Start about four months before your first practice. For a spring season, that means November. Here is the plan, one session at a time.
The four sessions
| Session | Weeks | Focus | What you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Session 1 | 1 to 4 | Tendons and shins | 15-minute tendon routine (long holds), A-skips, toe and heel walks, bodyweight strength |
| Session 2 | 5 to 8 | Strength | Five lifts twice a week, first pogos and mini-hops |
| Session 3 | 9 to 12 | Power | Pogos, then bounds, then hops, then short-approach jumps |
| Session 4 | 13 to 16 | Speed | Falling starts, first block starts, flying 20s, then one easy week before practice |
Your week: three days, 30 to 40 minutes
- Day 1: tendon routine, A-skips and A-marches, strength.
- Day 2: tendon routine as your warm-up, this session's jumps or plyos, then log it.
- Day 3: tendon routine, acceleration or speed, strength.
- Day 4, optional: play another sport, swim, or bike. Never a fourth jumping day. In a study of 1,190 athletes aged 7 to 18, those who specialized in one sport had higher odds of serious overuse injury [1].
Monday, Wednesday, Friday works. So does Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
Three rules that never move
- Do the tendon routine all three days. Tendons adapt over months. Build them now so you are training through the season instead of nursing a sore Achilles.
- Never put two jumping days back to back. Keep 48 hours between hard days. That is our rule.
- Start at half of what you think you can do. Build up over four to six weeks.
Run the experiment
Change one thing at a time. Write it down. Watch what your legs tell you the next morning. Your tracker is your lab notebook.
Where to go next
Read Stay Healthy first. Then open your event page, Jumps or Speed. Then Weight Room. Print the Weekly Tracker and start today with the tendon routine.
Go deeper: Season Planning and Periodization builds this plan out for a whole season.
Research notes
Science works through iteration, meticulous perseverance, comparison, challenge, and identifying patterns across the spheres of science, so no single study is the whole answer. Findings come from other populations, animal models, or other tissues in the body, because living systems share enough molecules and machinery that these clues help us understand our own health. Individual papers are cited as keystones to stir thinking, and each one opens onto years of peer-reviewed work it was built on. Follow the citations when something is relevant to you: they open further readings you can bring to your coach, athletic trainer, or doctor.
- Jayanthi NA, LaBella CR, Fischer D, Pasulka J, Dugas LR, 2015, American Journal of Sports Medicine. Single-sport specialization and injury in 1,190 athletes aged 7 to 18 seen at sports medicine and primary care clinics. https://doi.org/10.1177/0363546514567298
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