We have had a major breakthrough with Alisha Tatham. She came into today’s training feeling recovered after a day-off on Tuesday. Today’s session began by testing her vertical jump and her single leg vertical after a thorough warm-up. Her warm-up can be seen below. Her scores were a modest 17.0, 13.8 and 6.1 for her counter movement jump, left and right legs (ACL repaired) knees respectively. These results are way off her best, when she jumped 30 inches October 2008. [/youtube]We have had a major breakthrough with Alisha Tatham. She came into today’s training feeling recovered after a day-off on Tuesday. Today’s session began by testing her vertical jump and her single leg vertical after a thorough warm-up. Her warm-up can be seen below. Her scores were a modest 17.0, 13.8 and 6.1 for her counter movement jump, left and right legs (ACL repaired) knees respectively. These results are way off her best, when she jumped 30 inches October 2008.

Her training consisted of:

Warm-up bike 10 minutes
Dynamic warm-up 4 cycles of:
20m walking lunge
20m lateral lunge / side

Vertical Jump testing

Warm-up squat @ 95 lbs x 12
Squat @ 115 x 12 complexed with 5 squat jumps
Squat @ 135 x 12 complexed with 5 squat jumps
Squat @ 155 x 8 complexed with 5 squat jumps
Squat @ 175 x 6 complexed with 5 squat jumps x 3 sets
Squat @ 185 x 6 complexed with 5 squat jumps x 2 sets

With this volume and increasing intensity approach we saw her vertical increase from 17.0 to 21.4 inches. This reflects a tremendous increase in vertical power during a single training session. Without question Alisha is an incredible athlete that is figuring out how to recruit her injured knee after the ACL injury.

The protocol is something that I’ve been using consistently to rehab athletes. Too often the volume is inadequate. We need high volume to re-establish motor pathways to the atrophied tissues. Likewise we must have high volume with safe high output exercises such as jumping. The increase in vertical in this one session is very dramatic and expected with elite athletes returning from an ACL injury.

Consider that we progressed Alisha from being unable to squat on February 21 to being able squat with 185 to a parallel position for 6 reps within 10 days. I wish I had filmed her first day squatting because it was very, very difficult for her. There was a lot of compensation.

Until next post.

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