ANYBODY can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!

The key is understanding the role your body type plays. 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 exercises just 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. This group of exercises ought to sequence 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 get gains is to build a brand new strength foundation. After this start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in further inches.

2. Practice Lifts. Total 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 also increases stretch-response of hip muscles and hamstrings.

3. Root the squat centrally within most of your lower body workouts. 6-8 quality lifts gets the best strength developments and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, use the same philosophy, 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 safe and effective manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for both lower and upper 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. Correctly use 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 begin by using a series 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 slowly lessened 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. Visualization is important - imagine 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.” Then jump once more. You ought to observe a noticeable increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the usefulness of “mental practice” in increasing one’s performance in sports.)

To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you must consider a vertical jump training program. To get more information on Improving Your Vertical Jump, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 12:06 am and is filed under qualifing Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.