Dear Jason Dwight,
If you cannot use more than 5 Depth Jumps in one set and you have “some hard time with eccentric phase of the jump” it means that you are not ready to Shock method use. Don’t use it, prepare better your legs through bounces and serial jumps (see my answer to your previous question) and increase your explosive strength trough overload jumps.
You should start from 2-3 series of 10–15 consecutive half squat jumps with barbell (20 – 25 kg). After, these jumps should be substituted by 2-3 series of 6– 8 consecutive jumps with Russian Kettlebell (16 kg at the beginning and after 32 kg). After, the Russian Kettlebell jumps should be substituted by another type of barbell jumps with 40-60% overload: 4-6 consecutive single half squat jumps executed with maximal effort and with muscle relaxation between each jumps (you should put the barbell on high supports, shake the relaxed legs and immediately put the barbell on the shoulders again to execute the sequent jump).
Only after this, you could start to use Depth Jump.
Regarding the Shock Method.
1. It’s not necessary to have 2-3 min rest between each jumps, it could be only 1-2 minutes of active rest with arms and legs shaking (“skeleton dancing”).
2. The one leg Depth Jump that you described is a very hard specific exercise for high level “professional” triple jumper who has “iron legs”. If this exercises is used by an athlete of a lower level, he will be “broken” very soon.
It’s true that “power is the most essential thing for sports”, but the problem of power output increasing could not be solved using only one training mean, also if it’s the most effective.
Each training mean has a training potential (the possibility to obtain a training effect), but the training effect depends on the preparedness level of athlete and on the duration of the use of this mean. In the “training potential hierarchy” of explosive strength training means, the Depth Jump is the most powerful, but the athlete should be get ready to obtain its training effect and, very important, he should not use this exercise for long time.
The training potential of each training mean decreases in relation with the duration of its use: the “new” exercises (or the exercise that was not used for a long time) could be more effective for the athlete than the “old” exercise. This means that at the beginning of the training process (at the beginning of the athlete career) or at the beginning of preparation cycle it’s possible to obtain an increasing of the trained capacity (explosive strength, maximal strength, etcc..) through the less powerful exercise. For this reason the athletes should start from the less powerful training means and, when their training potential has been fully exploited, he should go through the next level training mean.
If the athlete starts from the most powerful training mean, he looses the possibility to obtain in future the increasing of trained capacity. What happened in this case of Depth Jump?
If Depth jump has been used for long time as the only one training mean finalized to increase the explosive strength, the athlete perceives that his jump height doesn’t increase like at the beginning. He starts to search how to increase more the training effect (for example, he “gradually increases the total reps and decreases the time” or “never stops rotating between two shock exercises” or he tries to “violent” his organism in another way ) but he will never obtain the increase of the trained capacity as at the beginning.
To use the Shock method at the beginning of preparation cycle or to use it by not high level athlete is like to use the most powerful antibiotic to treat the runny nose.
Yuri Verkhoshansky