ANYONE can increase their vertical leap 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., do not play as important a role. You need to do an assessment of your own individual response to certain exercise routines, 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 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 current strength and your expertise with previous types 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 even more inches.
2. Perform Lifts. Total body strength 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, in turn, stabilizes you under tension, and in addition increases 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 developments 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. Bear in mind to work often overlooked muscles at the end of your 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 effective way. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for upper and lower body. Done in the proper manner, you ought to see gains of 5% each week. 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 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 slowly lessened to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyometrics.
6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you move forward through the phases.
7. Visualize by closing your eyes, imagining yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with big leg muscles that are coiled like springs, prepared to propel you higher. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more powerful and much lighter.” Then jump again. You should notice a marked improvement in your vertical leap. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the effectiveness 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.
