Landings & resilience

Counting Jumps: The Workload Nobody Adds Up

Try this after your player’s next tournament weekend.

Estimate the jumps. Every rebound attempt, every shot, every layup line, every block, every tip drill — then the games themselves, then the week of practice that led in.

Most parents land somewhere in the high hundreds — and most are surprised. Basketball is a jumping sport that never counts its jumps.

Why the total is the number that matters

Young knees and tendons adapt to workload the way any tissue does: gradually, when the load looks like what it already knows.

What they punish is the ambush. The week where school season overlaps AAU, a camp lands mid-week, and a four-game Saturday closes it out. Each commitment made sense alone. Together they hand a growing athlete double the normal jump count — and that’s typically when patellar tendons and heels start filing complaints.

Basketball makes this easy to miss because jumping is the game. Nobody logs it the way baseball logs pitches. The counting, realistically, falls to families.

The habit: add it up, roughly

No clicker required. Once a season, estimate a normal week — practices, games, extra shooting, pickup — and write the number down.

That number is your baseline. Then, when a big week is approaching — tryouts, a tournament, two seasons overlapping — compare against it before the week happens, not after the sore knees show up.

The framework: no surprise weeks. If the coming week is heading toward twice normal, remove something optional — or plan the week after as genuinely light. One honest caveat: jumps are a rough measure. Fifty tip-drill hops and fifty maximum rebound efforts load the body very differently. The count is a flashlight, not a lab report. It still beats not looking.

What this is not

It’s not an argument for jumping less basketball. Jumping builds the spring — gradually, when the dose is sane and the landings are coached.

It’s an argument for building the schedule the way you’d build the athlete: deliberately, with strength underneath so the body can afford the workload it’s asked for. That’s the heart of our guide to landings and resilience.

And if you’re wondering whether your athlete’s strength matches the calendar she’s carrying, an assessment answers exactly that.

This article supports our deeper guide: Landings & resilience.