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., are not as important as most people think. You need to assess your body’s individual response to certain exercise routines, as this varies from person to person. Just assigning you a list of exercises just doesn’t cut it if you want to really jump higher…you NEED a sequence based on exercises for your given body type, concentrating 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 previous methods of training. The best way to experience gains is to construct a totally new strength platform. After this start performing an explosion phase. This will result in even more inches.
2. Practice Lifts. Total 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 additionally increases stretch-response of hip muscles and hamstrings.
3. The squat should be the main 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, use the same philosophy, with the core 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 safe and effective manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for both lower and upper body. Done properly, perceptible 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 finished pre-weights. E.g., on Day 1 you start by using a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyometrics (after the proper warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes about, this will have slowly switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.
6. Emphasis on the heavier weights should fade as you move forward through the phases.
7. Visualize by closing your eyes, imagining yourself exploding upwards. Visualize yourself with big leg muscles that are coiled like springs, set to blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more powerful and much lighter.” Then jump again. You should notice a marked increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the effectiveness of “mental practice” in improving athletic performance.)
To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you should think about a vertical jump training program. To find more information on How To Improve Your Vertical, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.
Tags: how to jump higher, improve vertical, jump higher, vertical jump