The Hidden Toll of 80,000 Landings

By: David GIl

By the time those fortunate collegiate players got to sign with their programs, their knees, ankles, hips, backs and all the connective and muscular tissue that allows them to move had absorbed tens of thousands of landings. To many, that load is invisible. Hidden behind ball-contact, serve success rate, blocking successes and errors, wins and losses. While it's hidden, the body remembers. 

That history walks into every college preseason, firmly attached to its athlete. The scars, improvements, habits, and promise are part of the player, part of the team. That past plays a major role in the future of the athlete who carries it, and the team they represent. 

Given this truth, it's important to consistently push, promote and expound on the fact that teaching athletes proper movement mechanics, especially jump and landing, at a younger age is paramount to success and health as they develop in the sport. 

Mechanics first, then comes strength. 

Order matters. While it can be more challenging with some athletes than others, getting them to understand the basic mechanics behind vertical movement is critical to future success. Strength added to poor mechanics makes faulty patterns more powerful, and those faulty patterns may be repeated over 20,000 times a year on the court alone (high school/club, players 14 - 18 years old). 

For landing, it doesn’t have to be complex:

Mechanics: 

• Soft, quiet landing. 

• Land on two feet. 

• Ankles, knees and hips in flexion with knees in line with your toes. 

• Train single leg control on approach and blacks landings 

Strength: 

• Ensure proper landing patterns remain under fatigue

• Begin training squats, hinges, split squats, calf and hamstring work

• Better develop force absorption

Power and Volume:

• Add plyometrics, starting with rudiments like pogos before getting into moves like depth jumps

• Increase jumps counts proportionally to improved strength and mechanics 

It is best to build this early in their athletic careers. A meta-analysis of neuromuscular training found the largest reduction in ACL injuries in mid-teens (odds ratio 0.28), a smaller effect in late teens, and no clear effect in early adults (Myer et al., 2013). Movement habits are easier to shape at 13-15 than to fix at 19. 

Muscle and Tendon work together, but develop at different speeds. 

Muscle adaptation can happen rapidly, especially in young athletes. Gains can take a few weeks, even days, for muscles to improve their capacity and ability to contract stronger and faster. On the other hand, tendons, the tissue that takes the force from those contractions and applies it to the bone for movement, can go months before seeing a meaningful change to stiffness and capacity (Mersmann et al., 2017). During puberty, that gap actually widens. 

Sex hormones lead to even more rapid muscle growth, but our understanding of how it impacts tendon development is far less clear. This means that while we may see rapid improvement vertically for a player, their strength is not necessarily a sign of their physical resilience. At times of massive strength gains, keep training loads manageable and fight the urge to send every ball to your new highest jumper. They’re writing their history, and remember, that history will remain with them as they continue in their volleyball journey. 

Speaking of history: The load before college for athletes that play both high school and club is roughly 20,000 landings per year. 

This number does not include additional, off-court training. So these are conservative numbers. These numbers were collected with club/high school athletes using the VERT Team system. Every practice and every match on both the club and high school teams with athletes of various positions. They do not include:

• Plyometrics and conditioning in the weight room

• Beach volleyball, camps or other sports

• Individual training, one-on-ones that may not have been tracked

Over four years of high school, that is roughly 80,000 landings before a collegiate freshman's first collegiate practice. The calendar makes it harder: high school and club seasons overlap, tournament weekends stack multiple matches into two days, and true off-seasons are rare.

Two coaching staffs often program the same athlete without sharing what the other is doing.

The lesson is not that young athletes should jump less across the board. Tendons and bones need loading to adapt. The problem is unplanned load: sudden spikes, no recovery, and nobody looking at the total. 

How to Manage Training Load

We have provided numerous articles on methods for tracking training load. RPE, VERT wearables, heart rate, etc. The easiest and most effective means of managing training volume and ensuring athletes are trained in a manner that allows for optimal performance and physical development is both easy… and hard. 

The goal is a loop: 

• Plan the load, “work the plan, plan the work” (x amount of jumps for pins and y amount for middles)

• Measure what actually happened, use data to ensure you work the plan 

• Adjust as needed based on the load, did we overdo it, underdo it, how can we use that to better plan the next session? 

  
  

Creating an objective plan, then following objective data to confirm or modify that plan, creates a closed loop system that is simple to follow, understand and explain. 

In an ideal world, we understand the athlete training load in high school and club. This load is managed and follows the athlete if they’re fortunate enough to make it to the next level. This would give their new coaches, strength and condition and sports medicine staff a MUCH clearer picture of how to approach training and pre-hab with the athlete. 

Alas, this is a real-world challenge, but not an excuse to minimize the importance of training load as one of the absolutely more important components of athlete health and performance. 

What this means for coaches

Club coaches

1. Coach landings as a skill from the first day of the youngest age group, and recheck them under fatigue.

2. Earn strength on top of good mechanics, and earn jump volume on top of strength.

3. Treat growth spurts and fast strength gains as a time to hold jump volume steady.

4. Count jumps across practices and tournaments, and share the number with the athlete's school coach.

Collegiate coaches

1. Assume incoming freshmen carry years of uncounted load and possibly early tendon changes.

2. Screen landing mechanics and tendon health at intake, not after the first injury.

3. Build each athlete's preseason ramp from their actual starting load, not a team-wide plan.

4. Use jump data to make one decision every week: what to cap, what to add, and who needs recovery.

Every jump has a landing. The athletes who reach college healthy are the ones whose coaches planned for both. 

VERT’s Performance Lab supports coaches at every level. Our movement clinics are designed to educate both coaches and players on the key fundamentals behind proper jump, landing and acceleration mechanics. The VERT sensor and various software applications are still the world’s number one choice for tracking and monitoring player load. This type of technology is no longer something restricted to collegiate and professional teams, yet the adoption for those who need it most is still lagging behind. 

For inquiries about our movement clinics or technology, please contact info@vertsports.com or schedule a call here. 

As always, anyone is free to schedule a call with members of our performance lab to learn more. CLICK HERE to do so.

For more information on the VERT Team System,

please schedule a demo HERE.

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