You’re probably thinking you know all about the vertical jump, you just bend your knees and push upwards as hard and fast as you can, right?..
There are many aspects to a vertical jump, if you want you increase your vertical you need to thoroughly analyze these aspects and have a good look at yourself and how you are incorporating training methods into your routine. A 40 inch vertical jump is not something that is easily built, and I mean built, because that’s exactly what you’re going to be doing.
Imagine a house. It has a foundation, then you build the walls, then you put the roof on. You can think as a vertical jump having similar elements. The foundation of a powerful vertical jump is strength. You need massive strength to be able to push your bodyweight, anywhere from 150lb to 200lb 40 inches into the air. That’s no easy task. Massive strength isn’t everything though. You don’t see huge powerlifters who are squatting 800lb with a 40 inch vertical, even though they have rather impressive vert’s for large guys.
You then need explosiveness. Think of it like the walls of your house. What exactly is explosiveness though? If you google “What is explosiveness”, no matter how many ways to try and change your search term, what you want to know just doesn’t quite come up. Explosiveness is a term that is thrown around a lot by many people, but everybody’s definition varies slightly. To be explosive in a sporting context means to be able to rapidly access all of your available strength. If you can squat 300lb but you aren’t very explosive, this means you might only be able to access 100lb worth of strength in the 0.25 seconds that it takes to perform a vertical jump. When you spend a lot of time training with parkour practitioners or people who do free-running, you find a lot of people who have very impressive verticals, without specific training or weights. How can this be? These people have limited strength (its almost impossible to train the posterior chain muscles without weights) but they have a very high amount of explosiveness. They might be accessing up to 80% of their full strength in 0.25 seconds, which is VERY impressive. Training your explosiveness is something that can be done with relative ease, compared to strength training and plyometrics.
Next comes plyometrics. The roof, the part that brings it all together, without a foundation and walls though, there’s absolutely no point in having a roof. Plyometrics is something that is a fair bit more difficult than strength training and training explosiveness. The difficult arises in understanding the dynamics of plyometrics and the correct form. Think of when you first started weights (if you have started weights…) you had to learn that you couldn’t just hit the gym everyday and train because firstly, muscles grow on rest days and secondly, your CNS (central nervous system) would get fatigued and you would experience over-training and see no gains. I won’t get into a discussion about weight training as that is for another post – but think of plyometrics as having rules and methods similar to weight training in structure. There are things you just can’t do and things you have to understand before you jump in (excuse the pun…) The premise of plyometrics, is to train your CNS. It’s one thing to train your muscles and have them in peak condition – and its another thing to have refined neuromuscular connections and thorough movement patterns.
So what do YOU need to do to increase your vertical jump? First you need to decide what your level of ability is. Is this new information to you? In that case I suggest you read more of my blog posts and do more research before you decided on anything. If you’re looking to increase your vertical jump then I suggest you take some basic steps, these are only guidelines – you will find more blog posts that address these specific issues more directly.
- Practice your lifting technique, make sure you can deadlift, squat, bench press, overhead press and row with excellent form (all lifts are important in developing a proportional and rounded physique, you don’t monster legs and no chest/back!)
- Build a weight routine around the SQUAT and DEADLIFT. These two lifts hit the most muscles in the body and are most beneficial to vertical jumping overall, as they target the posterior chain (glutes, hamstrings, calves)
- Work hard on increasing your squat strength to 2x your bodyweight, squat 3 times a week and add 2.5% or 5% more weight each week.
- Begin a explosiveness cycle, start squating with 25% of your maximum weight as fast as you can, perform explosive lifts and build a plyometrics routine (look up safe methods of doing explosive squats as they can be very dangerous to perform incorrectly)
- Continue with explosiveness training and plyometrics until you stop seeing gains.
- Go to step 2
This is a highly condensed summary on a training cycle – but this is how the professionals do it. Other methods will be very similar with subtle differences, methods which don’t follow this basic cycle are mostly bogus. This is why programs like Air Alert don’t work.
There are most things to go over, for example, how to build a strength routine, how to build a plyometric routine and the safe way of performing these. What to eat when training and how to program your weight training with your sport. I will go over all of these aspects in future posts.
-Will
