Thought I’d share this one with you. No doubt many of you have used something similar or have used box jump derivations. Stair work was one way I got a little more propulsive overload into my athletes without increasing the landing forces. As intimated in a previous post, it is how you accelerate your mass and the effects of gravity that affect your landing forces. When you ask athletes to jump up onto a box or a step – you actually reduce or totally eliminate the effect of gravity as there is no downward displacement of your centre of mass (COM) i.e. you land on the box/step at the top of COM displacement.

The step work provides a double whammy however, in that you can concentrate on explosive propulsive power on the way up and then on the way down the steps, the athletes concentrate on maintaining alignment and their slow eccentric strength as shown in the video. There are a heap of derivations from bilateral/unilateral, amplitude (1-4 steps) and velocity of movement on the way up and challenging unilateral eccentric strength by taking 1-2 steps on the way down. Any other ideas?