Posts Tagged ‘improve vertical’

Increase Vertical Jumping Today

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

What can you expect by increasing your vertical jumping? 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 power with plyometrics. Plyometrics is a form of weight lifting that requires quick-fiber punches within your body. Our bodies are built on fiber tissues that determine our reflexes by the snap of the fibers. In jumping, the tissues in your body must work in unison to provide a strong spring. Plyometrics training improves the stability and power of your vertical jumping by building those twitch fibers within your legs.

The plyometric exercises typically are quick reactions to resistance like gravity or weights.  It could be simply jumping as high as you can until you can not reach your maximum jump any more.  Some exercises may include jumping over or on top of boxes, then jumping down off them.  With plyometric exercises, it is important that each rep attempt is quick and attempt to achieve the maximum every time.  Along with strength training, plyometrics provides a perfect complement to increase your vertical jump quickly.

2.  Agility Drills, Intervals, and Sprints

Strong jumps require stability, flexibility, and frequency in monitoring the twitch fibers of your legs and core. The core muscles (upper abdominal, lower back, and lower abs) experience a crunch when you have to move into the air. If you’ve ever paid attention to great jumpers, their core muscles are quite tight. They are able to move in a flexible motion by increasing vertical reaction times to jumps.

Sprints and interval are also good exercises in your vertical jump training .  These exercises will improve the reaction time of muscles and help build quick fiber muscles.  Sprints forces your muscle to explode quickly, thus developing the hamstrings, quadriceps and calves used in jumping higher.  Have you ever noticed that many strong jumpers are also fast runners.

3. Decrease Your Body Weight

Common sense tells us that excess weight can make it more challenging to jump higher.  Besides putting extra stress on your ankles and knees, excess fat on your body will weigh you down.  Simply by changing your diet, reducing sugars, and junk food will assist your body in losing the excess fat thus making you seem to “fly” ever higher.  Good nutrition is vital for those desiring to improve vertical and jump higher.

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Learn How To Leap Higher

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

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

The key is learning the role your body type plays. Age, sex, race e.t.c., are not the deciding factors. You need to do an assessment of your own individual reaction to certain exercise routines, as this varies from one person to another. Giving you exercises just 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. These exercises should cycle from Strength to Explosiveness to Plyometrics.

Basic Steps To Get Started

1. Assess your existing strength and your level of experience with prior types of exercise. The most effective way to get gains is to construct a brand new strength platform. After this start utilizing an explosion segment. This will result in even more inches.

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

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

4. Make sure to use a lifting technique in a secure and efficient manner. Undergo 3-5 week strength phases for upper and lower body. Done in the proper manner, visible gains of 5+% on each lift should be seen weekly. Following this, you will start to envision how your jump is bound to increase.

5. Correctly use explosive and plyometric training as well as your strength training. These are your “field workouts” and are completed prior to your weight exercises. That is, on Day 1 you begin by using a series 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 slowly switched to shorter tempo runs, overspeed (downhill) sprints and high-intensity plyos.

6. Emphasis on the heavier weights should fade as you proceed through the phases.

7. Visualization is important - imagine yourself exploding upwards. Picture yourself with large leg muscles that are tightened like springs, prepared to blast you up into the air. Say to yourself “I feel myself getting more strong and much lighter.” After that jump again. You should notice a marked increase in your vertical jump. (Sports psychologists have long recognized the usefulness of “mental practice” in increasing athletic performance.)

To get the most out of your vertical jumping exercises, you ought to consider a vertical jump training program. To get more information on Improving Your Vertical Jump, check out these Vertical Jump Program Reviews to find out which are rated the best.

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Improve Fitness Level Before Starting Vertical Jump Training Exercises

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Before you engage in any vertical jump training program, it is recommended for athletes to achieve a basic fitness level. You can increase your vertical jump drastically only if you do the right exercises and know what you are doing.

Your fitness level can only improve if you overload your body, which is pushing your body beyond what you are already doing. You should have some cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, good nutritious diet, muscle endurance, along with flexibility. After that, you can challenge your body with more advance fitness exercises to increase your vertical. When you reached an adequate fitness level, your will be ready for an intense vertical jump training program.

Training Exercises That Increase Your Fitness Level

1) Cardiovascular (or Aerobic) Exercises

You can achieve cardiovascular endurance thorough regular aerobic exercise, which is a repetitive movement of large muscle groups over an extended period of time. Examples of aerobic exercises include jogging, rope jumping, basketball and swimming.

2) Improve Muscle Strength

By applying resistance to a muscle group, you can increase muscle strength. Lifting weights is a good way of increasing muscle strength. Squats, lunges, calf exercises, are some examples in increasing strength for jumping higher.

3) Boost Muscle Endurance

When the muscle repeats movement over a period of time, muscle endurance is created. Muscle endurance increases in conjunction with muscle strength. With regular exercise, your muscles burn energy more efficiently and endure overloading for longer time. Running long distance for a long period of time is an example for building endurance.

4) Increase Joint Flexibility

Joint flexibility refers to the range of motions (ROM) the joint can undergo as limited by the joint’s structure and surrounding connective tissues. Warming up and then stretching your calves, hamstring and quad muscles are important activity in preventing injuries and increasing your fitness level. Joint flexibility can also give dramatic increases in vertical leap height.

5) Proper Nutritious Diet

A good healthy diet promotes faster recovery and is important for your body to repair itself. Avoid eating junk food or sugars, and make sure you diet includes protein, good carbs and fats, along with vitamins. Drinking plenty of water will also enhance your growth and ability to handle an increase load of exercises.

6) Reduce Your Body Fat

If your body fat index is less than 10%, you can increase your potential in jumping higher. You need to concentrate on building muscle and limit your caloric intake. A nutritionalist will be able to design the proper diet that makes sense for you specific needs. Vigorous exercises like running will also help you to lose those extra pounds and condition your lungs.

Remember, obtaining a good fitness level is the start of your jumping higher program. After that, you can begin to do exercises to increase your vertical explosion. Plyometric exercises, along with the previous steps, will help you jump higher. Plyometric training develop quick twitch muscle fibers needed to increase your vertical. Many athletes omit these exercises, resulting in them not drastically increasing their vertical jump.

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Increase Your Vertical Jump With Plyometric Training

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Plyometric training can give you an enormous edge over your competitors. Plyometric training programs are effective for increasing your speed and explosiveness in movement. Plyometrics is gaining popularity because of the tremendous benefits for both the competitive and non competitive athlete. For those interested in increasing their vertical jump, plyometric exercises is a must.

Plyometric training is simply exercises involving jumping in order to enhance certain muscle developments of speed and explosiveness. Even though jumping does help strengthen your legs muscles, there are other factors needed to increase vertical jump abilities. Besides the legs, the rest of your body also need to be challenged to enhance the full body workout. Thats why plyometric exercises are necessary to get the full benefit in jumping higher.

Plyometric exercises focuses on the development of explosive movements in order to develop muscular power and quickness. Most plyometric training programs are intense and not for those people out of shape or beginners. So even though plyometrics are not used by the novice athlete, the competitive athlete will discover tremendous benefits and enhancements to their physical attributes.

There are a variety of plyometric exercises you can do. Jumping on and off a chair can be a very simple exercise. Plyometric boxes can be purchased as a tool to be used in different exercises of jumping onto, off, or over those objects. As the athlete works on with every rep going at maximum, the highest you can jump or the quickest you can go, this will develop other muscles used to jump higher. Strength along with quickness will enhance explosiveness, helping the athlete jump higher.

Depending on your goal or your physical abilities, you can adjust you plyometric exercise workout. For the novice athlete, perhaps the number of reps are less and with less intensity. But to fully benefit from plyometric training, each rep should be done with intensity and at the maximum effort.

To help ensure your plyometric training is safe and effective, it is important to listen to your body. If you are in pain or your knees become achy, take a break. Allow time for your body to recuperate and do not over do it especially if you are just starting out.

Plyometrics is one of the keys in learning how to jump higher. Practice these tips, and you will increase your vertical jump drastically.

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Increase Vertical Jump

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

Initiatives Necessary Before You Start Your Increase Vertical Jump Training

These three steps are necessary before you attempt to start your training exercises to increase your vertical jump. One, set challenging but realistic goals, two, construct a workout plan, and three, Do the workout you have planned. This will be a great start in order to see improvement or real change in your vertical jumping.

Lay out Pragmatic Ambitious and Measurable Goals

When you set your goals, they need to be specific, measurable, realistic and challenging. For some, this might be a reasonable goal. When setting goals, keep in mind your current fitness level, and how much time you are willing to spend in training. Example: I want to increase my vertical jump by 10″ in twelve weeks. As you can see, this is specific, the progress can be measured, and could be both realistic and challenging for some athletes. Some athletes who have a good fitness level might set a more challenging goal like doubling their vertical in 10 weeks. Some poor examples might be: I want to jump higher, I want to slam dunk a basketball. Even though slam-dunking is great incentive to keep training, it is better to set specific and measurable goals.

For example, if you know you are 9″ from touching the rim, your goal should be increasing your vertical by 14″ to insure you will be able to dunk. You can measure this progress, and reaching this goal results in dunking.

Design A Workout Plan

If you fail to plan, plan to fail. Those who are successful in all walks of life have this in common, they write out a plan on what they want to accomplish. In order to keep focused on your plan, it should be written down and reviewed regularly.

Implement Your Created Plan

Once you have a goal and have created a workout plan then ALL you need to do is Do it! Eliminate all excuses, sacrifice, and get an accountability partner. Change is never easy, but when you accomplish your goals, it will be worth it!

For best results, keep track of your initial performance, workout statistics and on-going performance. With this information you can make the decision to alter your plan to make it easier or harder based on your initial goal constraints and how you are coming along in accomplishing it.

I hope you realize the importance of setting goals, writing them down, making a plan, and then taking action until you reach your goals. For those in a position to take it to the next level and drastically increase their vertical, go to Jump Manual, an online vertical training program.

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