Jump landing & resilience

Counting Jumps: Managing Club Volleyball Load

Here’s a question that surprises most volleyball parents.

How many times did your athlete jump last week?

Nobody knows. Not the club coach, not the trainer, not the athlete. We track sets played, matches won, hours in the gym — and never the one number the knees actually experience.

Why the number matters

Tissue adapts to what it’s asked to do, gradually. What it doesn’t handle well is surprise.

A season week that looks like the last few weeks? The body reads it as normal. A tournament weekend stacked on tryouts stacked on an open gym? That’s a spike — and spikes are where the aches tend to start.

The habit: count, roughly

You don’t need a lab. You need a rough weekly picture.

Practices, matches, open gyms, private hitting lessons — each has a typical jump load. Write a rough count for a normal week. Then, when a heavy week is coming, compare it to normal before it happens.

The framework: no surprise weeks. When the count is about to double, something voluntary comes out — or the following week gets deliberately light.

What this is not

This isn’t a reason to jump less forever. Jumping builds jumpers.

It’s a reason to build the load like you’d build the athlete: progressively, on purpose, with strength work underneath it. That’s the same idea we teach in landing and resilience training — the down matters as much as the up.

If you want to know how your athlete’s strength compares to the load her schedule asks of her, that’s what an assessment is for.

This article supports our deeper guide: Jump landing & resilience.