Broad Jumps

What the broad jump actually trains

A broad jump is a plyometric exercise in which you jump forwards from a standing start, taking off and landing on both feet, covering as much horizontal distance as you can.

The gluteus maximus and hamstrings do a disproportionate share of the work compared with a vertical jump, because horizontal propulsion is a hip extension problem. The quadriceps contribute, the calves finish the drive, and the trunk works hard to hold a rigid line while the body is projected forwards.

What it trains is horizontal power, which is a genuinely different expression of force from jumping straight up. Sprinting, accelerating and changing direction are all horizontal problems, and the broad jump is the simplest way to train and test that quality without equipment.

It is not, however, leg training in the muscle building sense. The rep lasts a moment, the tension is brief, and the total work done is small. Plyometrics are power and conditioning work. This one is a good example of the category and a poor substitute for squats.

Two things make it distinctive.

The first is that it is self-limiting. You cannot cheat distance. There is no box height to hide behind and no knee tuck that flatters the number. You either covered the ground or you did not, which makes it an unusually honest measure of progress.

The second is the landing. Everything you generated horizontally has to be stopped by your legs at the end of the rep, with your bodyweight travelling forwards rather than down. This is the part that deserves respect, and it is why broad jumps belong at the start of a session in small numbers rather than as a fatigue driven finisher.

Setting up and executing

Find a clear stretch of floor with grip and space to land and overshoot. A rubber gym floor or grass is ideal. Anything polished is a bad idea.

Stand with the feet hip to shoulder width behind a line or marker.

Dip into a quarter squat, swinging the arms back hard. The dip should be fast and shallow, with no pause at the bottom.

Drive the arms forwards and extend the hips powerfully, projecting yourself forwards and slightly upwards. The arc is lower and flatter than in a vertical jump.

In the air, bring the knees up and get the feet out in front of you. This is what converts height into distance.

Land on both feet at once, whole foot down, and absorb into a soft wide squat. Then stand up, walk back to the line, and reset.

The mistakes that cost you the most

Jumping up instead of forwards is the technical fault that limits most people's distance. If your jump has a high arc, you spent your force fighting gravity rather than covering ground. The correct feeling is of throwing your hips out along a low trajectory.

Landing stiff is the fault that hurts people. Schoenfeld's review of squatting kinematics and kinetics describes how the knee and hip share load through a flexed position, and the practical version is that soft joints absorb force through muscle while straight ones deliver it into the joint.

Repeated bounding jumps, where each rep begins the moment the last one landed, stack fatigue on exactly the tissue that has to absorb the next one. Bounding is a legitimate advanced exercise, and not what you should be doing in your first month.

Jumping on a slippery surface is how this movement causes injuries. Both the takeoff and the landing require grip.

And treating it as leg volume is the standard misunderstanding. Roig and colleagues found eccentric work drives strength and mass gains, and while the broad jump landing is a real eccentric, it is a single hard moment at a rep count far too low to build anything.

Sets, reps and rest by goal

Very few reps and a lot of rest between them.

For muscle gain, three sets of three to five with two minutes, treated as power work rather than as part of your leg volume. For strength and power, four sets of three to five with three minutes. In a fat loss phase, three sets of five to eight with ninety seconds, understanding that you have turned it into conditioning and distances will fall.

The long rest is functional rather than indulgent. Distance is the whole measure of this exercise, and it drops sharply with fatigue. A set where the last jump is a metre shorter than the first is not training power; it is documenting tiredness.

Measure your best jump occasionally. Broad jump distance is one of the few honest, equipment free progress markers in training.

Keep frequency low. One or two sessions a week, always at the start.

Schoenfeld and colleagues' dose response work on weekly hard sets explains where your leg size will actually come from, and it is the heavy compound work that follows this in the session, not the jumps themselves.

Where it fits in your split

First in a lower body session, before anything else.

On push, pull and legs it opens legs day. On a bro split it goes at the start of leg day. On an upper and lower split it precedes the squats and hinges. On a full body programme it is a short opener if you have floor space. On a bodyweight programme it supplies the horizontal power element that squats and lunges do not.

The strongest argument for broad jumps specifically, rather than any other jump, is that most gym training is entirely vertical. You squat down and stand up, you press up, you pull down. Horizontal force production goes untrained unless you sprint, and most people do not sprint.

Speirs and colleagues found unilateral and bilateral squat training both improved sprint and agility performance in rugby players, and Liao and colleagues' meta-analysis found resistance training generally improved jump and speed measures. Your squats are already contributing to your horizontal power. The broad jump adds the specific expression of it, cheaply, in about two minutes a week.

McGill's work on core training is relevant to the technique, since projecting the body forwards requires the trunk to stay stiff enough to transmit force rather than folding.

Variations worth knowing

The squat jump is the vertical equivalent, with a far gentler landing, and is the better starting point for anyone new to jumping.

The box jump adds a landing platform, which mostly adds a knee tuck rather than a real training difference.

The triple broad jump links three jumps for total distance, which is considerably more demanding, since each landing feeds straight into the next takeoff.

The single leg broad jump takes off and lands on one leg, which is far harder to control and exposes side to side differences that the two legged version hides.

The lateral broad jump moves you sideways for distance, training a direction almost nothing else in a normal programme touches.

And the broad jump to stick asks you to freeze the landing and hold it, which turns the absorption itself into the skill being trained. It is the best entry point for anyone whose landings are loud.

What the evidence says

Speirs and colleagues compared unilateral and bilateral squat training in academy rugby players and found both improved strength, sprint and agility measures, supporting the view that heavy resistance training underpins horizontal power.

Liao and colleagues' systematic review and meta-analysis of unilateral versus bilateral resistance training found improvements in jump height, linear speed and change of direction, reinforcing the same point.

Schoenfeld's review of squatting kinematics and kinetics describes how load distributes across the hip and knee through a flexed position, which is the mechanical basis for absorbing a broad jump landing in a soft squat rather than on straight legs.

McGill's work on core training describes trunk stiffness as the means of transmitting force between the lower body and the rest of the system, which is why a braced midsection matters here.

Schoenfeld and colleagues' comparison of concentric and eccentric muscle actions found eccentric work produced at least equal and often greater hypertrophy, which is worth knowing because the landing is the only meaningful eccentric here and it is far too brief to build size.

Roig and colleagues reached the same conclusion in their meta-analysis of eccentric versus concentric training.

Schoenfeld and colleagues' dose response analysis of weekly hard sets is the reason to keep broad jumps outside your leg volume calculations entirely.

Common questions

Do broad jumps build muscle?

No. The muscular work per rep is brief and the rep count is deliberately low. They train horizontal power, which most gym programmes ignore, but leg size comes from squats, presses, hinges and curls.

How is this different from a squat jump?

Direction, and therefore emphasis. A squat jump is vertical and leans more on the quadriceps and calves; a broad jump is horizontal and leans more on the glutes and hamstrings. The landing is also considerably harder, because you have to stop forward momentum rather than just downward momentum.

Why does my distance keep dropping across a set?

Because power falls off long before you feel tired. That is normal, and it is the reason to keep sets to five reps or fewer with a couple of minutes between them.

Is the landing risky?

It is the part of the exercise that deserves the most attention. Land on both feet at once, whole foot down, and bend the knees and hips into a soft squat. Practise the broad jump to stick variation first if your landings are loud.

Can I do them for conditioning?

Repeated jumps will certainly raise your heart rate, but each additional rep is a shorter jump and another landing on more tired legs. There are safer ways to get out of breath.