How to Do a Squat Jump | Boot Camp Workout

To do a squat jump, first you gotta make sure that you have good basic squat mechanics. So just real briefly going over how to do a squat properly. Take your feet about shoulder width apart, make sure your knees aren't going to cave in or bow out. But really maintaining that alignment. Good rule of thumb is to keep your kneecaps just kind of shooting right in between your big toe and your second toe. You wanna come back with your hips. And your chest should always be higher than your hips. So what I mean by that is as you go into the squat, my chest at the bottom is higher than my hips. As opposed to ending up in a position like this. This would be more action in the lower back. And the purpose of the squat is to really get action in the legs and maintain a nice good posture up top. So then, from there, you just jump it. So you're going into your squat, jumping up and then landing. When it comes to jumping, it's mostly about the landing mechanics. You want to decelerate. So that there's not a lot of shock in your joints, but you're really absorbing the shock through your muscles. So thinking about the landing as being slow and controlled, rolling through your foot, toe, ball, heel. Making sure you get your weight back onto your heel before you take off again. So a good test is make sure you can lift your toes a little bit inside of your shoe. That ensures your weight is far enough back. You don't have to keep your toes up the whole time, it's just a good test. Exhale as you jump up, inhale as you go down. If you use your arms to help propel yourself, it's going to be a little easier. If you want it to make it harder, you can do something like a prisoner squat jump, with the hands behind the head. And now you take away any assistance, any momentum from the upper body and you've got to power yourself up all just with your legs. You could also do a squat jump where you bring the legs together and then land back in the squat, getting a little bit more work with the adductor muscles, the inner thigh muscles, to draw the legs inwards. You could also do it really fast, where your goal would be to gain more speed. You could go for greater range of motion, by making it a top squat jump. So those are just a few examples of the many different types of squat jumps that you can do.