Scooby's Home Bodybuilding Workouts Plyometrics

(Under Construction)

My journey into plyometrics started with a bad ankle sprain.  During physical therapy, my therapist was amazed at how weak my calves were.  I think his exact comment was "I'm surprised you can walk!".  Anyway, it occurred to me that perhaps my sponge-calves were part of the reason that my vertical jump was so pathetic in volleyball.  Since then (18months ago) I have been training calves heavy once a week and gained in calf size and strength.  My vertical jump seems to be a bit better, but only barely.  So I'm at the gym two weeks ago and this gentleman in his mid '30s was doing jump training and I was transfixed, he was simply amazing.  He set the stool height to about 30" and repeatedly jumped up which was simply amazing considering that he was 5'7" tall.  Anyway, I grilled him about his plyometric training which got me starting researching the subject.  Since I always seem on the cusp of tendonitis in my knees, I never gave any serious thought to plyometrics.  I guess it was an excuse to avoid training that looked very difficult. So I started plyometric training on 5/1/07 and measured my vertical jump as a metric (remember, we always must have measurable goals!), my standing vertical jump is a whopping 16.5"!  OK, I obviously had a lot of room for improvement as the pro volleyball players can jump 44". 

6/15/07 Some interesting results in my first 6 weeks.  First, I had to discontinue most of the plyometrics because of back issues unrelated to the plyometrics but I was able to keep up at least the calf plyometrics, specifically, doing stiff legged calf jumps.  I've slowly ramped up on the volume of the training and although I haven't re-measured my vertical jump (back issues again), my calf strength seems to have surprisingly increased.  Before I started my max calf-raise was 180lbs, now its 220lbs.  I will be very interested to see if that continues and if my vertical jump has improved as well.