subject: Increase Your Vertical Jump By Knowing How Muscle Fiber Is Built With The "all-or-nothing Principle [print this page] Increase Your Vertical Jump The Right Way
I want to rant and rave for just one second before I explain something you can add to your training to get a little bit better results-maybe even a whole lot better results, depending on what you're currently doing to increase your vertical jump.
Watch Out For Vertical Program Misinformation
First of all, I always get questions from people who are trying a certain vertical program- I'm not going to mention the name of it, you guys who e-mailed me know the name of it. And you're wondering why you're not getting results or why you've even lost some results, and it is because you may be training your endurance and not your jumping explosion. There's a lot of vertical jump programs out there doing that, but there's one in particular that is really bad with it, I mean repetitions up to like twelve hundred in some cases where you're doing twelve hundred times one exercise; and that's training your jumping endurance. And so I just want you to be aware of that.
I want to explain one principle that might help you understand why this principle of vertical jump training is going to work out when focused on explosion, not endurance. First of all, your muscles work on a principle called the the "all-or-nothing principle."
The "all-or-nothing principle"
It's not something I made up, it's something that I learned during my personal training education. You can look it up on Google: the "all-or-nothing principle." Basically how it works is, depending on how much weight you're lifting, it's going to depend on how your body recruits muscles. So let's say, for instance-this is not true-you have twenty muscle fibers, and if you're only lifting very light weight, your body's only going to recruit maybe half of those muscle fibers. And it uses muscle fibers either the whole muscle fiber, or not at all.
So it doesn't use maybe one muscle fiber a little bit, or all the muscle fibers just a little bit, it recruits a certain number of muscle fibers, and then it either uses all of them, the entire fiber, or not at all. If you're training with lighter weight, you may not have been training certain muscle fibers at all, because you're only training a certain portion of the muscle fibers.
That's why in your training to increase your vertical jump you want to emphasize doing heavier lifts, because you're going to be training every single one of your muscle fibers as your body recruits everything it has to lift that weight.
