Weight lifting is a great way to build muscle. Itโs straightforward and itโs easy to track your progress, just keep lifting more weight next week and youโll see how youโve improved. Weight lifting comes with some downsides that you have to reach outside of your exercise routine to solve. If you want to streamline your workout, you want to incorporate exercise that will add flexibility to your muscle gain, youโre going to have to get creative.
Tuck jumps are an exercise that will push your lower body to its limit. Youโre going to be moving your full body the entire time youโre jumping and tucking your body together in a way that will force your body to limber up at the same time. If youโre looking for a way to branch out, then tuck jumps are the leap to the next level that youโre looking for.
Tuck jumps are as simple as it sounds. Theyโre a vertical leap where you bring your knees up to your chest. This is an excellent exercise for building your coordination along with your lower body and core. Jumping happens all the time in video games and in the animal kingdom, itโs the ultimate power fantasy because human beings are particularly bad a jumping. If you have a cat in your home youโll see them springing all over the place, up to heights many times their own height. If youโre not training your lower body, youโll be lucky to get yourself a foot off the ground. Tuck jumps are a great way to learn how to master your lower body and get your body higher in the air.
Tuck jumps are almost the same as bodyweight squat jumps. You can think of them as the natural progression of a squat jump. In fact, if youโre struggling with tuck jumps, you should consider starting with squat jumps until youโre proficient with them. Itโs like the jump equivalent of training up to a pull-up by slowly lowering yourself from a bar rather than pulling yourself up a tiny bit at a time.
What makes tuck jumps an exercise with so many benefits? Theyโre a plyometric exercise meaning youโre going to be pushing yourself hard and fast to make progress. Theyโre intense and well worth the effort. Itโs literally the name of the game. The name plyometric comes from the Greek words plythein meaning โto increase,โ and metric literally means โto measure.โ Plyometric exercises are all about progress and growth.
Plyometric exercises are also often also known as jump training or just plyos if youโre not up for the mouthful that โplyometric exercise.โ These are exercises where your muscles are going to be exerting their maximum force in some pretty small intervals of time. Your goal here is going to be to increase the power of your jumps. That means youโre going to be aiming to build muscle and mastering the movements of your upper body and tuning into the movement of your lower body. Plyometric training puts all of your focus on training the jumper to move from a muscle extension explosively. Thatโs what doing quick subsequent jumps in a special manner will do for your body.ย
If youโre a weightlifter then plyometrics are probably going to be a little unfamiliar to you. Typically plyometrics are used by athletes, especially martial artists, sprinters, and high jumpers, to jack up their performance on game day. Theyโre great for improving the aspects of fitness that athletes are drawing from. Your cardio and explosive power are going to benefit a great deal from plyos.
Because jumping is so strenuous for humans, youโre going to have to take some precautions before diving in feet first.ย
Flexibility is required to prevent injury. This is the case as well as in any other exercise, you want to keep yourself flexible. Building muscle should always be paired with flexibility. Muscle is dense and tough. Whenever you build a lot of muscle in an area youโre going to be adding a lot of tension to the joints and ligaments. The only way you can prevent long term injury prevention when youโre building muscle is to keep your body limber.ย
Tuck jumps will also just benefit from keeping your body flexible. If youโre able to pull your knees up towards your chest quickly after leaving the ground is going to make a world of difference in your progress. Folks with a lot of experience with plyometric exercise will combine their plyometric exercise with intensive stretching to keep their joints healthy and keep your body ready for the repetitive movements of your jumps. This also keeps your body limber enough to protect it from the shock of landing. Proprioception is an important component of balance, coordination, and agility, which is also required for the safe performance of plyometric exercises.
If youโre concerned about injury there are a few factors you should monitor in your own body before you start your tuck jumping journey.ย
One of the most exciting things about tuck jumps and adding them to your workout routine is how many of your muscles youโre going to be working out at the same time. Your legs, obviously are going to be getting the most benefit from this, but when you get into tuck jumps, youโll quickly see that your core and your upper arms are also going to see a lot of involvement and improvement.ย
Lower Body
The jump and the tuck are going to recruit nearly every single muscle in your lower body. Youโre extending your muscles rapidly and with enough force to lounge an entire human being into the air after all. Imagine the kind of force it would take for you to launch 100 or more pounds into the air and all of the muscles youโd need for such a feat. Your quadriceps, gluteals, hamstrings, calves, and hip flexors are all coordinating to lower your body towards the ground, lend you the explosive power you need to leave the ground, and contracting once more while youโre up in the air.
Core
Your core is going to bring your lower body and upper together once youโre up in the air.ย Your abs are responsibleย for bringing your upper and lower body together, and when youโre up in the air this is more evident than ever. Tuck jumps are a unique opportunity to observe this aspect of your anatomy. When youโre flexing your upper body, youโre technically pulling both halves of your body together, but youโre usually being stopped by another plane or gravity. But up in the air, thereโs nothing stopping the rectus abdominus from doing its job to the best of its ability.ย
Youโre also going to be recruiting your obliques. When youโre setting your core, youโre adding pressure to your abdomen and setting your torso in place. In order to get the most exercise done, you need a solid core thatโs not going to wobble all over the place as soon as youโre exerting force. Itโs just physics at that point. If you donโt have a solid core then your exercising is going to be doing you instead of the other way around.
Upper Arms
Youโre going to be employing your upper arms to generate a little bit of swing. This is going to be a cakewalk for your biceps, but your anterior shoulders arenโt designed to take a lot of punishment, so this exercise ends up working your shoulders pretty well.ย
Overall, tuck jumps are an incredible calisthenic exercise for your full body. As you become more comfortable with this exercise you open yourself up to a world of plyometric exercises. Youโre going to become much more coordinated because of the cooperation between so many of your different body parts, and learning to leap into the air and hang there like Jet Li is a pretty sweet skill to have. If youโre looking to get shredded and trying to make yourself more powerful, then youโll want an exercise that engages as many muscles as tuck jumps.
Benefits
Tuck jumps are an excellent addition to your workout for a number of reasons. Youโre going to be building up your flexibility and loosening your muscles up at the same time that youโre strengthening your core and building out lean and thick quads. Tuck jumps have the benefit of bringing a lot more to the table than just building muscle for you, unlike a lot of other exercises we tend to work on.
Tuck jumps are useful and fun, but theyโre also pretty easy to wrap your head around. Take the time to learn proper tuck jumping technique, and youโre going to be off to the races.ย
