A growing body of randomised-controlled work has now pushed plyometric training from the edges of distance-running orthodoxy to something close to the mainstream consensus. The latest sequence of trials, including a 2026 follow-up to the much-cited Festa et al. design, continues to point toward the same neutral finding: a single weekly plyometric session of measured intensity improves running economy at marathon-pace efforts and reduces training-day losses to injury in recreational marathoners, with effect sizes that hold across a range of starting fitness levels.
The 2026 update, published in March in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, followed 132 sub-elite marathoners across a 16-week build-up to a Spring goal race. Subjects were randomised into three groups — plyometrics, isometric strength, and a control group running a matched training plan without additional resistance work. The plyometric cohort produced a mean 3.7 percent improvement in running economy at 16 km/h, in line with earlier findings, and lost the fewest training days to injury across the build-up.
The catch, as it has been since the foundational work in the late 2000s, is dose. Plyometric sessions that crossed a per-week volume of around 120 contacts in this latest trial began to show a reverse trend in soft-tissue injury rates, particularly in the Achilles and the medial gastrocnemius. The protocols associated with the cleanest gains share a clear pattern: 60-to-100 ground contacts per session, single-leg work prioritised over bilateral hops, and a progression that runs across at least six weeks before the loading volume is allowed to climb.
What has changed in the 2026 literature is the integration with wearable training-load metrics. The Stirling running-research group's recent analysis of Garmin- and Coros-derived ground-contact-time data showed that plyometric-trained marathoners reduced their ground-contact time at threshold pace by an average of 12 milliseconds across a 12-week block — a small absolute number, but one that translates to materially less energy lost on each footfall over the course of 42 kilometres. The same dataset showed no meaningful change in cadence, suggesting the economy gain is mechanical rather than rhythmic.
For the recreational marathoner, the practical translation is straightforward: one explicit plyometric session per week, prescribed after an easy run, sequenced into the early base period and tapered into race-specific work as the goal race approaches. The intervention is cheap, it requires no equipment beyond a flat surface and a low box, and the evidence base for its benefit is now substantially deeper than for many of the more elaborate workouts found in commercial training plans. The most consistent ceiling on these gains, the recent research suggests, is not training design but adherence — runners who sustain plyometric work across a full build-up tend to keep the economy benefit; those who drop it through the taper tend to lose it.