Box jumps and depth jumps train different things. A box jump trains the take-off: you jump up and land high, so the landing is easy and the work is all in the push. A depth jump trains the rebound: you step off a box, hit the ground and spring straight back up, which teaches the legs to absorb force and return it fast. For sprint speed and in-game explosiveness, depth jumps carry more over, because that is what a foot strike in a sprint is. But they come later, after an athlete can land well, and they are worth doing only if every rep is fast.
Parents ask us this when their kid's team has been doing box jumps for a season and nobody is any quicker. That is usually not the box jump's fault. It is a question of what each one is for and where it sits in the program.
What a box jump actually trains
A box jump is a take-off drill. The athlete loads, swings, drives off the floor and lands on top of the box. Because the landing happens high, the body never has to absorb the full drop, which makes box jumps a good, low-stress way to train jumping with intent and to practice a clean, quiet landing.
The catch is the height of the box. Past a point, a taller box measures how high an athlete can tuck their knees, not how high they jumped. We would rather see a moderate box landed in a quiet, balanced athletic position than a tall one landed in a deep squat with the knees at the chin.
Step down afterward. Jumping back off the box adds landing stress with no training benefit, and it is how a lot of the scraped shins and rolled ankles in this drill happen.
What a depth jump actually trains
A depth jump starts on a box. The athlete steps off, not jumps off, lands on both feet and immediately jumps as high as possible. The drop loads the muscles and tendons on the way down, and the goal is to turn that load around into the next jump as quickly as possible.
That is the quality that shows up on the field. In a sprint at top speed, each foot is on the ground for roughly 0.1 seconds. An athlete who can absorb force and give it straight back has a faster stride for the same strength. Depth jumps train that directly. Box jumps mostly do not.
There is a near relative worth knowing about. A drop jump uses the same setup but asks for the shortest possible ground contact rather than the highest jump. A lot of what gets done in gyms as depth jumps is really a slow, sinking drop jump: the athlete lands, pauses, sinks and then jumps. That rep teaches the opposite of what the drill is for. If the contact isn't fast, it isn't the drill.
So which one builds speed?
For sprint speed and first-step explosiveness, depth and drop jumps transfer more, because they train the same fast, stiff ground contact a sprinter uses. Box jumps build jumping intent and landing skill, which is the base those faster drills are built on.
The honest answer is that a well-run program uses both, in order. Box jumps and landing work first, then low depth jumps where every contact is quick, then progression in height only when the contacts stay fast.
How we fit them into a session
In our 6-block session, short, sharp, low-volume jumps sit in Block 2, the nervous-system priming block near the start, when the athlete is fresh, and more demanding plyometrics live in Block 4, change of direction and plyometrics, before strength work. Jumps never go at the end of a session as conditioning. A fast jump done tired turns into a slow one, and a slow one teaches the body to be slow.
We keep the volume low and count contacts, not sets of burpee-style reps. And because we retest jump numbers on a fixed cadence, we can see whether the jumps are actually turning into output, not just leaving an athlete sore.
Who should start where
An athlete who can't land a jump quietly, with knees tracking over the toes and hips loaded, starts with landings, snap-downs and box jumps to a moderate height. Depth jumps come once landings are clean and the athlete has a base of leg strength, starting from a low box, around 12 inches for most high school athletes. The height only goes up while the ground contacts stay quick. For younger athletes, our post on what age kids can start strength and speed training covers how that progression looks.
If you want to see where jumping fits in a full week, building a week for speed and vertical jump lays it out, and strong but slow explains why strength alone doesn't fix it. To get an athlete assessed and on a plan, book a session.