How often should I do plyometrics?
Two to three short sessions per week is plenty for most people. Plyometric quality depends on freshness, so keep contact counts modest, rest fully between sets, and place the work early in a session rather than at the end.
Why quality decides the dose
The training effect comes from producing high force in a very short ground contact. Once fatigue arrives, contact times lengthen and force drops, so you are no longer training the quality you set out to train, but you are still accumulating joint stress. This is why plyometric sessions are short and why stopping early is usually correct.
Contact guidelines
- Beginner: 20 to 40 contacts per session, low intensity, two sessions a week.
- Intermediate: 40 to 80 contacts, mixed intensity.
- Advanced: 80 to 120 contacts, with high-intensity work such as depth jumps kept to a small fraction of the total.
Count every ground contact, including hops within a set. A set of 10 pogo hops is 10 contacts, not one.
Where to place it
After the warm-up and before strength work, while the nervous system is fresh. Plyometrics at the end of a session, as a finisher, trains fatigue tolerance rather than power and carries a higher injury risk.
Rest between sets
One to three minutes, or longer for high-intensity work. If your jumps in set four are visibly lower than in set one, either rest more or stop.
Fitting it around everything else
Two plyometric sessions plus two strength sessions covers most needs. If you also sprint, count sprinting as high-intensity plyometric work, since the ground contact demands are similar, and reduce jump volume accordingly. Athletes in-season should reduce plyometric volume substantially, because matches already supply a large number of high-intensity contacts.
Signals to back off
Achilles or patellar tendon soreness, jump height falling week to week, and heavy legs that never clear all mean reduce volume. Tendons adapt more slowly than muscle, so they are usually the first to complain. See Introduction to Plyometrics.
