Tip 10: always warm up before you exercise, never overwork your muscles before they are properly warmed up or you can easily cause your self serious injury. Jump rope or jog before lifting any heavy weights

Tip 9: a good exercise to build large amounts of quad muscle is the squat. Start with very little weight and slowly increase your repetitions and weight as you become more advanced. Move slowly as this will build more of the explosive power you want for jumping.

Tip 8: make sure to have separate days on your workout schedule for weight training days and speed/plyo days. Most studies agree that mixing these types of workouts can really hamper your results

Tip7: Jump Rope, even though many people may look down on jumping rope it is a fantastic cardio workout as well as a very basic plyo workout. It will strengthen your legs and get your lungs in great shape too. That’s good for whatever sport you’re playing.

Tip 6: work 100% of the time, while you can’t be in the gym 24/7 you can always be working out a little bit. Walk around on your toes or heels and stand with your legs slightly or half bent when your doing things around the house or at work. All of these little things will strengthen your legs over a long period of time

Tip 5: exercise your calfs, while they are a smaller muscle than your quads they are very important in jumping. Calf raises are the best way to build muscle and you can do that anywhere. If you can put your toes on a ledge this will allow you to bring your heels down below your toes for an even better workout. You can add weight to make this more challenging.

Tip 4: don’t work to hard. Your muscles need some time to rest and if you are constantly working them they don’t have time to heal themselves. You actually tear your muscles just a little bit when you work them really hard. Especially when you are weight training. That light workout or a day of rest gives them time to repair those minute tears so that they are ready to go again and grow even bigger.

Tip 3: focus on your jump and use your entire body. Also make sure you are trying for your maximum height. Just jumping for the sake of jumping won’t get you nearly as good of results as actually focusing on each jump

Tip 2: be patient when you are training. You cont build muscle over night and you wont see 3 inches tacked on to your vertical either. It takes time and effort and the proper workout to put inches on your jump. Don’t give up and don’t let your determination and motivation float away. Keep at it and you can see results faster than you ever thought

Tip 1: Plyometric Exercises are one of the best ways to train your jumping muscles and whip them into shape. They are tough and demanding but that is because they work the largest muscles in your legs and they do it efficiently. Jumping as high as you can and bringing yourself down into a crouching position when you land and then immediately jumping back up is the best way to strain your leg muscles.

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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.

Technorati Tags: increase vertical, vertical jump