How To Increase Your Vertical Jump

You want to know the single best indicator for how great of an athlete you are; the vertical jump. The vertical jump is the best indicator of athletic ability due to it relying so heavily on strength and explosive abilities. If you are not strong, you will not jump well. If you are not explosive, you will not jump as well. That is the very basic formula for jumping high; getting strong and explosive.

So now that you know what you need in order to jump high, well now you need to know what you need to do. The first thing and the most important thing, is to get strong, very strong. I am not talking about strong enough to consider yourself fit, I mean strong enough to the point where when you lift, everyone in the gym is watching you as the weight is enormous. Becoming very strong is a priority and if you think that you are going to increase your vertical jump not training to get stronger, then you might as well give up now.

The exercises that I like to use for the vertical jump includes: squats, deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, lunges, step ups, calf raises, and glute-ham raises. There are many variations of the listed exercises, and that is why they are very valuable as you have the freedom to use variations of the lifts to keep gaining strength.

I advise that every athlete become very strong in both the upper body and the lower body, but that is not a must. The vertical jump relies primarily on the lower body, mainly the quadriceps, but there is a small contributing amount from the upper body. In order to get strong enough to jump high, I recommend that an athlete includes both bilateral and unilateral lifts. Many athletes seem to think that the squat is the only way to jump higher, but only doing bilateral lifts is sure to lead to an injury; the single leg lifts are just as important as the double legged ones.

The next aspect of obtaining a high vertical jump is to become very explosive and reactive. This is done primarily through plyometrics. Plyometrics are commonly confused with power training exercises. An example of this includes box jumps. Box jumps are a fine exercise, but they should not be confused with plyometrics. What constitutes as a plyometric exercise is that the movement has a very fast loading phase that is quickly followed by a powerful contraction. Without both of those events occurring, the exercise is not plyometric.

This was a very brief article that didn’t have much depth but hopefully opened your eyes to what it truly takes to increase your vertical jump. Eventually I go a lot more in-depth with each variable that makes up vertical jump training, but for know this article does a good jump of just opening your eyes to how the vertical jump is truly trained. There is no ‘quick fix’ or ‘magic bullet’; it takes tons of hard work and dedication to truly increase your vertical jump.