ANYBODY can improve their vertical leap and learn how to jump higher!
The key is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, sex, race e.t.c., are not the deciding factors. You need to do an assessment of your body’s individual response to certain exercise routines, as this varies from one person to another. Just assigning you 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, concentrated on your weaknesses. These exercises ought to sequence from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Fundamental Steps To Get Started
1. Assess your current strength and your expertise with prior types of exercise. The most effective way to get gains is to construct a totally new strength foundation. After this start utilizing an explosion segment. This will result in further inches.
2. Perform Lifts. Entire body strength is a key factor for such an athlete and there is no superior exercise than the full back squat. This provides you with progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and in addition increases stretch-response of hip muscles and hamstrings.
3. The squat should be the main exercise 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. Remember 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 efficient way. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for both lower and upper body. Done in the proper manner, visible gains of 5+% on each lift should be seen weekly. 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 prior to your weight exercises. That is, on Day 1 you begin by using a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyometrics (after a dynamic warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes around, this will have slowly switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.
6. Emphasis 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, ready to propel you higher. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” Then jump once more. You should notice a marked improvement in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long documented the usefulness of “mental practice” in improving athletic performance.)
To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you should consider a vertical jump training program. To get more information on How To Improve Your Vertical, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.