How You Can Leap Higher
ANYONE can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!
The key to increasing you vertical jump is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, gender, race e.t.c., do not play as important a role. You need to assess your own individual response to certain exercise routines, as this varies from person to person. Just assigning you exercises simply doesn't cut it if you want real hops...you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, aiming at your weaknesses. These exercises should cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Some Basic Steps To Get You Started
1. Assess your current level of fitness and your expertise with prior types of exercise. The most effective way to experience gains is to build a totally new strength foundation. Then start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in even more inches.
2. Do Lifts. Entire body strength is an important factor for such an athlete and there is no better exercise than the full back squat. This gives you progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and as well increases stretch-response of hip muscles and hamstrings.
3. Make the squat the core exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 quality lifts gets the best strength improvements and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, the philosophy is the same, with the core exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Keep in mind the overlooked muscles towards the end of your 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 way. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done in the proper manner, you ought to see gains of 5% each week. Following this, you will be able to see how your jump is guaranteed to increase.
5. Properly use explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your "field workouts" and are completed before your weight exercises. E.g., on Day 1 you begin by engaging in a sequence 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 switched 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. Visualize by closing your eyes, imagining yourself exploding upwards. Visualize yourself with large leg muscles that are tightened 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 observe a noticeable |increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the helpfulness of "mental practice" in improving athletic performance.)
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