Plyo What?

Genius running programs aside, I’m pinning my hopes of marathon success on finding a battery of sneaky strength exercises I can easily add to my workout routine. Enter the plyometric exercise. Fancy word, but from what I can tell, PEs basically boil down to jumping. Lots of jumping. Jumping on boxes, jumping off boxes and jumping up and down. Erm, hang about, that’s something I can do at home.

Suitable footwear probably recommended.

Actually it was Stacy, the one-woman running machine that I’ve been working out with at 24 Hour Fitness, (but more about her later) who introduced me to the jumps with a lateral box push off. They look easy, but believe me if you do enough of them in quick succession they get challenging. Apparently they're all about teaching the muscles, nerves and tendons to be more powerful and to quickly convert strength into speed – all without necessarily building muscle strength (thanks Wikipedia.)

So, I haven’t been exactly sure how often to integrate these exercises into my schedule to get the best results, but the good news is that from what I’ve been reading, occasionally seems enough to help boost running speed.

Interested? Hop, skip or jump over to this site for fun animations of PEs.