13/08/2026
⚠️NEW ARTICLE ⚠️
Do you monitor your athletes or patients using the CMJ? Do you use popular protocols consisting of 3–5 consecutive repetitions? There is probably a more effective way to do it.
Another project developed under the Next Generation Performance Sports Science Department has now seen the light of day — this time in the Journal of Sports Sciences (Dr Tim Gabbett, Dr Jason Lake, Szymon Karpęcki, Dr Michał Nowak)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2026.2712762
For this study, we extracted 35451 CMJ repetitions from 998 athletes from our force-plate database and applied a detailed, multi-stage filtering process to identify standardised 3 + 3 testing sessions.
We then mapped where the best repetition occurred across six clustered CMJs for seven key performance and force–time metrics, examining the pattern both on athletes’ personal-best days and during their typical performance state.
And the message for practitioners is quite simple:
If your goal is to capture an athlete’s highest CMJ performance, three repetitions may simply not be enough.
In our dataset, the first three repetitions captured only approximately:
▪️ 54% of peak jumpheight values
▪️ 48% of peak mRSI values
▪️ 39% of peak average relative braking force values
▪️ 33% of peak average relative braking power values
🔎 The braking phase was particularly interesting.
Both average relative braking force and average relative braking power progressively shifted towards later attempts, with the sixth repetition being the most common location of the session-best value.
For several other variables, including mRSI and average relative propulsive power, the peak most frequently occurred on repetition 4 — the first jump after the 60–90 s cluster break.
This suggests that the process of calibrating, tuning and organising movement may take longer than we sometimes assume.
Even experienced and high-level athletes may need several maximal attempts before they express something close to their best available solution — not only in terms of the final performance output, but also in the kinetic strategy used to produce it.
For some time, we have seen a methodological gap in CMJ monitoring: testing protocols themselves are rarely validated.
Three or five jumps.
These approaches have often become routine simply because they are practical — or because they are embedded within research traditions, software workflows and manufacturers recommendations.
🚩 Based on our findings, a 6-repetition clustered protocol organised as 3 + 3, with a short recovery period between clusters, appears to be a reasonable candidate when the objective is to maximise the probability of capturing high CMJ performance values that are closer to an athlete’s current neuromuscular ceiling.
