What seems to be the general idea behind when to do your plyos? Before speed work, as you are fresh, or at the end of your session, as you are well warmed up and more elastic?
do plyo after speed
Do your serious plyos after speed.
Dlive (I think) recommends doing a little and light amount of jumping in the warm up. i do ankle jumps or skipping in warm up.
Remember to be careful! Build slowly. Under NO circumstances would I do weights and plyos on the same day.
I did 60 contacts prior to speed work last night (Im in my unload week of a 3-1-3) and I can say i will be doing them after the speed next time as I felt a little flat in my starts after the plyos…though my plyos were great 
I guess it depends on teh volume, in normal strength weeks I would do 20 contacts per sessions and generally do them prior to speed with little or no effect, but the higher the volume the more effect it has on the speed session…
I also do weights on the same days as plyos…but both in reduced volumes and more frequent over the week, though I am yet to do much bounding on tempo days, I think I should start including 20 contacts on those days too.
thoughts?
What do people think of Louie Simmons’ idea that plyos shouldn’t be done at all unless the athlete can squat double BW? Granted he’s a PL coach, not a track guy, but his reasons if I understand correctly, are:
- That plyos are too stressful unless the athlete is that strong at least,
and,
- If you’re not that strong yet, the best thing to do is to work on getting that strong(without losing speed).
I understand that sprints are different from squats, but does his idea have relevance here?
This double bodyweight squat relates to depth jumps - which from my understanding is plyometric. But plyometrics is used loosely now as all form of jumping and bounding.
It has merits though with depth jumping, but would you stop somebody using the skipping rope
Okay I was being a little too narrow in my conception of plyos. Never mind then 
remeber sprinting is a plyometric and during sprinting we are delivering force 6-8x our bodyweight. and even running can be up to 3-4 times our bodyweight.
It depends on the type of plyo and the phase of training.
Some possible examples for consideration…
e.g. say we are talking about bounds and hops, and you have finished a max strength phase but are in the period before intensification of your speed training. You might do the bounds before an acceleration workout, because this is the quality that has your major focus.
Later, when maximum speed and the quality of such becomes your focus, you may reduce the bounds and hops and place them after your speed work.
True, but if you have obvious lower leg deficiencies sprinting alone is not going to let you move on to a higher level because your mechanics will be limited to the lowest common denominator. What I mean is, your sprint mechanics will work to their fallback strength, which may be your glutes and hams. You need to do something new to strengthen the weakest link and then seamlessly integrate this into your sprinting.
dwc,
good post. and i totally agree. i am incorparating plyos into my program actually. the post i made that you responded to was actually in response to jugglers first post.
I tend to do some jumping with weights.
My training tends to follow
Skill
Speed
Strength
Stamina
Roughly speaking. I would put Plyos between Speed and strength
I don’t think, or don’t understand why one might need to be “that strong”
before doing plyo’s. I doubt Carl Lewis squatted twice his bodyweight though he rarely lifted weights so it doesn’t mean he wasn’t strong.
I first started doing plyo’s when I was 18 years old and at that time I was squatting 120 kg which was 1.45 times my bodyweight. I had great success with the plyos, I could do them correctly and ended up outjumping every body else on the basketball team, partly becuase few of them were doing plyo’s.
Agreed. I know people who rarely touch weights but can depth jump. It is all about building slowly. If I started to depth jumping now, with minimal plyo or jumping training I would be injured in a few weeks.
The double bodyweight squat is a general rule. Also the depth of the squat is important, from memory it was a half squat or parallel squat.