TENDONS LIKE A KANGAROO

By the same token, many athletes who can jump high and/or run fast have physical characteristics such as long lower legs, high calves and long Achilles tendons. The length of the achilles tendon gives them a leverage advantage and enhances plyometric ability because it acts like a long rubber band. If you take 2 rubber bands of equal strength the longer one will fly further. Recall that in a plyometric movement the muscles and tendons are stretched and energy is stored and released in greater

quantities. Having long tendons in the lower leg can enhance this entire process. The achilles tendon is amazing at storing elastic energy and giving it back to you; it's an adaptation to make activities like walking and running more efficient. In the animal kingdom kangaroos have the longest achilles tendons and are also the best leapers. They can literally bounce around all day over 10 foot fences with hardly any effort. This doesn’t at all mean that if you don’t have long legs and tendons that you won’t be able to jump. It just means that your leaping ability will likely be naturally more dependent on pure strength and your reactive strength will come less easy. You’ll probably be excellent at demonstrating your explosive power from a virtual standstill as well. Likewise, if you have long legs and tendons, - strength and the ability to demonstrate that strength in the weight room or jump from a pure standstill probably won’t come as easy for you, yet being able to bounce around like a kangaroo, running at top speed, high jumping, long jumping and overall just demonstrating good reactive ability will.

Since there is obviously nothing you can do to change your body structure once you’re done growing besides adding muscle (despite what some people may want to sell you), the only thing you can do is work with what you have and train to maximize your natural attributes so that you can perform to the best of YOUR ability! Testing and Program Design

Obviously you now know the importance of having good levels of strength, rate of force development, and well-developed reactive ability. If we separate the 3 strength categories and look at them independently most everyone will have one category that needs a bit more work then the other. For the tough guy who is already squatting 3 times his bodyweight it's obvious he's already strong enough, so he will immediately move to a program focused more on rate of force development and reactive strength training. For the rail thin guy that crumbles when he looks at ½ his body weight on the squat rack, it’s definitely time for strength training 101 with limited plyometric

training. But for the rest of us that are somewhere in the middle, the answer may not be so clear.

Finding Your Ideal Training Focus

Is there anything we can do to determine this for you? Well, good thing for you there is but first you’re going to have to do a little test! An old mechanic once told me that vehicles will talk to you and tell you what’s wrong with them but the key is to know how to listen to them. I believe our bodies are much the same way. If we know how to read into them and listen to them, they’ll tell us how to train them for optimal results. Figuring all this out can take years however! Luckily for you, when determining where to focus your training and how to structure it, a highly effective diagnostic method has been around for ages

Voluntary explosive strength and plyometric strength are independent components of motor function. That is, you can be really good at one and not the other but both are trainable.

When analyzing the vertical jump, have you ever noticed how regardless of their style of jump, some guys can jump nearly as high from a standstill as they can with a long run-up, - while some guys can fly through the air with a long run-up but can’t get a foot off the ground when jumping from a standstill? In a sprint, some guys can accelerate to their top speed very quickly while others take forever to reach top speed but once they get there they're very fast.

As noted above, the ability to jump from a standstill position or start and accelerate in a sprint is more dependent on pure voluntary explosive strength and rate of force development while jumping after a run-up or sprinting at top speed are both more dependent on involuntary plyometric efficiency. The greater speeds of movement both allow and rely more on reactive ability.

Yet another example of this would be to compare the standing broad jump to a high jump, long jump, and sprinting at top speed. Even though one can initiate a bit of a bounce when performing the broad jump, it is still mostly dependent on pure strength and rate of force development. The long jump, high jump, and full speed sprint are much more plyometric in nature. Athletes who are really good at broad jumping are usually extremely strong (throwers and Olympic lifters) and tend not to be the best at high jumping or long jumping and vice versa.

When your reactive ability is good the amount of energy that you put out in a movement will be directly proportional to the energy you take in. So if you absorb more force you develop more force. There is a test that will measure the amount of force you can take in and put out. It will show you the difference between your plyometric strength and your explosive strength. The test is called the Reactive Resources jump test. With the results of this test we can determine where to focus your efforts for quick improvement.

SO HOW DO I TEST MYSELF?