Excellent reply Kingfish. THis is the exact spot on advice you'd want to follow as a novice.
My only difference, apart from not progressing slowly enough, is to question the point of performing depth jumps minimzing ground contact time if they severely reduce your jump height. In other words, is there a point in performing such mini depth jumps like the guy in the video?
From the video:
"Plyometric exercises work on the principle that a concentric muscular contraction is much stronger if it immediately follows an eccentric contraction of the same muscle. It's a bit like stretching out a coiled spring to its fullest extent (the eccentric contraction), then letting it go (the concentric contraction): immense levels of energy are released in a split second as the spring recoils."
Yes. But, if you are performing minimal GCT depth jumps and losing significant height, you are not releasing "immense levels of energy," in fact you are losing immense levels of energy. Just like trying to take 3 huge steps like golden child before an RVJ if you cannot handle that.
Therefore, for beginners with little jump training experience, just try to jump high.
For strength trained folk with slow rate of force development (RFD), still, try to jump high, that will automatically reduce your ground contact time compared to the ground contact time in a squat or a squat jump.
Once your minimal GCT depth jump and max height depth jump are in like 1% of each other, lifting is probably the solution. Or weighted vert jumps, external resistance.
But if there is a large difference between minimal GCT depth jump and max heigh depth jump, or SVJ, then keep working on depth jumps for height.
Doing these puny depth jumps will improve your ability to apply a small amount of force, in a small amount of time, but not necessarily a large amount of force/power, in a small amount of time.
So therefore, I'm against minimizing GCT, if and only if there is a significant drop off (which I cannot define in numbers) in jump height, unless your goal is to get in some submax work and just train the nervous system. The majority of the time, jumping for max height may be better, and will reduce GCTs in a max vertical jump or a max depth jump.
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meHoPLP3xqg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meHoPLP3xqg</a>]]>At 00:58 I go for max height, I actually reduced my height as a result, mainly due to bad form
1:03 - max height
1:13 - minimize GCT, WHILE jumping as high as I can - actually jumped same height, if not slightly higher.
1:18 - replay of 1:13
It's all about max power output. So if minimal GCTs (resulting in submax jumps, like in the video) really do improve power output in MAX jumps, then I'm for it. I think though that since less power is produced in such a jump, it's as beneficial as doing line drops and other submax foot drills.
Hope that makes sense
