ANYONE can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!
The key to jumping higher is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, sex, race e.t.c., do not play as important a role. You need to assess your body’s individual response to certain exercise routines, as this changes from person to person. Just assigning you exercises just doesn’t cut it if you want to really jump higher…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 level of fitness and your expertise with previous methods of exercise. The most effective way to experience gains is to construct a totally new strength foundation. After this start performing an explosion segment. This will result in even more inches.
2. Practice Lifts. Total body conditioning is the key for such an athlete and there is no superior exercise than the full back squat. This provides you with progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and also increases stretch-response of hip muscles and hamstrings.
3. Make the squat the core exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 quality lifts gets the best strength developments and vertical carryover. For the upper body days, use the same philosophy, with the core exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Bear in mind 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 way. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done in the proper manner, observable gains of 5+% on each lift should be seen weekly. 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 prior to your weight exercises. That is, on Day 1 you begin by using a sequence 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 steadily 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. Visualize yourself with big leg muscles that are tightened like springs, prepared to blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” Then jump again. You should notice a marked improvement in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long documented the usefulness of “mental practice” in increasing 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 abs.
