Let’s touch on why a lot of athletes struggle and fail to increase their vertical explosion. The thing is, you don’t have to struggle, im going to show you a few simple steps you can take which will show you exactly what you can do to increase your vertical in the next few weeks or even less.

Why do they fail?

The first most obvious point is the lack of understanding. They don’t have the knowledge to perform the correct techniques and principles. They don’t know what to do and how to do it correctly. These are huge barriers because without that knowledge you will likely work very hard but see pitiful gains compared to what you could be having. Also some have a lack of discipline and motivation. Things don’t come for free and there is no overnight miracle. You have to work, and often work hard for something you want. Lastly a lack of nutrition is also an issue with many athletes; you have to give your body what it needs to grow.

Why are these problems so common?

Some of the most popular vertical training programs are not actually written by professional trainers. They are often written by marketers and ghostwriters just to turn a profit. Be wary of who you get your information from since much of it can be made up by people who have absolutely no idea about jumping. They just knew that people would buy it if they made up a program and sold it over the internet.

High school and often college sport coaches have the same problem. They just aren’t trained well enough. They do know a good amount about fitness and health. But that doesn’t mean they are experts on jumping. Often they will train you wrong and think they are doing the write thing. But it’s very tricky since often times training for vertical explosiveness is very counterintuitive. So until you really find the correct program that teaches the correct principles it will be very difficult to add inches to your vertical. Luckily they are out there and not as hard to find as you might think. I’ve actually laid out some simple guidelines on picking a quality jump training program if you are interested check out my other articles.

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When trying to decide how we should do our bodyweight training we have to compare and contrast it will resistance training. Weighted lifts are often far harder than their un-weighted brothers. So for this reason you will often have to increase your reps for the bodyweight exercises. However more reps does not mean to do them forever. You still need to focus on the fact that you are training for explosion and not for power. Doing endless reps will train your endurance and not make you jump higher.

Slightly increasing the reps from say 3-5 to 7-9 will make a good improvement in the workout. Now since there is no weight you must focus on speed. Since we are not greatly improving the amount of strength we have we must focus on applying that strength as quickly as possible to get the result. So when doing squats or lunges you must concentrate on explosion up. Doing these amounts of reps with a explosion on each rep will make for a pretty rigorous workout.

With bodyweight exercises you need to police yourself when it comes to calling it quits. When you are resistance training it is usually failure to complete the rep that signals the end of the set. When you cant do any more your done. But with bodyweight lifts you can go for a much longer time and will need to focus on your form and explosion. When either of these start to falter it is usually a good sign you should move on to something else.

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While we all love box jumps, power skipping, squats and dead lifts there is one exercise that will always be a step ahead of the others when it comes to how to improve your vertical jump. This exercise is extremely well rounded and works and strengthens just about every attribute required for jumping higher. And is one of the best exercises for increasing movement efficiency. Also, if you’re working on your hops for your sport, then this is the most sports tailored jumping you can do.

So what is it you might ask? Well it’s quite simple, it’s practicing jumping. Yep, shocking I know, but just like most things in life, practice makes perfect and the best way to get better at jumping, is to jump. If you are practicing for your sports specific goal. You should simply practice just as you would if you were playing your sport. If you are trying to jump higher in basketball, then go find an empty hoop and practice jumping for the rim. Depending on how high you can jump already you might just be touching net or you might be able to grab the rim already.

Wherever you start all you have to focus on is trying to get higher. If you can just touch rim, work your way up until you can grab it. After that you can work up until you can get as much of your hand above the rim as possible. If you can get your wrist over the rim, chances are you can dunk off a lob. And this makes practicing a bit more entertaining.

Proper jumping technique is often overlooked when practicing to jump higher. The focus is often put on extensive workouts or special weight training equipment or fancy programs but in reality the basic art of simply jumping will have a profound impact on your vertical jump.

Make sure you spend some time focusing on just improving your jumping technique. You will recall notice a difference since it is important to helping you jump higher in several ways. The first thing practicing will do for you is it will improve your movement efficiency. This is huge if you want to be able to jump since it requires you to fire all your muscles in the correct order to create a powerful explosion off the ground. If you can’t do this you’ll look

a little janky and won’t go very high either.

The second benefit to increasing your movement efficiency is that it will help you create explosive strength and reactive strength in a manner that is very similar to jumping. Box squats and power cleans are similar and will increase your explosion but they are merely similar to jumping. What you are doing IS jumping, so you can’t get much more actuate replication than that.

Whenever you workout or try to build muscle on your body you do it in one way. It is called adaptive response and it means that your body reacts to the environment you put it in. if you force it to lift heavy weights, it builds muscle to survive that lifting. Only exposing the body to continually heavier loads will make it stronger. So likewise if you would like to be able to jump higher you need to go out and continuously attempt to jump higher. This will tell the body that it must adapt to those conditions.

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I am sure at least once when playing basketball you have told yourself, “I need to increase my vertical jump.” It could be because you are tired of getting stuffed by players that are shorter than you, or you want to be able to dunk, or just to make yourself a better player.

There is no doubt having a formidable vertical jump translates to you being a formidable opponent on the court. Every basketball player could benefit by increasing their vertical. While other fundamentals like dribbling and passing are important it’s the ability to block a shot or always win the rebound or slam dunk the ball that takes a player from average to extraordinary. Fortunately for you its not brain surgery to increase your vertical jump, however it does take proper exercise and training.

The obvious focus of your training will be the dominate leg muscles as these are the primary group used to jump, along with your core. Well I wanted to increase my vertical jump so I started doing some research. Like you are no doubt doing now. What I found was that finding the information to increase my vertical was the easy part. Actually doing it was the hard part. I found out my legs were not even close to being in the kind of shape that I wanted. Before I started training I had thought I was pretty strong and fit, but clearly I was wrong. No wonder I wasn’t jumping as high as I wanted too.

Now I knew what I needed to do to increase my vertical jump I worked on it for a few months. Some of the best things that helped me were actually very simple. I started jogging regularly. Going on a run is a good way to exercise your whole body. It strengthens your legs and helps get your lungs into shape. That was a definite plus for playing ball. I also started running with ankle weights which added just a bit more difficulty to the exercise.

Toe raises are another way that I was able to increase my vertical jump. They are very simple and all you need to do to perform them is to stand flat footed and simply push up on to your toes and hold it there for a second or two. To make it a bit harder you can stand on the edge of a stair or a bench so you can actually extend farther down that simply flat on the ground. Make sure you focus on the explosiveness of the movement up. This will get you better results than raising yourself off the floor slowly.

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