Plyo in parkour: a precision jump straight out of a landing. Progression, mistakes and what studies say about landing and reactive strength.
A plyo is a precision jump straight out of a landing: you arrive on a target, absorb the energy and jump at once to the next target. In the FIG rules the plyo has a base value of 0.2 among the parkour basics, as high as the speed vault [1]. Parkour UK lists "Strides and Plyos" in its beginner syllabus [2].
The honest answer on the tension in a plyo: soft landing means long landing. In measurements, traceurs roughly doubled landing duration compared with untrained people and passed about half of the energy through the knee [3]. A stiff landing, by contrast, had the shortest landing time in a kinematics study, and the authors see higher injury risk in it [4]. In a plyo you want to keep contact time short — and still stay soft. That only works with leg strength that grows from the bottom up.
How much? Experienced traceurs reached 64.9 cm on average in the drop jump, gymnasts 60.9 cm, and their eccentric knee-extensor strength was higher than that of gymnasts and power athletes [5]. Those are comparison values, not goals: your plyo starts at a few centimetres.
And injuries? In a survey of 161 traceurs, "plyometric jumps" were named in 4 of 207 reported injuries (about 1.9 %), the precision jump in 39 (18.8 %) [6]. Careful: those are shares, not rates per training hour. How long the plyo takes to become safe depends on your landing — often a few weeks. That is an experience value, not a study figure.
A practical thought on the anchor: contact time in a plyo is so short that you no longer steer it consciously — you can only decide beforehand how stiff or soft your body enters the landing. That is why every plyo session starts with quiet landings: they programme the soft pattern that later runs as a reflex.
Keep only a few high-quality repetitions per session and take long rests (two to three minutes). Quality beats quantity. This is a practice standard.
Jump from a low edge onto a target, land quietly on the forefoot and hold for three seconds.
Milestone: 10 quiet landings, soft knees, eyes forward.
20 small jumps on the spot, heels barely touching the floor. It is about rhythm, not height.
Milestone: 3 sets of 20 hops without heel impact.
Land on one target and jump to a second one without a pause, distance about one foot length. Stay flat and short.
Milestone: 10 repetitions, landing on both targets calm.
Widen the distance in steps of about one foot length, staying under half your standing long jump.
Milestone: 8 out of 10 tries without extra bounce and without a hand touching down.
Two plyos in a row, then a rest. More than two only with a coach.
Milestone: 5 clean chains of two.
After landing, add an "echo": do not jump at once, count one "one" and say it quietly. This is a practice trick without study evidence, but it stops the jump from coming out of a tense landing.
A plyo is a precision jump straight out of a landing: the landing energy goes reactively into the next take-off. In the FIG rules it has a base value of 0.2 [1].
No data compare the two directly. The plyo shortens contact time, and short landing times are considered harder on the joints [4]. That is why you start low and with a small distance.
Start with no more than half of your standing long jump. That is a practice standard without study evidence. What matters is that the landing stays quiet.
That is open. In a study of 14 youth basketball players, neither a parkour tic-tac protocol nor a drop-jump protocol changed jump and sprint values significantly (8 weeks, twice a week); responses were highly individual [9]. The study was small.
Two short sessions a week with at least one rest day in between are a reasonable start. That is an experience value, not a study figure. If tendons or joints hurt, take a break.
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