I started playing basketball 5 years ago and realized that if i was gonna be able to dunk, I was going to have to learn how to jump higher. Whether you want to learn how to jump higher in volleyball so you can spike or in basketball so you can dunk, the training principles are the same. I spent years following free advice on forums and trying all kinds of strength workouts to increase my vertical. I would go to the gym and squat huge amounts of weight to realize that after tons of work and effort my vertical jump would only be 1 inch higher after months and months of training. I thought it was normal to see gains of a few inches per month, after all, if a 40 inch vertical was easy to achieve, everybody would have one. Except I really started to feel it in my knees from the heavy squats, week after week. After a good year of training, my vertical jump was a couple of inches
So I started researching on the internet for jumping programs and found The Jump Manual by Jacob Hiller. On his webpage there was a huge title that promised 10 inches to your vertical jump. I thought that there was absolutely no way that could be true and was highly skeptical because of my own experiences with vertical jump training. After I had read all of the testimonials on his website of people getting results very quickly I decided to buy his jumping program. I was so amped up by the things I had read that I started doing it the next day, and it was very different to what I’d been doing for the past year. Apparently I was going about it the wrong way. I mean i was doing some good things that were beneficial to my vertical jump, but I was also doing a lot of stuff that made me think it was working because it got me sore, when in reality it wasn’t really helping my vertical jump improve at all. You can imagine how surprised I was when I added an inch to my vertical in the first week. I was so happy and so mad at myself at the same time. Why did I waste a whole year and so many hours in the gym doing training that wasn’t efficient? You live and learn I suppose. The training for jumping higher is a lot different than the normal workout I would do in the gym and had very good plyometric exercises that I would have never known about.
Click here to see The Jump Manual workout page
