ANYBODY can increase their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!
The key to jumping higher is understanding the role your body type plays. Age, gender, race e.t.c., are not the deciding factors. You need to do an assessment of your body’s individual response to certain exercise routines, as this changes from one person to another. Giving you a list of exercises simply doesn’t cut it if you want real hops…you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, concentrated on your weaknesses. This group of exercises ought to sequence from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.
Some Basic Steps To Get You Started
1. Assess your present level of fitness and your level of experience with earlier types of exercise. The most effective way to get gains is to construct a totally new strength foundation. After this start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in further inches.
2. Do Lifts. Total body strength is a key factor for such an athlete and there is no better exercise than the full back squat. This provides you with progressive increases on spinal loading, which provides stabilization under tension, and also improves 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. Bear in mind 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 secure and efficient way. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done correctly, you ought to see gains of 5% each week. Following this, you will be able to see how your jump is bound to increase.
5. Correctly use explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are completed ahead of your weight exercises. That is, on Day 1 you start by using a series of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyos (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 plyos.
6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you advance through the phases.
7. Visualization is important – imagine yourself exploding upwards. Visualize yourself with big leg muscles that are tightened 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 again. You should observe a noticeable increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the effectiveness of “mental practice” in improving one’s performance in sports.)
To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you ought to think about a vertical jump training program. To get more information on Improving Your Vertical Jump, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.
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