ANYONE can increase their vertical leap 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., are not as important as most people think. You need to assess your own individual response to training, as this varies from one person to another. Giving you a list of exercises simply doesn’t cut it if you want to really jump higher…you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, aiming at your weaknesses. These exercises ought to cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Some Crucial Steps To Get You Started
1. Assess your present strength and your expertise with prior methods of training. The best way to get gains is to construct a totally new strength foundation. After this start performing an explosion phase. This will result in further inches.
2. Do Lifts. Entire 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 additionally 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, the philosophy is the same, with the central exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Keep in mind to work often overlooked muscles at 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 secure and efficient way. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for upper and lower body. Done properly, observable gains of 5+% on each lift ought to be seen weekly. Following this, you will start to envision how your jump is guaranteed to increase.
5. Properly use explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are completed pre-weights. E.g., on Day 1 you start by engaging in a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyometrics (after the proper 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 should fade as you advance through the phases.
7. Visualization is important – imagine yourself exploding upwards. Visualize yourself with big leg muscles that are tightened like springs, set to propel you higher. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” After that jump once more. You should notice a marked improvement in your vertical leap. (Sports psychologists have long recognized 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.
