ANYBODY can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!
The key to increasing you vertical jump is learning 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 reaction to training, as this changes from person to person. Just assigning you a list of exercises just doesn’t cut it if you want real hops…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 strength and your level of experience with previous methods of exercise. The most effective way to experience gains is to build a brand new strength foundation. After this start performing an explosion phase. This will result in further 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 gives you progressive increases on spinal loading, which, in turn, stabilizes you under tension, and also improves stretch-response of both hamstrings and hip muscles.
3. The squat should be the main exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 decent lifts gets the best strength improvements 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 secure and effective way. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for both lower and upper body. Done properly, 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 pre-weights. 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 around, this will have gradually lessened to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyometrics.
6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you advance 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 blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” After that jump once more. You ought to observe a noticeable increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long documented the effectiveness of “mental practice” in improving 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.