Rec and Sports

How To Jump Higher

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, gender, race e.t.c., are not as important as most people think. You need to do an assessment of your own individual response to certain exercise routines, as this varies from person to person. Just assigning you a list of 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, 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 level of experience with earlier types of training. The best way to get gains is to construct a brand new strength platform. Then start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in further inches.

2. Practice 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 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 developments and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, the philosophy is the same, with the central exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Remember 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 efficient way. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for upper and lower body. Done properly, perceptible gains of 5+% on each lift should be seen weekly. 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. That is, on Day 1 you begin 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 around, this will have slowly lessened to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyometrics.

6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you proceed through the phases.

7. Visualization is important – imagine yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with large leg muscles that are coiled like springs, set to blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” After that jump another time. You should notice a marked improvement in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the effectiveness of “mental practice” in increasing one’s performance in sports.)

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.