It started with tuck jumps. Knees to chest. I tried a few and the conclusion was immediate: I am weak.
So I did the obvious thing. I went to the gym and worked on my legs. Squat went up. Hip thrust to 100. Single-leg squat, an exercise I had never done in my life, learned from scratch and slowly added to the rotation. The numbers told a clean story. I was getting stronger.
Then one day, walking the dog, I tried something simple. Pogo jumps. Line hops. Short, fast, on the spot. After thirty seconds my quads were burning like I had just done a heavy set. Skips, where you do not actually load anything reactive, were fine. Aerobic work was fine. Heavy lifts were fine. But these tiny bouncing hops, no load, no plates, nothing - destroyed me in half a minute.
Twenty-six years without jumping. That is roughly the math. Not a single block of plyometric work since school, and even then almost certainly nothing structured.
That walk taught me more than any lab test.
The wrong diagnosis
When the tuck jumps felt weak, I assumed the problem was strength. So the fix was obvious: more strength. And the gym delivered. Quads, glutes, posterior chain, all measurably stronger. The single-leg squat was a personal milestone. I felt solid.
But on the dog walk, with no bar, no plates, no grind, just my own body trying to bounce - I was useless within seconds.
This is not a strength problem. This is a transmission problem.
Force-velocity curve, four zones
The picture clears up the moment you stop thinking of “leg strength” as one thing and start thinking of it as a curve. Four zones across the force-velocity spectrum:
- Zone 1 - Max strength: low velocity, high force. Grinding a heavy squat.
- Zone 2 - Speed-strength: mid velocity, high force. Explosive concentric, broad jump.
- Zone 3 - Strength-speed: high velocity, mid force. Light, fast efforts.
- Zone 4 - Reactive / max speed: very high velocity, low force. Stretch-shortening cycle, pogos, sprint mechanics.
I had Zone 1. Quietly built over years. Everything to the right of it was missing.
The quad burn on pogos was diagnostic. Elastic recoil should be giving me free energy on each rebound. I had none. Every hop was a voluntary mini-squat - concentric contraction, no spring. The ankles were not stiff. The nervous system did not know how to express force fast.
Tempo squats with a three-second eccentric, which I had done plenty of, teach the tendons to stay stable under load. They do not teach the body to explode. If anything, they reinforce the wrong frame: strength equals slow grind.
A familiar shape
Years ago I plateaued on pushups at twelve reps. I blamed age. I blamed testosterone. I told myself the obvious story.
Then I started doing planks for an unrelated reason. A few weeks later, pushups jumped to thirty-five, forty.
The pushup was not failing on chest or triceps. It was failing on anti-extension stability - my torso was sagging, leverage was leaking. The plank trained the one missing link. Chest and triceps had been ready the whole time. They just needed a platform.
Plateaus rarely come from a deficit in the main engine. They come from a missing link that limits the engine’s expression.
The legs now look identical. The engine is there. The transmission is missing.
Sequencing - my first plan was wrong
My first instinct was to attack the deficit head-on. If pogos are the problem, do more pogos. Reactive work, often, get the ankles stiff.
That is the wrong order. You cannot train reactive Zone 4 work cleanly when the muscle does not yet know how to fire fast concentrically in Zone 2-3. The quad has to learn to explode first. Then the ankle learns to be stiff during that explosion.
Walking into Zone 4 with a Zone 1 nervous system is empirically confirmed in about thirty seconds of pogos. Quads on fire, no recoil, no progression possible.
So broad jumps and counter-movement jumps come first. Pogos are secondary, low volume, short duration. Line hops are out until later. Tuck jumps - the exercise that started this whole investigation - are deferred. They were too aggressive for where I actually sat on the curve. The fact that I tried them at all was itself diagnostic of how badly I had misread my own profile.
The plan
Two components running in parallel:
- Daily coordination work on the dog walk - low strain, every day.
- Dedicated plyo sessions - 2 or 3 times per week, ~15 min each.
Both matter. The daily part keeps the pattern alive between sessions; the dedicated sessions do the actual loading.
Daily
A-skips 2x10m on the dog walk. Coordination drill, low strain. Cut it if the hip flexor talks back - psoas memory from the tuck jump strain.
Weekly cadence for dedicated sessions
- W1-2: 2x per week (Wed pre-gym, Sat standalone)
- W3-4: 3x per week (+Thu) if progression criteria are met
- Not on: Tue (quality run), Sun (long run), Mon (off)
Dedicated session structure (W1-W4, ~15 min)
| # | Exercise | Dose | Rest | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jump rope | 2 min | - | Warm-up |
| 2 | A-skips | 2x10m | 30s | Coordination |
| 3 | Standing broad jump | 3x3 | 60-90s full | Horizontal explosive concentric |
| 4 | CMJ | 3x3 | 60-90s full | Vertical explosive concentric |
| 5 | Pogos | 2x8-10s | 45-60s | Secondary reactive |
| - | Line hops | OUT | - | Too many variables for now |
Same doses through W4. What changes between W1-2 and W3-4 is the frequency (2x to 3x per week), not the session itself. Volume increases come only after a clean W4 - see progression criteria below.
Rules
- Quality before fatigue. Max intent, max height or distance, every rep.
- Height or distance drops, or you start grinding - set is done.
- Plyo is not cardio. An ugly rep is neurological garbage.
- Pre-session only, CNS fresh. Never tacked onto something tired.
Progression criteria after W2 - all four
- CMJ without “concrete quads”
- Broad jump feels springy, not forced
- Pogos do not burn the quads after 10s
- Achilles and calves quiet in the morning
All four checked: add 3rd session per week (Thu), volumes unchanged. After a clean W4: reintroduce line hops 2x10s forward/back only, CMJ to 3x4, broad jump to 3x4.
Deferred
- Dynamic effort lifting (jump squats with the bar, speed deadlifts) - L5/S1 risk vs benefit. Maybe Cycle 2.
- Depth jumps, hurdle hops, shock work - Zone 4 advanced. Phase 3, W12+.
- Tuck jumps (knees to chest) - the ones that started this. Earliest W12+, after a clean bilateral jump pattern.
- Olympic lift variants - valuable long term, but broad jump and CMJ already deliver 80% of the benefit for 20% of the complexity.
What changed in my thinking
The lab gave me one gap - LT1 too high, years of grey zone training, almost no aerobic base. Real, useful, fixable.
But the lab did not catch this one. No protocol on a bike or treadmill exposes a reactive deficit. It took an honest attempt at a tuck jump, the humility to take “I am weak” at face value, and then the patience to follow the thread instead of reaching for more weight.
A few rules fell out of the process:
- “I am weak at X” is not a verdict on the engine. It is a coordinate on a map.
- Adding more of what you already have is not progress. It is repetition.
- A clean diagnostic is worth more than a clever program. The thirty-second pogo test taught me more than another lab visit would have.
- Plateaus point to bottlenecks, not deficits. Find the missing link, not the missing kilogram.
Twenty-six years without a jump. The engine kept getting bigger. The transmission stayed broken. Now the diesel is learning to shift.