ANYBODY can increase their vertical leap and learn how to jump higher!
The key to increasing you vertical jump is learning the role your body type plays. Age, sex, race e.t.c., do not play as important a role. You need to do an assessment of your body’s individual response to certain exercise routines, as this changes from one person to another. 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, aiming at your weaknesses. These exercises should sequence from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Fundamental Steps To Get Started
1. Assess your current strength and your expertise with prior methods of training. The best way to experience gains is to build a brand new strength platform. After this start performing an explosion segment. This will result in even more inches.
2. Perform Lifts. Entire body strength is the key for such an athlete and there is no better exercise than the full back squat. This provides you with progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and additionally improves stretch-response of both hamstrings and hip muscles.
3. Root the squat centrally within most of your lower body workouts. 6-8 decent 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 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 effective manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for both lower and upper body. Done in the proper manner, 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 utilize explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are finished before your weight exercises. That is, 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 around, this will have gradually switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyometrics.
6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you progress through the phases.
7. Visualization is important – imagine yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with big leg muscles that are coiled 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 recognized the usefulness of “mental practice” in improving athletic performance.)
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.
