Learn How To Leap Higher

by amare on December 17, 2009
in Sports

ANYBODY can improve their vertical jump and learn how to jump higher!

The key is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, sex, 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 varies from person to person. Just assigning you exercises just doesn’t cut it if you want real hops…you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, aimed at your weaknesses. These exercises ought to cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.

Some Important Steps To Get You Started

1. Assess your present strength and your level of experience with earlier methods of training. The most effective way to experience gains is to build a totally new strength platform. Then start performing an explosion phase. This will result in even more inches.

2. Practice Lifts. Entire body strength is the key 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, in turn, stabilizes you under tension, and additionally 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, use the same philosophy, with the central exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Remember the overlooked muscles towards the end of the workout – muscles such as hip flexors, the shins , transverse abdominals e.t.c.

4. Make sure to use a lifting technique in a safe and effective style. Undergo 3-5 week strength cycles for both lower and upper body. Done correctly, you should see gains of 5% each week. Following this, you will start to envision how your jump is guaranteed to increase.

5. Properly utilize explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are finished pre-weights. E.g., on Day 1 you start by engaging in a sequence of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyos (after a dynamic warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes around, this will have gradually switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.

6. Emphasis 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 coiled like springs, ready to blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” Then jump again. You ought to notice a marked improvement in your vertical leap. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the helpfulness of “mental practice” in improving athletic performance.)

To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you should consider a vertical jump training program. To find more information on How To Jump Higher, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.

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