Plyometrics belong at the start, not the end

Jumps get used as a finisher because they look like conditioning, which destroys the quality they build.

Forty minutes of lifting, then three sets of jumps at the end because there is time and the athletes like them. That ordering appears in a lot of programmes and it converts a nervous system exercise into a fatigue exercise, which means the thing you were trying to build is the one thing the session cannot produce.

Elastic quality lives in a very short window of contact with the ground. It depends on tissue behaving like a spring and on the timing being sharp, and both of those degrade fast once the athlete is tired. A jump performed at the end of a session still looks like a jump, still gets counted as a jump, and is a different exercise entirely. Longer on the floor, softer, slower, more like a slow strength effort with a hop attached.

So the athlete accumulates a lot of repetitions of the wrong version. This is the part that bothers me most, because it is not merely wasted, it is practice of a pattern you specifically did not want. Then somebody concludes plyometrics do not work for their sport.

Put them early. After the warm up, before the heavy work, when the athlete is fresh and can be coached rep by rep. Keep the volume much lower than instinct suggests, because quality collapses long before the athlete feels tired, and the coach has to be the one who stops it rather than the athlete.

Contact time is the number I would actually watch, and you do not need equipment to hear it. Loud, long, flat footed landings tell you the set is over. Coaches count repetitions instead, which is why sets of twenty exist, and the last twelve of those are teaching the opposite of what the first eight taught.

There is a place for jumps under fatigue and it is not this. If the goal is to hold mechanics together when tired, that is a separate, deliberate, well supervised block with a different purpose, done occasionally, with the athlete told exactly what it is for. Sliding into it accidentally at the end of a lifting session because the clock allowed it is not that.

The finisher slot is for work whose quality does not matter much. Elastic work is the last thing that belongs there.