How to Jump Higher

Now that you have blazing speed courtesy of our article on training the 40 yard dash, it’s time to learn how to jump higher. Playing football and then running D1 track meant that training my vertical jump wasn’t really a priority for me, but I was still able to attain a somewhat respectable 35 inch vertical jump using the techniques I’m going to tell you below. If you want to learn how to jump higher from a true expert I suggest you check out our review of Vert Shock.

If you are looking for instant results for upcoming testing check out our free vertical jump guide that will teach you how to use PAP and some other strategies to boost your vertical jump 2-4 inches within minutes.

Understanding The Vertical Jump

Learning how to jump higher is a lot simpler than most people make it. What it really comes down to for standing vertical jump is only two factors

1. Strength to body weight ratio
2. Rate Force Development

Running vertical jump is slightly more complicated because there is much more technique involved as well as other factors like muscle reactivity and muscle insertions. I’m going to ignore those in this article and focus on the best techniques to see the fastest improvement in your vertical jump. If you want to dive into the deep end of vertical jump training consider Vert Shock, you can see our review here.

 Training Vertical Jump

Strength

The first thing you’re going to want to do to jump higher is get stronger. A vertical jump is simply us against gravity. Gravity is constant so the more force we can put out relative to our body weight the higher we will jump. The whole body is involved in jumping, so no body part can be fully ignored.

A good metaphor for vertical jump training is a car. Think of your arms and legs as the engine and your core as the tires. If you have a big engine (lots of strength) it won’t matter if you have flat tires (a weak core), and vice versa.

Some of the best exercises for training vertical jump are

1. Squats
2. Straight leg deadlifts
3. Bench Press

These exercises are all compound lifts that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Check out our 10 favorite exercises for increasing vertical jump.

Rate Force Development

Now that you have the strength, you also need to be able to exert that strength quickly so that you can take advantage of this strength. To do this you want to do plyometrics and sprinting exercises with maximum intensity. This will train your CNS to fire your muscles faster and with more force. The majority of athletes don’t perform these exercises correctly and thus don’t see the massive gains possible through proper periodization and recovery.

Quality is always greater than quantity in both effort and execution with these exercises. The best bet for success is to find 2 or 3 exercises that you like and making sure that you are perfect at them, rather than switching between many and being average at all of them.

Our recommended plyometrics

1. Box Jumps
2. Standing single leg triple jumps
3. 10-20 yard sprints
4. Depth Jumps

A good workout will generally have between 60-80 ground contacts for plyometrics like the ones above or 300-500 yards of sprints. For exact workouts check our Ebook The Athlete Blueprint.

Conclusion

Contrary to popular opinion, achieving a respectable vertical jump isn’t rocket science. Everybody follows the laws o physics, so never let anybody tell you what possible or not. If you put in the work and follow sound training principles you will see results.

If you learned something from this article I would love it if you shared it on social media so that somebody else can too!