How to Increase Vertical Jump

Jumping is a skill. We start off as toddlers crawling, walking, running, and finally jumping. Some of the hardest events in the olympics involve sprinting and jumping farther and faster than anyone else. In a basketball game, the men can dunk, and the boys are left to play defense. Jumping with style has its own name. Free running.

The best jumpers have been known to have good genetics. However, people like Michael Jordan started small, and grew. Eventually it was said he could fly. Perhaps you won't fly, but I can guarantee you this guide will help you increase your vertical. Dunk. Leap. Fly.

There are two parts to increasing your vertical. Power and explosiveness. Its simple physics. Power x speed = acceleration for a certain object. This object is you. And with this guide, you will accelerate quickly.

Leg strength. The gym is generally always crowded with muscle heads. However, for some reason the squat stations are always open. This is because leg muscles don't impress women. However, we aren't looking to impress women. We want to slam dunk on our competition or jump farther and higher than they ever could.

Here are some exercises to build up strength.

• Squats
• Lunges
• Deadlifts
• Hamstring curls
• Calf raises

For these exercises, I would suggest a 5 sets of 5 reps. By your 5th set your spotter should be having to lift you off the ground, because we are going for muscle failure. You want to build power. Continue doing these exercises and adding 5 pounds ever 1-2 weeks.

Kobe didn't learn to dunk in a day. Explosiveness is a slow and hard training process for the legs as you are forcing them to grow a certain muscle fibre. These are called fast twitch fibres and are the key to exploding off the ground. To train these, we use plyometrics.

Here are some plyometric exercises.

• Depth drops (Jump off a box and jump again immediately upon touching the ground)
• Jumping Lunges (From a lunge jump to the opposite lunge. Rinse and repeat)
• Frog leaps (From a crouch jump as far as possible back into a crouch. Fast)
• High Knee Skips (Skip like a school girl. High.)
• Jumping

Plyometrics are a fancy way of saying putting extra force on the legs by jumping. Which makes sense. The more you jump, the better you're going to get at jumping.

Warning. If you do this exercise right, you should only do them every third day as it puts a large amount of stress on the legs.

The King exercise is the jumping pistol. This is a frightening exercise that should only be attempted by masters of the jump, leap, and dunk.

Take a look at the picture on that right. That is a regular pistol which trains strength. Go watch some videos on youtube.

Next attempt to explosively jump from the bottom of the pistol. If you can do this, I will be very happy that my meagre writings lead to a King of Jumping. I would not start with this exercise. That is all.