The Single Most Effective Way To Increase Your Vertical Jump

To improve your vertical jump there are plenty of great exercises you can do

. Squats and deadlifts for strength, skipping and bounding for reactivity, and box jumps for rate of force development to name just a few. However, above all of these in terms of effectiveness stands one exercise that should be in ALL jump programs.

This exercise is far more specific to your sport than any of those others. It will develop all the athletic attributes needed to jump high including the often overlooked area of movement efficiency. Even better, this particular exercise is insanely sports specific. No other exercise comes close.

So what exactly is this brilliant vertical jump training drill that gives such amazing results? The exercise I am referring to is none other than going out and performing some maximum effort jumping. Yep, it is that simple. As is the case with most things, the best way to improve at something is to actually go out and do it.

If you are trying to improve your jumping ability for a sporting pursuit, then the simplest, and most effective way to go about it is to actually practice that skill. Volleyball spiking is a great example. You need to time the jump as well as co-ordinate yourself to hit the ball with a lot of force, all while in the air. This isn't as simple as just jumping up straight and down in the air. In the early stages the movement will often feel unnatural, but the more you do it the more fluid it becomes and the higher you will jump.

Sadly, despite the obvious benefits that doing sports specific jumping practice has, it is rarely included in any of the vertical jump programs you can buy. Vertical Mastery is about the only one that does. People often believe they need all sorts of fancy exercises, different sorts of weight training equipment, and cleverly designed programs, but it is amazing how often they overlook the basic act of going out and simply doing some jumping.

Spending time working on your jumping technique will help you jump higher in so many ways. First and foremost though it will improve your movement efficiency! This is a big one. If you have less than stellar co-ordination then you will be severely limiting your potential jump height. It results in you not being able to coordinate your muscles and joints to fire in the right order and with the right power to maximize your jump height.

This type of maximum effort jumping is also one of the best ways to develop sports specific reactive and explosive strength. Squats, deadlifts, depth jumps etc will also increase these traits too, but they are not as specific as maximum effort jumping practice and therefore don't carry over as well.

Basically all training you do is designed to force your body to adapt to its environment (also known as an adaptive response). So in order to get stronger you need to consistently get into the gym and lift progressively heavier weights. In this way you send signals to your body that you require it grow in order to meet those continuously higher demands. The same goes for jump training. If you want to jump higher you must go out and regularly try to jump continuously higher. The more regularly you send this message to the muscles and CNS, the quicker it will adapt and respond.

Just about the only thing jumping doesn't do that well is to increase your maximal strength levels. Weight training is a clearly superior approach for this. For most athletes there will come a time when it is strength that is holding them back, but unless they have their jumping motion down first, they will not be able to apply the benefits of any additional strength anyway.

by: Jack Woodrup

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