Plyometric Fundamentals Part 1: Learn How To Land, Before You Jump

A lot of the questions we are asked as Doctors of Physical Therapy from coaches and athletes are related to how should I teach our athletes how to perform plyometrics or how do I know if my athlete is ready to return back to jumping following his injury. Therefore, we created this course to answer those questions. In this course, we teach you the proper progressions to ensure safety, instill confidence, and build overall performance for all your athletes when learning how to jump or returning back to jumping following an injury. 

Furthermore, this course is great for every athlete to go through, especially following the decreased activity from COVID-19, because it promotes movement competency and fundamentals to build a more durable athlete. One issue that all coaches will be facing is how intense or how will their practices look like when returning back to basketball for the first time following the clearance of COVID-19 pandemic. As physical therapist we are worried about this new spike in activity that most athletes will be facing, which will lead to increased risk of injury because the athletes' bodies will not be ready for this huge increase in activity. 

In this course we really emphasize learning how to land and control the landing. The best analogy we use is that of a car. All gas without good brakes is a recipe for disaster. We believe in teaching athletes how to brake/land before we teach anything else. The reason we teach that is that majority of all injuries occur during landing and decelerating part of the basketball game. We also place a heavy emphasis in landing in multiple planes of motion. In basketball, the game is not just played straight forward and back it is played in different directions making it a very chaotic sport. Therefore, we must lean how to land in all these different planes of motions. 

The course is split up into 3 sections which are based on the base of support of the athlete. In other words we split it up based on double leg, split squat and single leg. These are the most common ways the athlete will land during a basketball game. Within the 3 bases of support we further break this down into the 3 different planes of motion which are sagittal, lateral and rotational. We must train and learn how to move in these planes of motion because basketball is played in 3 planes of motion. The progression of the course is outlined in that we must master the double leg base of support in all 3 planes of motion before we go into split squat then into single leg.