Depth Jumps: Yosef Johnson on Building Explosive Hops

Based on Episode 46 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and Yosef Johnson of Ultimate Athlete Concepts.

The depth jumps that actually build a bigger vertical are dosed lower and progressed slower than most coaches expect. That is the message from Yosef Johnson, the strength coach and publisher behind Ultimate Athlete Concepts, who learned his craft directly from Dr. Michael Yessis and has spent years in conversation with the Russian sport scientists Anatoliy Bondarchuk and Yuri Verkhoshansky. His approach to jumping, and to training in general, runs against the American instinct to pile on height, load, and intensity as fast as possible. Start a depth jump at 12 inches, take everything you can from it, and climb only when the box stops paying you back.

Key Takeaways

• Dose depth jumps low, then earn the height. Johnson starts athletes at a 12-inch box and adds height only when the rebound stalls. A taller box is not a better box.
• Build jumps from general to specific. Repetitive jumps come first and the depth jump is the end game, never the starting point.
• General strength earns the right to special strength. Transfer from general lifts is finite; specialized work is where the later gains live, but only on top of a real base.
• Cap maximal strength around 80%. Above 90% trains the athlete to move slowly unless it is paired with something explosive like a depth jump.
• Plan for 15 years, not one season. Find the athlete’s threshold of adaptivity and stay in it rather than spending every bullet early.

How Yosef Johnson doses depth jumps

Depth jumps are the most intense plyometric an athlete will do, so Johnson treats the box height as a dose, not a bragging right. He starts everyone low and lets the athlete’s own rebound tell him when to go up.

You start at 12 inches, and then you’re gonna work your way up from there. You’re looking for the rebound height to keep improving. When that stops improving two to three workouts in a row, you know you’re done with that height, and then you’re gonna go up two more inches.

He finds about four inches of progress across an off-season is normal. The logic behind starting so low is the part most coaches skip: if a short box already produces an adaptation, a taller one adds risk without adding reward.

If you’re getting an adaptation response at 12, then why would you go higher? Makes no sense.

The reason it is not just cautious but necessary comes from the people he publishes. Overshoot the dose and you cannot walk it back.

Like Bondarchuk says, if you use something that’s more intense than you need, you can never come back, ’cause you put an imprint on their nervous system that can’t be erased.

For a coach, the application is concrete: pick a low box, log the rebound height every session, and hold that height until it stops improving. The 24-inch box is not the goal; the smallest box that still drives progress is.

The jump progression that ends in a depth jump

The depth jump is a destination, and Johnson runs a long road to it. Jumps start general and low in intensity and grow specific and intense over weeks.

We would use jumps that are very general and less intense and gradually go to more specific, more intense. So you might do just some nice repetitive jump in the very beginning, and at the end, it would be a depth jump. That would be the end game.

On the strength side, the same restraint applies. He builds from a half squat rather than chasing depth for its own sake, then rotates in percentages once there is strength to work with.

A half squat is what we normally use. We normally don’t go any deeper than that.

Olympic lifts have a place, but he uses them for speed, not for grinding maximal loads: lighter, velocity-based work rather than heavy singles where technique breaks down. The path to a bigger vertical, in other words, is a sequence of small steps (repetitive squat jumps, single-effort jumps, staged plyometrics) with the depth jump waiting at the end, not a max box on day one.

General strength before special strength

Johnson’s publishing house made Verkhoshansky’s Special Strength Training available in English, so he thinks carefully about where specialized work fits. Early in a career, general strength dominates; as an athlete matures, the specific work carries more of the load, because the general work has largely done its job. The key insight he credits to Yessis is about ceilings.

There is no limit on performance from specialized movements, and that’s kind of like your ace in the hole for later.

General lifts transfer only so far. Once a swimmer squats plenty, more squat does little, and that is where specialized movements keep the improvement going. The catch is that none of it works without the base underneath.

You certainly don’t build specialized movements on top of no general training. It has to be on top of the general.

The practical read for a coach: do not rush an athlete into sport-specific loading before the general foundation is there, and do not keep hammering general strength once it has stopped transferring. The order matters more than the menu.

What special strength actually looks like

Special strength is not a weight-room category. Johnson describes it as any movement, in the gym or on the field, that duplicates a sporting action or part of one. For a thrower it is heavier and lighter implements. For a basketball player it can be the game itself, loaded.

Maybe it would be him playing that game with weighted shorts, with the weights around his hips, so he’s doing exactly what he does on the court, under slightly more difficult conditions.

That is why the same exercise can be general for one athlete and specific for another. A quarter squat at 60% is general work for many lifters but a specialized movement for a volleyball player who needs to jump.

So what’s one person’s general is another person’s specialized.

He credits Yessis with adding degrees of separation the older Russian models lacked: instead of jumping from a general exercise straight to the competition movement, Yessis sequences several intermediate steps. For lateral quickness that might run from a double-leg side-to-side hop, to leg-to-leg, to a single-leg isometric hop, to a side lunge against a cord that loads like a depth jump for the frontal plane. The lesson is to fill in the gaps between general and specific rather than leap across them.

How much maximal strength an athlete really needs

Johnson is not against strength, but he caps how heavy his athletes train. He does not chase the classic above-90% max-effort zone.

We don’t look at training max-effort strength in the classical sense of going above 90%. The highest we’ll go is 80%.

He points to Verkhoshansky as the exception that proves the rule. Verkhoshansky did go heavy, but he paired it with an explosive movement so the heavy work primed the jump rather than teaching slowness.

When you do a 90%, your nervous system’s all excited. And then you walk over and do a depth jump. So now all of the motor neurons that may normally be a little bit dormant are awake.

Left on its own, pure maximal strength trains the wrong quality for most sports. His test is simple, and it lines up with velocity-based training ideas from coaches like Bryan Mann.

Think of any powerlifter you know that’s real fast. There aren’t any. They move like a tortoise.

The takeaway is not that strength is useless; it is that strength has a threshold of usefulness. Once a fast athlete is strong enough, adding another 100 pounds to the squat rarely shows up on the field, and the heavy grind can cost more than it returns.

Training for the long game

The thread through all of it is patience. Johnson describes how the Soviet system forecast a young athlete’s peak years out and then planned backward from it.

They knew they were gonna have this kid a minimum of 10 to 15 years. Why shoot all of our bullets now? What are we gonna do when the kid’s older?

The mechanism underneath is what he calls the threshold of adaptivity: the point where an athlete is still improving without being overloaded. The job is to find it and live there.

Your ability to adapt is genetically predetermined, and once you hit that threshold of adaptivity, that’s your sweet spot. Stay there.

He tells a story about Bondarchuk waving off throwers who wanted to start creatine while they were already improving, which captures the whole philosophy of not spending a resource before you need it.

You take the creatine when it makes sense.

It reframes the American habit of maxing out in high school and college. Johnson’s worry is the athlete who spikes early on heavy lifting and then has nothing left to progress, which he found were often the hardest athletes to keep improving once they arrived.

The 1×20 base that ties it together

Johnson helped introduce Bondarchuk’s 1×20 method to many of the coaches now known for it, and he frames it not as a program but as the general base the rest of the year builds on. One set of 20 reps across the movements an athlete needs covers several jobs at once.

There’s an absolute elegance simplicity to it. It’s simple: one-by-20, of all the movements that you need to cover.

In one set it builds strength, adds capacity to tendons and ligaments for injury proofing, and ingrains technique at a low intensity, so the prehab, rehab, and strength work fold into a single phase. He is candid that the results outrun what the rep scheme looks like on paper.

He went from 260 to 290, took five minutes off his mile time in that timeframe, and when he came back, he was the strongest guy on the team.

That base is the general foundation the special strength, the jump progression, and the depth jumps all sit on top of. It is the same idea in a different costume: earn the general work first, then let the specific work carry the athlete the rest of the way.

Frequently asked questions

What is a depth jump?
A depth jump has the athlete step off a low box, land, and immediately rebound as high as possible, training the body to absorb and return force quickly. Johnson treats it as the most intense, most specific plyometric in a jump progression, which is why he starts athletes at a low box rather than a tall one.

How high should a depth jump box be?
Johnson starts at 12 inches. He watches the rebound height each session and only adds about two inches once the rebound stops improving two to three workouts in a row. He would rather get everything out of 12, 14, 16, and 18 inches before ever moving to a 24-inch box.

What are the benefits of depth jumps?
Done at the right dose, depth jumps train reactive, explosive jumping as the final step of a plyometric progression that starts with simpler repetitive jumps. The benefit comes from matching the box height to the athlete’s response, not from jumping off the tallest box available.

What is special strength training?
Special strength is any movement, in the weight room or on the field, that duplicates a sport action or part of one, such as weighted-short basketball for a hooper or lighter and heavier implements for a thrower. It sits on top of general strength, not in place of it.

How much maximal strength does an athlete need?
Enough for the sport, and rarely more. Johnson caps most training around 80% and argues that once an athlete is strong enough, extra maximal strength stops transferring and can even train slowness unless it is paired with explosive work.

About the authors

Yosef Johnson is the owner of Ultimate Athlete Concepts, a publishing house that brings Eastern-bloc sport science into English, including work by Anatoliy Bondarchuk, Yuri Verkhoshansky, and Michael Yessis. Mentored by Dr. Yessis and in regular contact with the authors he publishes, he coaches high school, college, and private athletes in Michigan.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach who focuses on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Yosef Johnson on Just Fly Sports.