Cross Training workout: Boosting Your Strength and Athleticism through Jumps

The benefit of jumps is that they help in muscle fiber recruitment. Through the various jumps, you can recruit the dormant muscle fibers, enhance the efficiency of your nervous system, and increase neural drive. Through this, you can activate and train more muscle in the course of your CrossFit workout, and this enhances your strength gains. The more muscle fibers are activated, the more the number of muscles you can fatigue is increased hence muscle growth.

The main problem with many weightlifters is that they use loads that are way too heavy and boxes which are extremely high. This can jeopardize the strength boosting goals of jumps. To start you off on the right path, below are some types of jumps you can embrace to make your training worthwhile.

Box Jump

These jumps are effective in reinforcing landing mechanics as well as reducing joint stress. Restrict them to a single response jump as you maximize hip extension with each landing. Focus on your form and don’t try difficult box jumps, but slowly build your way up.

Broad Jump

When looking to develop your explosive horizontal power, longer jumps, and faster sprints, broad jumps should be your staple in the CrossFit gym. They also help you in developing powerful deadlift. Your focus should be on both up and out jumping to reduce the shear stress on your knees. The three common types of broad jumps include static single response jump, countermovement single response jump, and countermovement multi-response jump.

Squat Jump

This is a classic vertical jump that you can undertake either with bodyweight or by using a weight vest, light barbell or light dumbbell. Squat jumps are divided into four ranging from the simplest to complex ones. They include static single response jump, static multi-response jump, countermovement single response jump with weights, countermovement multi-response jump.

In all jumps, there are three important phases which include loading, exploding, and landing. You need to get these phases right for your jumps to be effective.

It is advisable that you program jumps very early into your CrossFit workout before you engage the main lift. The advantage of doing them before the main lifts are that they extend the warmup and rump up your nervous system to better recruit muscle fiber, boost power and strength. You can add your jumps two times in a week before you start your CrossFit training sessions. Anything between 3 and five sets made up of 3 to 5 reps with a 90-second rest in between the sets is awesome. If you find you can’t possibly stick each landing position, try and regress your jumps.