Leaking with Box Jumps

Hi, I’m going to talk to you today about box jumps. And more specifically, leaking with box jumps. This is an activity that women often tell me they leak with.  I’m going to take you through a few different strategies you can try to implement to decrease your leaking.

1. So the first one that we often tackle is scaling. What I mean by that is just decreasing the height of your box jump. Can we decrease the height and limit that leaking? We want to find your fence. So what I mean by that is we want to find the height that you don’t actually leak with but you might. So that’s the first thing we start with. Can we decrease the height and find that area that is challenging for you, but you’re not leaking with.
2. The second thing you can do is take a look at your breath. So when I watch people do this in the clinic, they’re often holding their breath. That can be an easy thing that you can implement. Just make sure you’re breathing.
3. The third option you could play around is with your stance width. So what I mean by that is when you are landing, you could try widening your stance. So for instance, my box jump looks like this. I’m jumping up, this is how I land. Can I do it, so I’m getting wider? This means I have a wider base of support when I take off and when I land. You can play around and try maybe narrowing your stance. So just playing around with that stance width and seeing if that helps decrease your leaking at all.
4. The fourth thing you can play with is your arm swing. So for a lot of women, increasing this arm swing and making it bigger can automatically decrease their leaking.
5. The fifth thing is be an athlete. So what I mean by this is make sure we are landing and taking off in a good, universal, athletic position. So are we bending our knees? Are we getting our butt back? Is our trunk slightly forward? Or when we land, are we landing really stiff-legged or leaning back? So make sure when you land, you’re getting your butt back. You have some bend in your knees. Arms can be out front. And you just want to think about also landing soft. That can help you make sure you’re getting that knee bend and landing in a good athletic position.

So just to summarize, there are a lot of different areas you can intervene with your box jump. Most important thing is I want to keep you doing the activity that you like. And if you’re going to a class where they do a lot of box jumps. I want to make sure we can keep you doing that but decrease your leaking.