Most people tend to think power training is only useful to athletes. These same people usually also think that doing an Olympic lift such as a hang clean or snatch is the only way to train power. These people would be wrong on both accounts.
The truth is that power is the first thing to go as we age. And if we do not train it it is going to go even faster. The other truth is that you do not need to be doing Olympic lifts to train for power. Medicine ball throws, squat jumps and plyo push ups are just a few examples of power exercises. We could even consider agility ladder training to be power training for some people.
Another reason to include power training as part of your workout is to ramp up the nervous system before a strength training workout. A couple sets of med ball slams or box jumps could lead to better performance in your main strength exercises.
One more thing about power training is that there should be a progression to follow just as there would with other exercises. For example a jump progression would be box jumps to squat jumps to what happens to be the exercise of the week, hurdle jumps.
The volume of jumps doesn't need to be high so I'll usually program two to four sets of 3-6 jumps
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