I once read a performance metric saying an 8 foot broad jump is decent, not shitty, starting to get good, or whatever. I think it was something Jim Wendler wrote. I figured it’d be cool to do at 245+lbs.
Now my gym has a Rogue crash pad, red, 6′ wide by 8′ long.
And a link to the product page should you doubt that it is 6’x8′.
Every so often I’d jump the width basically just playing around. Eventually that got easy, so easy in fact I’d do it for high reps, jump, turn around, jump, ad nauseum with my hands in the small of my back taking away the arm momentum.
At this point I was good for over 6′ but under 8′. I’d guess I was hitting 6’6″ or 6’9″ consistently on good jumps.
I kept playing with it. Sometimes fresh, sometime fatigued, sometimes warming up at the short distance, sometimes not.
Occasionally I’d hit warmups with an olympic lift, and start mixing in the broad jumps once I was warmed up and adding weight to the bar.
For around 6 or 8 weeks I’d been landing very close to clearing the 8′ pad. First on good jumps I’d get the toes over, then it was consistent at this mark of roughly 7’9″. This is already a gain of a foot in only a month or two of goofing around with this.
About a month ago I hit a string of squat PRs, then a week of two later hurt my knee, not injured it. (Note that this was not gym related.)
I decided to not make it worse, as doing stuff on it was making it worse, so I modified the PT leg stuff, and cut all lower body gym work. (I’d kept doing PT and olympic lifts on it + some bleacher runs and wrestling for a week or so and it was getting worse, it started swelling on top of the cuts and bruises behind the knee that had been there. I realized I had to stop to keep it from crossing out of hurt and into injury territory.)
I gave it 10 or 14 days and let it heal.
A few days ago I went back to normal PT.
2 days ago I did some light stiff leg and straight leg power cleans (slpc) + press.
Yesterday I did a full olympic session (all 3 pre-1972 lifts) of:
- SLPC (both types) + Military Press
- Snatch
- PC+Jerk
- Front Squat
Nearing the end of the presses I started doing broad jumps in between sets. 2 reps at 6′ then BOOM! I got it at 8′, a mild arm pumping celebration, and went back to weightlifting.
I ended up doing it twice or thrice more during the weightlifting breaks. No misses.
After the front squats I decided to try for filming it.
No celebration as I’d celebrated after the first time hitting the milestone, and this was the 4th or 5th time. Not liking the angle above, I moved the mat around, and did one more. I ended up deleting that video as the angle was no better and the clip lacked the humanity of a badly positioned holding up of 8 fingers to signify the number of feet I’d just jumped.
Now how did I make the gains on broad jumps?
- practice-in all matter of circumstances
- no real change in weightlifting ability
- a possible loss of 5lbs bodyweight (I’m unsure as I have forgot about the scale only checking today to see how heavy I was while jumping clear over the mat.)
- a month with little leg work, a week or so with only PT, and a few days with modified PT that was basically none (Modified PT was holding warrior pose for some longish counts and seated calf raises instead of standing, so basically none).
I guess I’ve admitted I messed up the hindu squats and calf raises daily thing, although I modified it around the hurt which was getting close to injured, recovered and reaped the rewards of recovery both intended and unintended. Mentally I am not counting that as a miss, it was a necessary modification.
Train hard and play,
-J
Update: 12/14 8’9″-9′ Roughly shoe length past clear over mat. Also the stiff leg power cleans likely come into play, it dawned on me later.
