you're a teenager, you're fucking invincible and your body is literally on steroids right now. take advantage while you can.
This statement could not be more true.
I Totally agree with LBSS.
Yes this is true.
The program you have should be fine, but I would like to raise a serious issue regarding
practicing jumping in lieu of training jumping.LBSS's recommendation here cautions against your training to include entirely plyometric workouts without any jumping.
The question here is if practicing jumping can actually be your plyometric workout, and substitute for those jumping exercises.
My answer is yes, and no, depending on a couple of things:
Absolutely without a doubt yes: if your jumping form needs work, AND if you have not been training consistently for more than any arbitrary number of months that indicates your inexperience with this training... say more than 6 months, 3 months maybe.
Here, practicing jumping will do two things, it will help you to execute the jump properly, applying forces efficiently, and make it hella smooth, while preventing you from getting too slow from the heavy squats. Next, it will be proving a training stimulus, to improve everything needed about the muscles, bones, tendons, needed to jump like an animal.
Yes sorta: if you're just a beginner, but also know how to jump.
Not really: If you've tried jumping already to improve your vertical and haven't seen much gains (or have plateaued quickly), if you jump regularly or play basketball or other sport that involves running vertical jump or single legged vertical jumps, and you're clearly deficient in strength.
So should you jump as much as LBSS recommends? It probably won't hurt, but if you already know how to jump well, practicing running vertical jumps simply will not be enough of a training stimulus to improve it, unless you overload the jumps, by taking more steps (5 steps instead of 3) to increase the speed of the runup or wear a weighted vest, but still there are better exercises you can do, like bounding, and single legged depth jumps which overload the stiffness of the leg, and elasticity and stuff like that better than just jumping.
The exercises that provide more overload should ideally be ones that you cannot perform with as much volume as regular jumps.. so if you can practice 20 jumps in a row without seeing a decrement in your jump height, it's not a good training stimulus. If you can only do 10 depth jumps off of one leg without noticing a decrement in your jump height, it's going to provide a greater training stimulus.
With bounding for example I noticed after a while I have to add more speed for there to be a stimulus, otherwise I can bound for literally 100m without feeling any fatigue in my legs (alternate bounding from a standing start). When I reach this point, I've also plateaued most likely (haven't truly tested this) in my ability to improve running vertical by just jumping. At this point, my legs are just bouncing along the ground easily, with minimal effort, like a bouncy ball or something that has great elasticity. That factor needs to be overloaded, with more intense shock training.
