maratoolKnee Tuck Jump
How to do the knee tuck jump
- Begin in a comfortable standing position with your knees slightly bent. Hold your hands in front of you, palms down with your fingertips together at chest height. This will be your starting position.
- Rapidly dip down into a quarter squat and immediately explode upward. Drive the knees towards the chest, attempting to touch them to the palms of the hands.
- Jump as high as you can, raising your knees up, and then ensure a good land be re-extending your legs, absorbing impact through be allowing the knees to rebend.
Muscles worked
The force comes from the hamstrings, which extend the hip and bend the knee, frequently at both joints in the same repetition.
A plyometric repetition is over before a slow contraction could contribute anything, so they have to produce that force immediately on contact.
Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the abductors stop the knee collapsing inward and hold the pelvis square; the adductors steady the thigh against the pull away from the midline; the calves control the ankle and hold the heel position.
The glutes and quadriceps take a share of the work as well.
Every exercise for:HamstringsAbductorsAdductorsCalvesGlutes
How this movement works
The working muscles shorten as they drive the load away from you, and more than one joint changes angle to do it. Load spreads down a chain instead of sitting on one muscle, which is why a compound push handles more weight than any single-joint alternative — and why joint position, not the muscle, is usually what fails first.
It is filed under plyometrics, which trains the stretch-shortening cycle: loaded fast, released immediately. Contact time matters more than volume, so these belong early in a session.
What you need
No equipment at all. The resistance is your own bodyweight, so you progress by changing leverage, range or tempo rather than by adding plates — and you can do it anywhere.
Every exercise using:Body only
These train the hamstrings too, using equipment this one does not:
- Lunge Pass Throughkettlebell
- Lying Leg Curl Machinemachine
- Muscle Snatchbarbell
- Stiff-Legged Dumbbell Deadliftdumbbell
- Ball Leg Curlexercise ball
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 86 hamstrings exercises in this database, 37 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.