Business Strategies, marketing planning and consulting

ANYONE can improve their vertical leap and learn how to jump higher!

The key to increasing you vertical jump is understanding how your body type affects this. Age, gender, race e.t.c., are not as important as most people think. You need to assess your own individual response to certain exercise routines, as this varies from one person to another. Just assigning you a list of exercises simply doesn't cut it if you want real hops...you NEED a cycle based on exercises for your given body type, concentrating on your weaknesses. This group of exercises should cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.

Basic Steps To Get Started

1. Assess your current strength and your level of experience with previous methods of working out. The most effective way to produce gains is to build a totally new strength foundation. Then start utilizing an explosion phase. This will result in further inches.

2. Practice Lifts. Entire body conditioning is the key for such an athlete and there is no better exercise than the full back squat. This provides progressive increases on spinal loading, which , in turn, stabilizes you under tension, and additionally improves stretch-response of both hamstrings and hip muscles.

3. Make the squat the core exercise of your lower body workouts. 6-8 quality lifts gets the best strength developments and vertical carryover. On the days of your upper body workouts, the philosophy is the same, with the core exercises being bench press, overhead press variations, pull-ups and dips. Remember to work often overlooked muscles at the end of your workout - muscles such as hip flexors, the shins , transverse abdominals e.t.c.

4. Ensure that you use a lifting technique in a safe and effective manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done correctly, you ought to see gains of 5% each week. Following this, you will be able to see how your jump is guaranteed to increase.

5. Correctly utilize explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your "field workouts" and are finished ahead of your weight exercises. E.g., on Day 1 you begin by engaging in a sequence of tempo runs, sprints and low-intensity plyometrics (after the proper warm-up of course). By the time Phase 3 comes around, this will have gradually lessened to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyometrics.

6. Concentration on the heavier weights will decrease as you move forward through the phases.

7. Visualize by closing your eyes, imagining yourself exploding upwards. Picture 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 powerful and much lighter." After that jump another time. You should observe a noticeable |increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long documented the helpfulness of "mental practice" in improving athletic performance.)