What can you expect by increasing your vertical jump? The answer lies in the sport you play and if it’s required to outperform other players. In basketball, your capabilities of strong vertical jumping is everything in relation to your jump shots, blocks, and rebounds. You can be an underdog if you cannot reach up and above competitors for rebounds because rebounds determine the success of a game. Defensive players must block out opponents when creating a solid position; point guards must have a straight vertical in order to get shots over taller players. The world of basketball depends on your vertical jumping; in this article, you’re going to learn three tips to help increase vertical jumps today.

1. Weight Lifting and Plyometric Exercises

You can increase vertical explosion with plyometric exercises. Plyometrics helps develop quick muscle fibers needed to improve vertical by training your muscles to explode quickly. Over time, plyometric training increases the amount of force you can produce and therefore plyometrics are effective in making you more explosive. This leads to improved sports performance, a higher vertical jump, and faster sprinting times.

To clear a myth up, plyometric exercises are not made for improving conditioning or endurance. They are specifically designed for improving reactive and explosive strength. Plyometric training offer a wide array of benefits ranging from improve vertical jump, improved sprinting speed, better explosiveness, improved ability to absorb force, and better agility. Plyometrics are meant to be performed very fast, attempting to reach maximum and with long rest periods in between sets. Too often you see athletes trying to do 5 sets of 10 depth jumps with 1 minute of rest in between. This may help develop endurance, but not explosiveness, which is needed to increase vertical or jump higher.

2. Agility Drills, Intervals, and Sprints

One example of an exercise to increase your vertical and lateral agility is what I call the skaters exercise. Not only does it require that you jump as high as you can but you must quickly change directions. Place a cone or some other target about 2 steps away from each other. Stand behind one of the cones with the other to one side. Jump laterally to the other cone and land on one foot. Quickly jump off of the same foot back to the starting cone. The movement will look like an ice speed skater, hence the name.

Since working on muscle explosion is vital for increasing your vertical , sprints and interval are good exercises to do. When you sprint or run as fast as you can, your quick fiber muscles between the hamstrings, quads, and calves are stressed but also developing. Those are the same muscles used to jump higher.

3. Lose Excess Weight

Excess weight does put more stress on your ankles and knees. You will improve your vertical jump by simply reducing the overall fat deposit of your body. This means you may have to change your diet, less “junk” food to healthy alternatives. Basketball players are encouraged to have more muscle than fat because it improves one’s speed, reaction time, and agility on the court. Common sense tells us it will also increase your jumping abilities.

Tags: basketball, exercise, fitness, personal training, recreation, recreation and sports, Sports, track, volleyball

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 7:27 am and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.