The plyometrics that build acceleration are the ones that send you forward. Broad jumps, repeat broad jumps, bounds and single-leg hops for distance all ask the body to put force into the ground behind it, which is exactly what the first three steps of a sprint are. Jumps that go straight up train a different skill, and a bigger vertical does not reliably show up in a faster start. If an athlete has been jumping onto boxes all off-season and is no quicker out of a stance, this is usually why.
Updated November 2026.
Direction is the whole thing. In a vertical jump the force goes down and the athlete goes up. In the first steps of a sprint the force goes backward and the athlete goes forward, with the body at an angle it never reaches in a jump off two feet. Those are different skills that happen to share a word.
The jumps that actually carry over
Start with the standing broad jump. It is the cleanest horizontal power test there is, it needs nothing but a tape and a flat surface, and the shape it demands, a hard backward push with the shin angled forward, is the start position in miniature.
From there, repeat broad jumps. 3 to 5 in a row, each one landing and going again with minimal time on the floor. This is where the rebound quality shows up, and the version that counts is distance with a short ground contact, not distance at any cost. An athlete who sticks every landing for a full second is doing a strength exercise, not a plyometric.
Then bounding and single-leg hops for distance. Sprinting is a single-leg activity and acceleration is a series of one-legged pushes, so at some point the training has to be one-legged too. Bounds are the most sprint-specific plyometric we program, and they are also the ones most often done badly, usually by turning them into leaping rather than driving.
Short, low hurdle hops travelled forward belong here too, and so does any version of a resisted start. A sled is not a plyometric, but it lives in the same part of the session and trains the same angle.
What a vertical jump is still good for
Box jumps are not useless, they are just not an acceleration drill. Landing high means the body never absorbs the full drop, which makes them a low-stress way to teach intent and a quiet landing. That is a real job, especially with a younger athlete, and we use them for it. We have written up where they sit next to depth jumps in box jumps vs depth jumps.
The honest limit is this. Vertical jumping tells you something about how much force an athlete can produce. It tells you very little about whether they can apply it leaning forward at 45 degrees with one foot behind them. That application is trainable, and it is trained horizontally.
How much, and how often
Less than people expect. We run plyometrics twice a week in most of our blocks, on the same days as sprint work rather than on separate days, and we count ground contacts rather than sets. A low-intensity session for a high school athlete sits somewhere around 60 to 80 ground contacts. The hard stuff, bounds and anything with a real rebound demand, lands closer to 20 or 30, and it goes at the front of the session when the athlete is fresh.
The stopping rule matters more than the number. When the reps get slower or the landings get noisier, the set is over, even if there were three left on the sheet. Plyometrics done tired stop being plyometrics and become conditioning, and conditioning is not what anybody came for.
What has to be in place first
An athlete should be able to land before they are asked to rebound. That means stepping off a low box and sticking it quietly, on one leg, without the knee drifting inward. If that is not there, bounding is premature and the answer is a few weeks of landing and deceleration work, which is not a punishment and is usually the fastest route to the thing they actually want.
Some baseline strength helps, though less than the internet suggests. The athlete who cannot produce force at all is rare; the athlete who produces it slowly, or in the wrong direction, is in every program in Monmouth County. We wrote about that mismatch in strong but slow, and where acceleration sits against top-end speed in acceleration vs max velocity.
The ones that are just jumping
Plenty of what gets filmed as explosive training is movement with no plyometric quality at all. Ladder drills are footwork and they do not make anyone faster, which we covered in do agility ladders make you faster. Jump circuits run for time are conditioning. A tall box jump where the athlete tucks their knees to their chest measures hip flexion, not power, and the number on the box flatters everyone involved.
None of these is harmful. They are just not the thing that changes a first step, and a limited number of good reps a week is what moves it instead.
If you want eyes on an athlete's start before changing anything, that is what a first session is for. Come see what we run, or get in touch and we will take a look.