ANYONE can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!

The key to jumping higher is understanding the role your body type plays. Age, gender, race e.t.c., are not the deciding factors. You need to do an assessment of your body’s individual response to training, as this changes from person to person. Giving you a list of exercises simply doesn’t cut it if you want real hops…you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, concentrating on your weaknesses. This group of exercises should cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.

Basic Steps To Get Started

1. Assess your current level of fitness and your level of experience with previous methods of training. The best way to experience gains is to build a brand new strength foundation. After this start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in even more inches.
2. Practice Lifts. Total body strength is the key for such an athlete and there is no better 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 hip muscles and hamstrings.
3. Make the squat the core exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 decent lifts gets the best strength developments and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, the philosophy is the same, with the core exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Remember the overlooked muscles towards the end of the workout – muscles such as hip flexors, the shins , transverse abdominals e.t.c.
4. Ensure that you use a lifting technique in a safe and effective manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for both lower and upper body. Done correctly, you should see gains of 5% each week. Following this, you will be able to see how your jump is bound to increase.
5. Correctly use 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 begin by engaging in a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyometrics (after a dynamic warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes around, this will have gradually switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.
6. Emphasis on the heavier weights will decrease as you progress through the phases.
7. Visualize by closing your eyes, imagining yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with large 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 again. You should observe a noticeable increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the effectiveness of “mental practice” in improving athletic performance.)

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