Thanks to CrossFit, Box Jumps have become one of the most utilized and popular functional movements in the gym. The box jump exercise has several benefits, from increasing explosiveness, crushing calories, and increasing strength. If you’re a beginner, box jumps can be intimidating, but this functional movement is one of the best to help you crush your fitness goals, even if it eats your shins.

What Are Box Jumps

The box jump is a bodyweight plyometric exercise. Box jumps help with developing more exposiveness and power, springing from a squat position and jumping onto a plyometric box. This exercise, can greatly improve your endurance capacity, core strength, and improve body composition.

Benefits Of Box Jumps

1. You’ll Crush Calories

One of the greatest benefits of box jumps is crushing calories and burning body fat. Quick and explosive, the box jump is a full body movement, utilizing your glutes, hamstrings, quads, core, and upper body to project yourself forward in motion. As long as you land on top of the box as intended, that is. It’s important to remember that you should aim to jump much higher than how tall the box really is, to ensure a safe and effective landing. 15 minutes spent box jumping, will help you burn 250-300 calories.

2. Increase Your Strength

During the upward phase of a box jump, you’re going to use nearly every muscle in your body including your arms, shoulders, glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, and core. When you plant your feet and land, you’ll finish in a full extension of your quads and hip flexors. The explosiveness from the movement will tap into your fast twitch muscle fibers. Since this is a body weight movement, you’ll increase strength through volume, since you’re consistently working your quads, extending from a squat position.

3. Improve Anaerobic and Aerobic Capacity

One of the greatest benefits of box jumps is increasing your body’s ability to cycle oxygen, and/or increasing VO2 max, which helps improve endurance. In lieu of increasing endurance, you’ll also increase your power and explosiveness or anaerobic capacity, which will help you gain a competitive advantage in other explosive movements and training modalities.

4. Creates Workout Versatility

Working out in the gym, or even your WODs at the CrossFit Box can get repetitive and boring. One of the greatest benefits of box jumps is that you just need a box to do them. You can throw in a set of 10 box jumps between your lifts, or as one of your workouts in your WOD, for a quick way to burn more calories, increase explosiveness, and improve endurance.

How To Do A Box Jump

Now that you know the benefits of box jumps, you should probably learn how to do one. Check out the video from CrossFit HQ, that shows CrossFit Games athlete Julie Foucher demonstrating how to do a box jump.

Start by facing a plyometric box with your feet shoulder width apart.
Bend your knees and push your hips back in a hinge motion, almost as if you were going into a squat.
This would be the eccentric phase, going into the amortization phase.
Use your loaded power and force to propel yourself into a jump using the balls of your feet as your base, swinging your arms forward to launch yourself onto the top of the box.
Stand up straight, then step back down.

Benefits Of Box Jumps: Takeaway

Box jumps are an incredible functional movement and provide many benefits, from increasing strength, endurance, explosiveness, and will help optimize your body composition. Throw in some extra box jumps between your workout or WOD and you're bound to crush your fitness goals.

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Tags: Box jumps, Crossfit, Fitness, Training, Workouts