How to land after a jump: the half of the movement nobody trains
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The point, in two lines
A jump has two halves: the drive and the landing. Almost everyone trains only the first. The second is where the body absorbs the highest load of the whole action, and it's where the knee problems that cost you weeks pile up.
If you jump a lot — and in volleyball or basketball you jump a huge amount — landing isn't a technical detail. It's the variable that decides whether you get to the end of the season in one piece.
Why landing loads you more than the drive
When you push, you produce force over a relatively long time. When you land, you have to stop the whole mass of your body in a fraction of a second. The less time you have to brake, the higher the force peak your joints have to hold.
Hence a simple rule: the stiffer you land, the more the load concentrates. If hips, knees and ankles bend and absorb, the load spreads out over time and across the muscles. If you land with straight legs, the absorbing is done by passive structures — tendons, cartilage, joints. Those don't train the same way, and they complain later.
The patellar tendon is the first to speak up. Front-of-knee pain in people who jump a lot often has more to do with how you come down than with how high you go up.
What to look for in your landing
Film yourself from the front and from the side, in a real situation: not an isolated jump in the gym, but a series of attacks or a block after a lateral shuffle. That's where the technique breaks down.
The knee caves in
The kneecap collapses inward while the foot stays put. It's the single most important signal, and it gets worse when you're tired or when you land off balance. If you see it, don't wait for it to turn into pain.
You land loud
Noise is energy you didn't absorb. A silent landing is almost always a cushioned landing.
You land on one leg
It happens in a game and you can't always avoid it. But if it happens systematically even when you could land on two, you're doubling the load on one side for no reason.
You land far from where you took off
Drifting a long way forward means part of the approach stayed horizontal. Less height and more speed to brake on arrival: damage twice over.
Your heel slams down
You should arrive on the forefoot and then let the heel come down. If you land heel-first, the ankle can't do its job and everything passes up the chain.
How to train it, without adding fatigue
The good news is you don't need an extra session. You need to change what you pay attention to in what you already do.
- Put landing work at the start, not at the end. Technique is learned fresh. If you work on it at the end of the session, you're just learning to land badly while tired.
- Use drop landings before drop jumps. Step off a low box and stop in position, silently, without bouncing. It sounds trivial and it's the building block of all plyometrics.
- Tell yourself to be quiet. It's the most effective cue there is: the body finds its own way to cushion.
- Raise heights and complexity only when the landing holds. If your knee caves in at 30 cm, going up to 50 doesn't make you explosive, it makes you injured sooner.
- Train the braking, not just the push. Controlled eccentric work on quads and posterior chain: you need muscle that can absorb, not only push.
The moment it all gets worse
Landing technique is the first thing to fall apart when fatigue shows up. It's the fourth set, it's the second tournament of the weekend, it's March. The knee starts caving in, the noise goes up, control goes down.
That's why jump volume has to be counted, not just endured. If your week already has three full sessions plus a match, adding heavy plyometrics isn't making you more explosive: it's just adding landings to a count that's already high.
And the jump? Does it get better or worse?
A clean landing doesn't make you jump higher by itself. It does you two different favours: it keeps you on court, and it lets you leave the floor sooner when you have to bounce back up for a second jump or a consecutive block.
What you can control is the rest. Measure your jump now, keep track, and check that it isn't drifting down over the months while the load goes up: that drop is often the first sign that you're accumulating more than you're recovering from.
What's next
Track your jump so you notice in time that you're accumulating
A jump that drops while the load goes up is a signal, not a coincidence. But to read it you need a baseline taken when you were feeling good.
Measure your jump — free JHP membership — €99/yearIf your knee is already talking to you, Knee Power (€40) is the program built to strengthen it.
