You might not be particularly concerned with your vertical jump – it doesn’t adjust your appearance, and it might not be your sport’s #1 success factor.
Vertical jump ability transfers well to everything you want to achieve: strength, power, speed and sports performance.
However, vertical jump ability transfers well to everything you want to achieve: strength, power, speed and sports performance. The vertical jump is more important than you think because it is the best measure of your power.
This is why we love vertical jump training and why training for power and huge hops is going to be the topic of today’s article!
What is the Vertical Jump?
The vertical jump is exactly what it sounds like – you jump upwards. It matters because it’s a test of your lower-body power – both strength and speed. Of course, if you play basketball, association football (soccer), volleyball, or one of many other sports and activities, you’ll probably want to leap higher in the sky!
Moreover, the vertical jump is a big player in testing for sports – you’re going to see it used in a variety of recruitment systems for sports with a high power-demand. American football, sprinting, jumping and other sports highly value the vert jump and what it says about you as an athlete.
Key Factors in a Big Vertical Jump
We’re going to break the vertical jump down in a way that you can use to benefit your own performance, but first, you need to know what is going to be important and necessary before you even get started.
Joint Health
Training for vertical jumps is a bad idea if you’re carrying any injuries in the lower body.
Being a fast, powerful movement, you have to make sure that your joint integrity is up to scratch. IT sounds obvious, but training for vertical jumps is a bad idea if you’re carrying any injuries in the lower body.
Your legs and hips are going to absorb all the shock, and there’s a lot of high-impact training exercise involved in achieving your jump goals. Watch yourself for any risks and make sure you’re healthy before you begin.
If you’re not feeling healthy, or have any doubts, please find a qualified professional to help you get into proper form!
(Remember to do dynamic and static stretching before and after exercising!)
Basic Muscular Strength
Strength may seem obvious, but you’re going to need that strength to perform the movements correctly. Jumping well also relies on joint health but remember that jumping and power, primarily, rely on strength and muscular force.
Having frail, weak hips and knees is a dangerous place to start because the quads and glutes are the ‘prime movers’ for these exercises! If you’re weak then you’re going to need to put together a basis of strength – we’ve put together articles on bodyweight training and strength for the lower body in the past, so check those out for achieving this foundation.
Check your Ego
This one always gets overlooked: finding the proper balance between power and speed training is a hard line to tread. Therefore you’re going to (1) need to commit to lighter weights, and (2) require movement quality to come first. These are about preventing injury and perfecting form, so it’s going to be essential.
Additionally, you’re going to have a genetic upper limit to power output, so it’s important to put yourself in a mindset that’s about maximising what you’ve got rather than competing with other people. Unreasonable expectations will only hamstring your training and make you feel disappointed – even with huge personal progress!
Muscular Balance and Function
The last thing to consider: Power training isn’t where your training should start, and it’s unsuitable if you’re not already sorted in terms of muscular function and balance. If you can’t open your hips effectively, extend your knee, or you have serious issues with balance between these structures you’re going to need to work on these problems first.
Make sure you’re working well and moving effectively before you try and stack power and strength on top of these movements. Otherwise, you’re only going to increase the speed at which you get hurt and broken!
Improving Power Through Strength
If you’ve successfully addressed the issues in the previous section, “Key Factors in Vertical,” move to the next step, strength training.
Strength is the first place to start: it’s the basis for all athletic characteristics from power to speed to endurance. Power is key to the vertical jump – it’s what it tests for – and it’s based on maximum strength.
Basically, the formula you have to use for figuring out your power is simple:
Power = Maximum Force * Rate of Force Production
This is pretty simple – strength is your maximum force, and RoFP is how fast you can get that force out of your muscles. So, strength is the place to start for most people when it comes to power training.
Let’s take an example: you have a maximum force of 100kg and a RoFD of 30% – you can produce 30kg of force in a given time. It’s just going to be easier to double your maximum force to 200kg than it would be to double your RoFD. Simply put, getting stronger is easier than getting faster and it will have as much impact on your jump ability!
Getting Stronger for the Vertical Jump
Start by strengthening the legs and hips. Quads and glutes are the main muscles for jumping. But you also need to strengthen the core and hamstrings to ensure you’re balanced and safe.
You’ll need strong legs, hips, and core to jump well.
Squats are the place to start – they’re a colossal exercise for leg and hip strength and are a tried-and-tested method for improving vertical jump performance. Back squats should make up most of this training (2-3 times a week for most people), though Bulgarian split squats and front squats can be used to target the quads more specifically.
Deadlifts – including Romanian deadlifts – should also be part of this training. They strengthen the glutes, hamstrings, and core more effectively than squats and teach the essential hip-extension that will be necessary to jump powerfully. These two fundamental exercises (deadlifts and squats) can make a huge difference just by themselves!
Practice slow-eccentric paused variations of these exercises. Control the descent portion, pause, and then explode through the extension! Eccentric loading is a great way to boost power. Moving fast on the way up will improve your RoFD by training fast recruitment of muscle fibres.
You can also focus on the specific movement by performing box squats at the bottom of your jump height – just be careful and stay light during these difficult movements.
Power and “ESD”
ESD stands for explosive strength deficit, which means “how fast can you produce a certain amount of force?”. Your muscles use less force to start with and build up when they meet resistance, so you need to learn to produce force quickly – this is what reducing your ESD is.
Step One: Training to Move Fast
Fast, powerful movements make you faster and more powerful. They train rapid muscle contraction and faster output. This means that every exercise should focus on fast extension at the legs and hips (while being controlled).
Step Two: Power Production
Step two is choosing exercises that are good for power production. These exercises exist on a continuum from maximum speed (totally unweighted) to maximum force (heavy weighted movements). Simply put – the more weight you move, the slower you’ll go.
The optimum approach is to train at maximum speed across these. There are roughly 3 key ranges that are going to make up your training:
Maximum Speed (30% of maximum force)
These are exercises like shotput and throws with medicine balls where you’re working with light weights, and you can probably achieve maximum force output in a short time. This is good because it trains your ability to move faster – it’s not limited by weight in the same way that heavy weights are, so you can just focus on moving at maximum speed.
Med ball throws, med ball slams and box jumps are great examples of this type of exercise. They’re easy to understand and perform and don’t place a huge demand on your recovery. They should go at the start and end of your session.
You can also train this sort of power with exercises like hill sprints and sled pushes. Third, to reach that 30% sweet-spot, try incorporating resistance-band exercises and other forms of compensatory resistance (that pushes back the harder you push).
Maximum Power (65-75% of maximum force)
This is where traditional power work happens – between 65 and 75% of a 1RM for an exercise. It’s heavy enough to recruit larger muscle fibres (as in heavy exercise), but it also allows for near-maximum speed, so you’re moving weight rapidly.
Slow-eccentric back squats fit perfectly in this range, as do slow-eccentric deadlifts/Romanian deadlifts. You should also be performing power cleans (ideally off of blocks) at this intensity to produce maximum triple extension force.
Maximum Force
This is something we’ve mentioned above in the strength section, but there are serious benefits to training at maximum or near-maximum force. This starts to work around 85% – it is the point at which force peaks.
As the intensity of an exercise increases, your speed will decrease and, thus, the benefit to your goals. Anything past 92% (roughly) will start to be a bigger drain on your recovery than a gain to power production: there’s no real benefit to moving 5% more weight at 50% the speed!
Focus during this part of training should be singles at maximum speed with the right technique. You’re going to build muscle and power – there’s no reason to push to 100% in training unless you’re competing in the movement you’re training!
Closing Remarks: What’s Best?
We aren’t going to provide you with a full program for vertical jump skills – it depends entirely on your challenge spots and what area of your force/RoFD equation is weakest.
What we can say is that you need to focus on getting stronger and putting that force to use as quickly as possible! You should be focusing on moving big weights, moving fast, and specific speed exercises to help you develop blistering speed.
There are some fantastic coaches out there and if you’re looking to add inches to your vertical jump, applying these principles properly is going to be key. Increasing your vertical jump is a way to focus your training and improve all of your lower body training!
Credits
Man Jumping Over a White Fence by Ady April
Jumping Woman Smiling by Pete Johnson
Women Working Out Jumping by Pexels
Man Jumping on Air Wearing Gray Hoodie by Vijay Putra
Olympic Barbells by Adrian Clark
Skateboarder from Pexels
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