ANYONE can improve their vertical leap and learn how to jump higher!
The key to increasing you vertical jump is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, sex, race e.t.c., do not play as important a role. You need to do an assessment of your own individual reaction to training, as this changes from person to person. Just assigning you exercises just doesn’t cut it if you want real hops…you NEED a sequence based on exercises for your given body type, aimed at your weaknesses. These exercises ought to cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Fundamental Steps To Get Started
1. Assess your existing strength and your expertise with prior types of training. The best way to experience gains is to build a totally new strength platform. After this start performing an explosion segment. This will result in even more inches.
2. Practice Lifts. Entire body conditioning is a key factor for such an athlete and there is no superior exercise than the full back squat. This gives you progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and also improves stretch-response of both hamstrings and hip muscles.
3. Make the squat the foundation exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 decent lifts gets the best strength improvements and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, use the same philosophy, with the central exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Keep in mind the overlooked muscles towards the end of the workout – muscles such as hip flexors, the shins , transverse abdominals e.t.c.
4. Make sure to use a lifting technique in a safe and efficient way. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done in the proper manner, perceptible gains of 5+% on each lift should be seen weekly. Following this, you will start to envision how your jump is guaranteed to increase.
5. Properly utilize explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are completed before your weight exercises. E.g., on Day 1 you start by engaging in a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyos (after a dynamic warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes about, this will have gradually switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.
6. Emphasis on the heavier weights should fade as you proceed through the phases.
7. Visualization is important – imagine yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with big leg muscles that are coiled like springs, ready to propel you higher. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more powerful and much lighter.” Then jump another time. You ought to notice a marked improvement in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long documented the helpfulness of “mental practice” in improving one’s performance in sports.)
One final thought – the core of improving performance in any sport is the core (center) of your body…your midsection. To improve your midsection check out this information on how to get a six pack.
