Jogging is one of the most important activities that anybody can do. It offers a lot of benefits for both the mind and the body. In order to gain from it as much as possible, you need to jog with proper form and pay close attention to what your feet are doing. And if you’re already familiar with plyometrics, you may have noticed that jogging shares a lot of similarities with it since they both revolve around jumping to a degree. And this is a common question that I get asked a lot: is jogging plyometrics?
Even though jogging shares a lot of similarities with plyometrics, it’s not considered a plyometric exercise since it’s not intense enough to build up power, speed, agility, and explosiveness in the muscles.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the proper form of jogging and compare it with plyometric exercises to see if they’re similar.
Table of Contents
Is Jogging Plyometrics?
In order to answer this question, we first need to take a look at how jogging works in order to see if there are any similarities between it and plyometric exercises.
What’s The Proper Form of Jogging?
Besides the fact that you need to be properly warmed up, hydrated, and not on an empty stomach, jogging requires some specific rules to follow in order to be as efficient as possible when you’re doing it.
The first rule that everybody recommends is to keep your muscles loose while jogging. Keeping your movements natural is what can differentiate between having a good and a bad workout. Your shoulders need to be down and your entire upper body should sit straight and also in a natural position.
Your arms need to be perpendicular to your body and your head always needs to be up and looking ahead at where you’re going.
Now for the most important part which is the movements of your legs. You need to absolutely avoid hitting the ground using your heels since that’s just bad for your knees and slows down your movements. Your feet need to stay flat or touch the front first when they hit the ground.
Now that we know the basics of jogging, let’s gather and summarize all the important information that can be tied with plyometrics and that we’ll use in the next section:
- Jogging is a slow-paced activity that requires the muscles to be loose
- It doesn’t involve a lot of jumping since the feet need to stay flat on the ground
- It’s not intense since it works on muscle endurance rather than strength
- It revolves around one activity over long periods of time
What Actually is Plyometrics?
Now we get to the most important part and we’ll compare what we came up with in the last section with actual plyometric exercises. In order to do so, let’s explain briefly what plyometrics are all about. I’m sure that you already have an idea in mind that you learned from the internet but most of those explanations miss one important factor, and that’s the myotatic stretch reflex or the stretch-shortening cycle.
Plyometrics is a combination of exercises that mostly requires athletes to jump, hop, skip, and so on, either using the legs like the case of plyo box jumps, or the hands like plyo push-ups in an explosive manner to build up speed, agility, and power.
Now the part that most people seem to get confused about is that this particular method of training usually involves fast-paced contact with a surface like the ground which triggers the stretch-shortening cycle which is a natural contraction of the muscles that results from their lengthening.
And in order for this stretch reflex to be activated, the contact time between the surface and the body part that controls the muscle you’re trying to work needs to be less than 0.12 seconds on average.
Jogging Compared to Other Plyometric Exercises
Now that we know the proper explanation of plyometrics, we can compare jogging to it, and we’ll use the points that we gathered in the last section.
Jogging is a slow-paced activity that requires the muscles to stay loose during the entirety of the exercise. Plyometrics, on the other hand, are intense exercises that put a physical strain on the muscles in order to build up their strength by using the explosiveness factor. It’s definitely a fast-paced challenging method of training.
Jogging doesn’t involve a lot of jumping which is the complete opposite of plyometric exercises. Jumping is the core mechanic behind this type of training and it’s the main factor that builds up the explosiveness in the muscles. And even though jogging does require a little bit of jumping, the contact time between the feet and the ground is way more than 0.12 seconds which won’t trigger the stretch-shortening cycle to its full capacity.
Jogging works on muscle endurance rather than strength which is not the main purpose of plyometrics. This unique method of training is all about building that raw power in the muscles that can help in cardio exercise.
And last but not least, jogging revolves around one activity (slow-paced running) over long periods of time which is pretty much what cardio exercises are all about. Plyometrics usually involves intense workouts and exercises that are done over short periods of time.
So from all these points, we can conclude that jogging is not a plyometric exercise. In fact, with the exception of jump roping, no other cardio exercise is plyometrics.
Conclusion:
Even though jogging is not considered a plyometric exercise, that doesn’t mean that it’s not good enough for you. It’s one of the best activities that anybody can do and that offers a lot of benefits, it relieves stress, it can help in weight loss, it boosts the immune system, it increases endurance and flexibility, and so on. And doing plyometrics will help in all these kinds of exercises that involve running. So if you combine them, you’ll be unstoppable.