Do you jump well?
Jumping and Landing
Jumping is a powerful exercise with many great benefits. However, your jumping is only as good as your ability to land efficiently.
Landing is the equivalent of the brakes on your car. It’s your ability to slow down or stop momentum. It is your body’s ability to absorb the energy of impact. The inability to land efficiently is a huge reason for pain and injury.
Landing is one of the most important movement skills that most people don’t do well. Something that makes landing doubly important is it is a part of the ONE movement you do more than any other… Walking/Running Gait mechanics.
If you don’t land well, then every step you take loads a poor movement pattern into your body. If you take the recommended 10,000 steps a day, eventually something is going to hurt.
Landing Phase of Gait
With each footfall, impact energy should be absorbed throughout the kinetic chain of your body – i.e. joint by joint from your feet to head and back out through the opposite foot – like a loaded spring.
When this full body loaded spring isn’t functioning optimally due to injury, overtraining, or just lack of use, it is unable to absorb and unload energy efficiently. This creates energy leaks somewhere in the kinetic chain. Your body still has to slow down or stop momentum, so the load of impact is leaked out into the less absorptive areas of your structure – such as directly into the joints. This can create all kinds of secondary compensations and pain.
And because landing is a full body movement, the compensations and pain can be anywhere. Maybe that pain your neck is actually coming from the how your body interacts with the ground?
I put a huge focus of my program design on teaching and integrating the skill of efficient landing because it is so important for the prevention of pain and injury.
Learn to land well so that when you jump, the sky’s limit.