maratoolScissors Jump
How to do the scissors jump
- Assume a lunge stance position with one foot forward with the knee bent, and the rear knee nearly touching the ground.
- Ensure that the front knee is over the midline of the foot. Extending through both legs, jump as high as possible, swinging your arms to gain lift.
- As you jump as high as you can, switch the position of your legs, moving your front leg to the back and the rear leg to the front.
- As you land, absorb the impact through the legs by adopting the lunge position, and repeat.
Muscles worked
The force comes from the quadriceps across the front of the thigh, which straighten the knee and, just as importantly, control it on the way back down.
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 glutes finish hip extension; the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.
Every exercise for:QuadricepsGlutesHamstrings
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 quadriceps too, using equipment this one does not:
- Side Squats with Barbellbarbell
- Single-Leg Leg Extensionmachine
- Smith Machine Hack Squatsmith machine + machine
- Split Squat with Dumbbellsdumbbell
- Squats with Exercise Bandsband
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 173 quadriceps exercises in this database, 70 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.