Name: Chapter 18 - Plyometric (Reactive) Training Concepts | NASM CPT
Uploaded: 2025-07-02T06:01:43.000Z
Duration: 24 min 21 s
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NASM also refers to it as the reactive training.

But basically, the same premise that you're going to see, same concepts that you're going to see.

They use two different terminologies, but the plyometric base.

We definitely are going to look at a shorter chapter here, simply because of the fact that it's really it's one of those things that it doesn't take a lot to explain based on the previous information that you have, especially going back to the chapters when we talked about early on with muscle base, and also with trying to make sure that we go back to the exercise science, the metabolic base.

And then, let's see, I'm just trying to think of the other chapter.

And so the human movement science chapter, which would be chapter 7.

So chapters 5 and chapter 7 kind of give you some insight onto this.

So what is this whole aspect of plyometrics?

The problem is that we always assume that just doing a simple box jump is plyometric.

In other ways, we're talking about something that's very explosive.

Bounding, jumping, forceful movement of both our upper and lower bodies.

But really, what we want to think about is something called a very fast stretch shortening cycle.

So when we talk about that, yeah, that's where jumping does come into play.

If you look at the second bullet point down in this region here where it says plyometrics, really what you're getting into is, like it says here, exercises that generate quick, powerful movements involving an explosive concentric muscle contraction preceded by eccentric muscle action.

So what that's saying really is going back to our muscular system, going back to the human movement science space.

When we talk about eccentric muscle action, that is the lengthening phase.

So when you go to jump, when you go to land on something and you absorb that force, what you're doing is you're causing an eccentric or lengthening of that muscle.

But with plyometrics, it's not just the, OK, we're going to absorb the force and then, OK, wait, 3, 2, 1, and then explode.

We want to think about that really rapid contraction.

So it's an absorbing eccentric force followed immediately by a very rapid, very explosive concentric or shortening of the muscle fiber.

Now, there are some things that are going to come into play also within this chapter that you may not see directly in this slide, but understand that when we have plyometrics, there is that in-between phase between the eccentric and concentric.

What we're trying to do is limit what we call the armonization phase, A-M-O-R-T-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N.

It's the in-between segment of the switch from lengthening to very quick shortening because there's that in-between cycle.

So if we can minimize that time between, then we're on the right track to being excessively, or not excessively, but very highly amounted of plyometric base.

What we're trying to do is, like it says there, we're trying to produce high levels of ground reactive force.

Those ground reaction forces are the ability that we transition from moving basically at a very high rate of speed to absorbing force again, and then moving at a high rate of speed again.

We want to be able to minimize the amount of ground surface time that we have, to be able to explode and do it again.

The way that we want to think about plyometrics, let's talk about a basketball player, for example.

They're always the really good ones there.

They go up, they shoot a layup, they miss it.

They land, and they're like, oh man, I missed that shot.

So they land, and then jump right back up again to get their missed shot, to get an offensive rebound.

And then they land, and they miss that shot again.

And then they land, jump back up to try to get a third attempt.

And then the third attempt, they dunk it home.

Well, that's plyometric because you're, again, minimizing the amount of time that is being taken to go down, OK?

To land down, meaning absorb the force, to then explode up into whatever you're trying to do.

Volleyball players are a good example of that.

They'll jump, they'll block, they'll land, they'll go up for a spike.

It's natural for them to do it, but it's a very quick sequence, OK?

So the one other aspect here, if you look down at the bottom, it is important for the fitness professional to understand that individual clients must possess adequate core strength, joint stability, and range of motion, and can balance effectively or inefficiently to get us to be plyometric.

Bottom line with that statement, we do not want beginners to be using a high level of plyometric training.

Do we want them to be doing 24-inch jump-offs to land, to jump back up onto a 24-inch box?

So we're going to modify that, and we're going to cue it to make sure that we give them the right training.

New people are not going to take the advantage that we would hope, or that we can give them.

They need to understand they have to build up to that point to then be able to adjust and be able to perform these plyometric exercises.

So there again, rate of force production, that's basically saying here that it's our muscles can exert maximum amount of force output in a very short period of time.

If you notice that max force, minimal amount of time, that relates a lot to what we would term power.

And that's key because we're having explosive, explosive actions.

And there's that term I was talking about before, stretch shortening, right down in here.

That stretch shortening cycle is what I explained in the previous slide, where we're trying to minimize the amount of time in between the eccentric land and the concentric move, okay?

Now, if you notice in the slide here though, this is where core stabilization, neuromuscular stabilization, all of these things are going to come into play because we need them to be able to function in the best plyometric manner possible.

So there it is, eccentric, armatization, concentric.

Preload, transition, then basically the response to those previous ones.

And what we're going to do is we're going to take for the concentric, we are going to take the, what we would call stored elastic energy and transfer that to be able to fly, all right?

And now, now don't forget here, when we talk about plyometrics, it's not just jumping.

It's an ability to also create change in direction.

So even if, you know, a football player, think about a wide receiver, they go up, they jump, they catch the ball, they land, and they immediately make a move, that's plyometric, all right?

And so that's a way that they can maneuver as well.

It's, those are ways that we can train it, but that's not exactly always what it is.

It can be a land to a cut and that's a plyometric move, okay?

Because you're taking again, an eccentric land, followed by a very rapid concentric lateral movement, okay?

So there they are again, a little bit more in depth on this here.

If you look eccentric, stored elastic energy, you're stimulating the muscle spindles.

Remember the muscle spindle is the detector of stretch, okay?

So they're trying to see what the stretch is gonna, you know, the stretch of the agonist, that lengthening component, the armonization, where it says the nerves meet the synapse and the spinal cord.

And basically what you're doing is you're having the sensory signal sent to the spinal cord.

Armonization is that in between where the spinal cord and brain basically say, okay, this is what I gotta do.

The signal gets sent back to the muscles to then say, okay, force produce, okay?

And then you have your shortening of that agonist muscle.

Now remember agonist, that's another term for prime mover.

You know, if you're doing a squat base or a jump base, we know that our prime mover is a quadricep, okay?

So that's what we're looking to do there.

Again, we wanna increase rate of force production.

We wanna increase the amount of motor unit recruitment.

And by doing that, it allows us to know when our body should turn on and turn off certain things.

Now, if it's plyometric and we know that we need more motor units, our body knows to call on it.