risers, little past 40inches) once every other week to jumping down from about 3 feet off the ground with weight in my hands.
I am nuts though and love the idea of seeing how far we can be pushed. Since I don’t have anything high to jump off of I add weight…has anyone else tried this and what is the highest anyone has dropped from?
As long as you move up from a reasonable starting height at a pretty gradual pace I think you should be fine. Your body will tell you when you’re pushing it a bit much and need to back down. Use common sense.
from the physics point of view, adding weight will increase your momentum, so it will mean that you will need to generate more force in the deceleration phase.
However, as pointed out, it will not affect your impact speed in any appreciateble way, which changes the dynamics slightly…
You should only go as high as you can go just before losing proper deceleration mechanics. Basically when you land you should be able to land softly, control the eccentric contraction of your leg muscles, and stay in an athletic position without moving your feet or falling.
Also you can throw your arms down at the very bottom to increase the force of your descent. This technique has greatly helped my speed and jumping power. Learning to land and control your body correctly is a SKILL most people don’t do correctly.
Good point about landing mechanics. They are very often neglected, especially with young athletes. Teaching proper landing mechanics without high stress is one of the biggest reasons to do box jumps- but whenever you see kids (or most people) doing them, there is almost no focus on the landing.
The landing mechanics for an athlete in training have little in common with techniques used for parkour jumps from what I’ve seen. While the carryover from normal depth jumps would be substantial, nothing will compare to the real thing in terms of techinique, joint angles and total impact at landing.
I believe the parkour style jumps place a much greater emphasis on disipation than they do on absorbtion.
Well I don’t even know what parkour jumps are. If you want to jump off buildings and stuff then I guess the only way to get good at it is to jump of the darn things. But jumping from that high for sports specific sake is not rational… in my opinion.
