Increase Vertical Jump Height with High Box Jumps?

High box jumps get misused when the emphasis is on the height of the box instead of the height of the actual jump. Sounds weird, but here's why:

Start standing next to a high box platform that's the same height as your waist. Now pick up one leg off the ground and flex your hip as high as you possibly can. The distance between the bottom of your foot and the top of the box is the actual height you'd have to jump in order to get on top of that box. The rest comes from hip flexion. Now, if your goal when using high box jumps is to emphasise work on quick hip flexion, that’s ok. But most people are using high box jumps because they want to emphasise explosive jump height. This is where box jumps get misused.

Think of it this way, your centre of gravity is just above your naval. Watch someone from the side when they are doing box jumps. Did their naval actually go up or did they just lift their legs up onto the box and their centre of gravity stays in the same horizontal place.  If it didn’t move, they didn’t actually jump up, they only created enough force to allow them to overcome gravity for enough time to flex their hip up onto the box. What they didn’t do was produce enough force to lift their centre of gravity up and jump up.

To increase your vertical jump height you will require a powerful and explosive hip extension action (instead of a hip flexion action). This means you actually want to limit the amount of hip flexion involved in landing on top of the box. If you do this, you won't land on top of the box in that super-low crouched position we see during high box jumps. Instead, you want to find the highest box height that you're able to land on, but with your knees and hips only bent around 30 degrees. With this method you'll get all the optimum training stimulation from the exercise.

Of course, you won't be able to use as high of a box if you're limiting the amount of hip flexion involved in the movement, which may be a blow to your ego. But there's a big difference between what determines smart and effective training and what makes for cool social media material.