Thoughts.

Seems like there’s discussion about the legitimacy of Air Alert’s ability to improve one’s vertical. One poster even denounces it as little more than conditioning, and an injury-risk-filled bit of conditioning at that, citing the high reps and plyometric nature of it.

I think it’s interesting; I’m not about to do a long-ass post on RSD about why I think he’s a bit off-base–quality over quantity is the mantra when it comes to posting to RSD–but I figure my thoughts should, appropriately, go to my blog.

I think he’s wrong in saying that all it is in conditioning, quite frankly. The thing is, jumping high isn’t just about training your fast-twitch muscle fiber. Seems counterintuitive–isn’t that the explosive muscle? Yep, it is. But the thing is, when you do a program like air alert, you work the muscles, and that’s one level of the training, but you also work the movements.

Similar to how you get better at throwing by throwing, not just strengthening the muscles that you use to throw, you can do the same for any movement. Yeah, you might stop working your fast-twitch muscles (emphasis on might) after 10-15 reps of the leapups, but that you continue to have your muscles perform the movement while fatigued reinforces the movement pattern. Unlike technical movements which you don’t want to practice while fatigued (I’m talking things like throwing form, where you start reinforcing bad form, or exercises like olympic lifting, where bad form greatly increases injury risk), with a relatively simple movement like this powering through will actually help your muscles to learn the movement to it’s fullest–once your fast twitch contribute less, you learn how to do the movement using the rest of your muscle instead of just the fast-twich, using your synergistic muscles more, by relaxing quickly so you use less energy, etc, and this will carry over to when you do the same movement recovered and all of that comes together. Progressive overload is a basic tenet of any sort of training–whether that’s through increasing load, as in weightlifting, or increasing the relative load by fatiguing your muscles, you can see similar neurological effects.

The thing with only using your bodyweight is, you can only increase your strength to a point doing the same movements. He’s not off in saying that the people who likely benefit most from the program are the untrained; that’s because they’re less capable of handling even their bodyweight than your average athlete. With plyometrics you have some form of progressive resistance in that you can jump higher and exert more force to go up (and decelerate when you land), and increase your power by minimizing contact time (power being force over time); but there is a point of diminishing returns even with that. It’s likely that anybody with a decent strength background won’t have much stimulus in the way of developing muscle strength (at which point you do get a conditioning benefit), but it is likely that anyone who isn’t already finely tuned to jump will see benefit from learning the movements involved–your nervous system will learn to be more efficient with the firing of more of the main muscles used, with recruitment in the muscles that aid (but don’t directly perform) the movement, and the sequenced firing of muscles to generate force quickly and efficiently(the examples I pointed to above). This will still result in improved jumping ability; as I like to say, plyos gennerally help to teach your body how to better use what it has, as opposed to strength training which gives your body more to work with.

As far as injury risk is concerned, having done the exercises myself, I can say fairly confidently that the only way you’d get injured doing it is if you move too fast, given that the reps increase progressively for a reason, to give you time to adjust to the movements and improve your work capacity for the program’s later stages, or if you’re performing the movements incorrectly. The majority of the movements are relatively low-impact in terms of how much weight you have to deal with coming down, given the relatively short heights jumped to, and given that all you’re ever using is your own bodyweight, you won’t ever really see your muscles overloaded; the only thing that I could see possibly being a concern is the leap-ups, where you go to 8-10 inches, but seeing as you’re jumping and landing on two legs you’d have to have serious difficulty landing or prior injury concerns to have any major injury risk (tying in to my last post, note that the posterior chain plays a large role in deceleration, including landing. Landing with your quads alone can work, but when you can engage your entire leg you’re spreading the force over a larger area–an area that doesn’t include your knee–it’s likely that those who get injured doing air alert already had imbalances to begin with–it’s not the program’s failure if the athlete cannot balance their strength).

Of course, this is all just my conjecture on the matter; I haven’t done the entire program myself (just bits from the early-mid weeks), and I can’t say with any certainty that the program actually works as advertised, so your results may vary. I may be way off base here, but I’d like to think I know a thing or two about muscular adaption and about jumping. At the very least, though, the program is not without value for its stated goal. I prefer to improve on my jumping primarily through training strength and power and then working jumping form on the ultimate field, myself, but to each his (or her) own. Different roads can lead to the same destination.