hi my name's Lachlan Wilmot I'm the strength and power coach unit of GWS John contact I'm strong but also the landing position welcome my name's Lachlan warm-up on the strength and power co-chair the GWS Giants and today we're going to start to look at how we can progress that vertical force output for our plyometric training we've been looking a little bit around the fallacy that plyometric training causes injury and our previous two episodes we started to look at how can we teach that active landing from that how can then we start to utilize that concentric power with our athletes but then also start to look at contact time with the jump mat to give them feedback and try and teach them how to remain stiff from an ankle knee and hip perspective to increase that power output so what we're going to do today with KD is we're going to start to challenge that stiffness so still with our jump mat setup using contact time looking at that below point two or 200 milliseconds we're going to start the challenge KD with a little bit more of a jump height or step off height and start to look at a little bit more around what height she can get for a jumps so what you see here is effectively what we term a depth jump but we're starting at a very low position where just nice and steady build we've utilized a 30 centimeter box for KD to step off so it can quantify the height at which is coming from and then we can also utilize a 45 centimeter box so we can quantify the height she's jumping onto so three things we really want to look at here from KT is firstly when she's stepping off the box that she's actually just stepping off a lot of people tend to jump off the box which then changes the height that they're landing at and we can start to see a few issues start to present as they have these large landing loads so with a 30 centimeter box we know every time that KD steps off it's going to be from a 30 centimeter height if she starts to pull up to saw from this we can change it to a 15 centimeter box but vice versa we can start to progress her with incremental box Heights so we can quantify each progression the second part of it we want to look at is making sure that when she lands there's still that nice essence of quick contact time making sure that we have strong stiffness through the limbs but we're saying that like we talked about last episode we want to make sure that we're not changing the way the athlete jumps just to try and achieve it a quick contact time which means when they land we don't want to see them just do this little ankle tap to get going we want them to really utilize their entire body to jump thirdly we want to make sure that they land with a nice strong active landing like we talked about in our first episode utilizing that active knee and ankle and hip movement to achieve a nice strong landing position from KT okay so get you to step off absorb quickly drive through and nice active landing onto the box for me here we go whenever you're ready well done greenlight she got under 200 perfect let's reset nice strong step quick absorption and drive off the cap and drive good really nice one more for me I'll just get you to hold the landing position good so you can see the way Katie's held her landing position here she's got nice active angles where she's positioned herself she's not too low and she's not too tall when she did it so it's a perfect landing position right here when your athlete is achieving really nice landing positions and he's getting good contact time off that box we can start to progress in two ways one we can elevate the height at which they're stepping off now this is the more aggressive progression so I'd recommend you start to look at doing a higher landing box which is your second option so we want to try and get the same contact time for a greater height but what's really important is as we progress that box height that Katie doesn't get lower and lower and lower into her position we're going to make sure that active angle is still there that nice strong athletic position as that box gets higher Katie's going to want to bring her knees a lot higher each time and what we don't want to do is turn that box position into a hip mobility drill rather than a vertical force production drill we can chase hip mobility anywhere in the gym with a whole heap of exercises box jumps depth jumps that type of positioning is not to try and hip mobility as I talked about first the more aggressive way to progress it is to actually elevate her drop so obviously the landing forces go up and Katie's ability to absorb is unchallenged so we need to make sure that this is done very slowly but definitely a good way to progress this depth jump option hopefully you've taken a few things away from this episode that you can start to implement with your athletes forewarning this exercise should only be done after you've had a strong progression of our first two episodes building that absorption building that force output teaching your athlete about contact time and also teaching your athlete about the landing position for more information make sure you check out the fusion website or subscribe to their YouTube channel