Strength training for basketball: jumping, landing and knees

You rise for the shot, land on one leg and push straight off into transition — the knee absorbs every bit of that. Most players train the jump and almost nobody trains the stop and the landing, which is exactly where most non-contact injuries happen. This is the practical version: how to add height to your vertical and take load off the knee at the same time.

Why knees take the beating in basketball

Basketball is a string of short accelerations and even shorter decelerations. A single game piles up dozens of jumps and even more hard stops and direction changes, and each landing asks one or two legs to absorb a force several times body weight.

Anterior cruciate ligament injuries usually happen without contact: on a landing or a cut, the foot stays out wide, the knee collapses inwards and the trunk tips to one side. The evidence is strongest for combined programmes — strength, plyometrics, balance and landing technique together — rather than for any single exercise. Rates are higher in women, so for female squads this work is less optional than it looks.

Pain at the front of the knee is a different story. It rarely comes from one bad landing and usually comes from a jump in workload: two weeks off, then straight back into five sessions and two games a week. The knee tolerates neither the volume nor the speed of that change.

Strength first: squat, hinge, calves

Jumping is a question of how much force you can produce in a very short window. Without a base of strength there is nothing to accelerate, and plyometrics work on an empty tank.

Two strength sessions a week are enough for most of the year. The basic template: a squat or a front-loaded variation for 3–4 sets of 4–6, a hip hinge (Romanian or conventional deadlift) for 3 sets of 5–8, and calves for 3 sets of 8–12 with both a straight and a bent knee, because landings load both parts of the lower leg.

As a rough marker, coaches often use a squat around 1.5 times body weight for adult men and around 1.25 for women. It is not a magic threshold, just a sign that strength is no longer the limiting factor. If your technique is still rough, fix that before adding plates — the progression is laid out in the piece on squatting from scratch. The same applies to pulling from the floor, where hip and back positions are covered in the guide to the deadlift.

Landing is a skill, so practise it

Landing is trained separately from jumping. The simplest feedback is noise: a quiet landing means the ankle, knee and hip have shared the work. A thud means one of them did not.

Three things to fix. The knee tracks over the foot instead of falling inwards. The hips travel back into a quarter squat rather than letting the knee absorb everything. The trunk stays stacked over the pelvis without leaning off to one side. Do not land stiff-legged, but do not sink into a deep squat either — somewhere between 30 and 60 degrees of knee bend.

In practice: step off (do not jump off) a 20–30 cm box and freeze the landing for two seconds, 3 sets of 5. Once that looks tidy, repeat it on one leg from a lower box, 3 sets of 4 per side. Put it at the start of the session while you are fresh; it takes five minutes.

Plyometrics: count ground contacts

Jumping is a training load like lifting and needs dosing. The most useful measure is ground contacts — every landing counts as one.

If you are starting out, 60 to 80 contacts per session, twice a week, with at least 48 hours between them. Experienced players in the off-season can handle 100 to 140. Sets stay short: 3–5 reps, then 60–90 seconds of rest, because you are training the quality of the push-off, not conditioning.

Progress in this order: in-place jumps landing into a stable stance, line hops forward-back and side-to-side, maximal vertical jumps, and only then low depth jumps from a box no higher than 30 cm. Stop the moment jump height visibly drops or the landings get loud — that is where the useful part of the session ends. Do not stack volume on top of poor sleep either; chronic fatigue has its own warning signs, covered in the article on overtraining.

The game happens on one leg

Almost everything in basketball goes through a single leg, so bilateral squatting is not enough on its own. You need single-leg work, and above all the kind where you control the way down.

Bulgarian split squats, 3 sets of 6–8 per leg. Step-downs from a 20–30 cm bench, 3 sets of 8, taking three seconds to lower. For the hamstrings, Nordic curls at 2–3 sets of 4–6, starting with a small range and adding depth only once you genuinely brake the descent. Add 2 sets of 12–15 of banded hip abduction, since a weak hip lets the knee drift inwards under fatigue.

Do not skip the ankle. If your knee cannot touch a wall in a lunge position with the heel down and the foot about 10 cm back, a stiff ankle is making the knee do someone else's job on every stop. Footwork and change of direction follow the same pattern in other cutting sports, which is why the piece on training for squash is worth a read.

Fitting it into a week

Off-season: three strength sessions and two plyometric blocks. If they land on the same day, jumps go first, while the nervous system is fresh. Eight to twelve weeks of this usually buys a few centimetres on the vertical — more if you have never lifted, less if you have trained for years.

In season the rule flips: keep the intensity, cut the volume. Two sessions of 30 to 40 minutes a week, 2–3 sets instead of 4–5, and no heavy leg work inside 48 hours of a game. In-season lifting mostly protects what pre-season built.

The part that never changes, in any block, is the five minutes of landing technique and ankle prep. It is the cheapest item on the programme and the first one to fall off the schedule when time is short.

When to see a doctor

Most knee soreness after a heavy stretch settles within ten days once the volume comes down. Some things should not be waited out:

• a pop or snap at the moment of injury, especially if the knee swells within a few hours;
• a sense that the knee gives way or shifts under load;
• a knee that locks and will not straighten;
• inability to put weight through the leg, or clear instability when walking;
• pain lasting more than two to three weeks despite reduced load, pain that wakes you at night, or a knee that is hot, red and swollen alongside a fever.

If the pain shows up specifically in the squat and returns in the same spot every time, work through the causes in the article on knee pain during squats before rewriting your whole programme.

The short version

• Two strength sessions a week: squat 3–4 x 4–6, hip hinge 3 x 5–8, calves 3 x 8–12 with both straight and bent knees.
• Train landings on their own: step off a 20–30 cm box and hold the landing for two seconds, 3 x 5, at the start of a session.
• Dose plyometrics by ground contacts: 60–80 for beginners, up to 140 for experienced players, twice a week with 48 hours between.
• Single-leg work with a controlled descent is the closest thing to the game — split squats, slow step-downs, Nordic curls.
• In season, hold the intensity and cut the volume; keep heavy leg work at least 48 hours away from a game.