Vertical Jump FAQBy Kelly BaggettFor www.EliteFTS.comThis article originally appeared at Higher Faster Sports.com. To view the original article, visit http://www.higher-faster-sports.com/verticaljumpfaq.html.
What are the most essential qualities of a high vertical jumper? Horsepower and movement efficiency. Strength per pound of body weight is the horsepower. Movement efficiency is how well you can carry out a movement. Put those two things together, and they determine the height that you jump. You need to be able to put out a lot of force relative to your body weight. In other words, you need strong legs! Your body structure influences how efficiently force gets transferred into the ground. Movement efficiency has to do with your coordination and ability to carry out a movement optimally. In the case of the vertical jump, it’s mainly impacted by body fat and coordination with your feet. Imagine trying to jump with a 50 pound tub of lard strapped to your back and you can see how extra fat would negatively affect your vertical jump. On the “feet” end, many people lack coordination in their feet and wear shoes that are too big and cumbersome for them to ever get light on their feet. What is natural strength? Some people have a build characterized by long Achilles tendons, long thigh bones, and high muscle attachment points that allow them to transfer force very efficiently. So for each unit of force they develop, they’ll be able to transfer much of that into the ground. This is how guys like Allen Iverson can jump well even though they’ve never seen a squat rack in their life. If you don’t have that great natural body structure (and most people don’t), you’re going to have to make up for it by increasing your strength. Simple enough. There are some skinny guys who can jump very well without being strong in the traditional sense. However, you won’t find anyone with a 35-inch plus vertical jump who doesn’t have a lot of “natural” strength. By natural strength, I mean that if you find someone with a naturally high vertical jump, they always have a natural ability to create force. Even if they don’t strength train, you can take them in the gym, teach them how to squat, and within a week, they will be squatting over 1.5 times their body weight. I have yet to see any exceptions to that rule. If you don’t have that strength naturally, you’re going to have to train to get it. My friends Billy Joe and Jack squat 350 pounds, but I jump 12 inches higher than them. What’s going on here? You can’t make comparisons like that with any accuracy. Muscle and tendon length, bone length, muscle attachments, endocrine, and neural characteristics all influence the ability to leverage force. Improve your qualities and let everything else fall where it will. Don’t try to compare yourself to others. What is the minimum amount of strength that I need? Before I tell you how much strength you need, do this so that I can make a point. Go in the gym and grab two fifteen pound dumbbells. Lay on a bench and bench press them 100 times. Now stand up and do 100 half squats with your body weight. Which is harder? The squats are probably harder, right? That means it takes more strength to do a half squat with your body weight than it does to lie on your back and press 15 pounds. Now realize that a shot put also weighs about 15 pounds. What is a shot put? It’s basically a press where you throw the weight. What is a vertical jump? That’s basically a half-squat where you “throw” your body into the air. The 15 pounds sounds really light until you think about throwing the weight. Let’s figure out how much strength it takes to be a good shot putter. The routines of top shot putters contain a fair mix of both explosive and strength oriented training. However, on the strength end, you won’t find any who don’t bench press over 400 pounds. The large majority of them will bench press over 500 pounds. Through real world observation, it has been established that there is no such thing as a top shot putter who bench presses less than 400 pounds. We’ve also established that squatting and “throwing” your body weight into the air requires more strength relatively speaking than throwing a 15 pound shot put. So, if a shot putter benches a minimum of 400 pounds, what does that tell you about how strong our legs should be for jumping? It tells me that they need to be quite strong. Just as you will never see a good shot putter who can’t bench press 400 pounds, you’ll never see a good vertical jumper who doesn’t have strong legs. In fact, I have a $500 bounty for the first person who can show me someone with a legit 35-inch vertical jump who can’t squat one and a half times their body weight within a week of learning the movement. I could probably crank that up to two times their body weight and I doubt I would lose. Does that mean that just because someone can bench press 700 pounds, they’ll be able to throw the shot put a mile? Or does that mean that just because so and so has a 500-pound squat, they'll be able to jump out of the gym? No. There is technique and movement efficiency involved in both shot putting and jumping. It does tell me though that if you’re weaker than a kitten, you’re completely wasting your time with plyometric work until you’ve built a base of strength. Once you have your base of strength, you’ll get the best results in the vertical jump, jumping related tasks, and explosive training. I heard that it isn’t good to squat because deceleration occurs at the top of the squat but not in the vertical jump. Keep in mind that when using exercises like the squat we’re not trying to duplicate the exact execution of the vertical jump. We’re just trying to strengthen the muscles involved. That’s also why a deeper squat is better than a quarter or half squat. It strengthens more muscles. By that line of logic, we shouldn’t walk either because there is deceleration that occurs with each stride. The body and brain are smart enough to differentiate between various movements. What about deadlifts? Are they good exercises? Yes, the deadlift is an excellent exercise. My only hesitation in ranking it equal to the squat is that it is possible to deadlift a significant amount of weight without using the lower body at all. A proper deadlift is an excellent exercise. How important are the calves for jumping? The calves aren’t very important. Try this. Stand on a stair step and let your ankles hang down. Without bending your knees, try to hop up onto the next step. Did you make it? You probably didn’t. That’s because the calves don’t contribute much to the jump. Your butt and thighs give you the power. The calves simply help transfer that power into the ground. Having said that, many people do have a problem with what appears to be weak calves because when they move they struggle to stay in optimal power position. They move back on their heels and have a hard time staying up on the balls of their feet. Their problem isn’t really weak calves. It’s a lack of coordination in the feet. Exercises designed to improve movement efficiency will improve this. How do I determine whether I have a good enough base of strength? In order to meet my minimum requirements, you must be able to do one of the following: 1. Squat one and a half times your body weight to legal powerlifting depth hip breaking parallel. 2. Perform five body weight pistol squats. Once you’ve met either of those tasks, your training can be more focused in either the strength area or the speed area. Initially, you can bring both your strength and speed/plyometric ability up at the same time, but eventually, you reach a point where you’ll need a bit more focus in a given area. Just like some shot putters need a bigger bench press to increase their shot put while others need to get faster applying their strength to the shot put (i.e. get more explosive), some vertical jumpers need more work on their strength base while others need more work on the speed that they apply that strength to their jump. Here are a couple of tests that will help determine that. A: Measure your regular down and up vertical jump. Next, get a box about 18 inches high and perform a rebound jump where you step off of the box, hit the ground, and jump straight up. If the jump from the box is higher, you’re most likely fast enough and could benefit more from increasing your strength base. If the jump with the box is lower, you could probably stand to work more on explosive oriented (plyometric) training. B: Stand in one place and perform five consecutive vertical jumps jumping as high as possible with each jump. Those with highly developed speed (plyometric) qualities will usually find that the height of the last four jumps is at least the same or higher than the height of the first jump. So they would want to focus more on strength while the group that struggled jumping on the “bounce” would want to focus more on speed oriented training. I heard that I need to squat faster with light weights to improve power production for vertical jumping. I also heard that lifting heavy weights will make me slow? Until you have a really good base of strength in place, you will get faster with light weights by increasing the poundage on your max lifts. Let me explain. Let’s say that we take someone with a 150-pound bench press who wants to be a great shot putter. Someone tells him that he can be an Olympic caliber thrower if he just practices being very explosive with light weights. So he trains by putting 100 pounds on the bar and does sets of five as fast as he can. What is going to happen when he goes out and throws against 400-pound bench pressers who can throw 300 pounds around as fast as he can throw 100? He’s going to get his ass kicked. That’s what’s going to happen. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that the guy who can throw around 100 pounds the fastest will have a superior vertical jump. Who is going to throw around 100 pounds faster—the guy with a max squat of 135 pounds or the guy with a max squat of 300 pounds? Definitely the guy with the 300 pound squat. However, if we were to compare a 600-pound squatter to an 800-pound squatter in the same task, the answer may not be so clear cut. Unless you’re already stronger than an ox, the fastest way to improve your ability to lift light weights is to increase your maxes. The best way to do that is to lift fairly heavy with reps between one and ten with weights between 70% and 100% of your one rep max. Lifting light loads won’t improve max strength. When lifting heavy weights, the load may not move that fast. However, it doesn’t need to move that fast. As for heavy weights making you slow, this is only true for those who carry strength training to the extreme. Even then, it’s not the strength or heavy weight that creates slowness. It’s the excessive muscular body weight that can develop. To verify this, take a look at Olympic weightlifters. Their entire sport is based on lifting heavy weights, yet they have the best vertical jumps of all athletes and are as fast as sprinters out to 30 meters. Sometimes, people mistakenly assume that strength training with heavy weights makes one slow because it can create a temporary state of fatigue and soreness in the muscles. That fatigue will sometimes temporarily “mask” explosiveness. The solution to that is very simple. Take some occasional down time and let that fatigue dissipate. Is plyometric training a waste of time for someone who doesn’t have a base of strength? Plyometric training works by boosting two things—the ability to move efficiently and the ability to display strength more rapidly. In someone without a base of strength and with a lack of coordination, it may help slightly to improve the ability to move efficiently. However, it won’t do anything to help rapidly express strength that you don’t have. How long does it take to see real results once I begin training? Beginners can see results in less than a week. A highly advanced athlete might require 6–8 weeks. Have you checked out any of the other jumping programs? What is different about your philosophy? There’s a lot of hype and gimmicks out there and many people just making stuff up. The problem is that as far as athletes go, on average basketball players have inferior jumps compared to other athletes like track and field athletes, volleyball players, Olympic weightlifters, football players, and even shot putters. The average NBA player might have a 30-inch vertical jump, but the average 250-pound NFL linebacker (who really has no desire to jump) has a 38-inch vertical. The world record standing broad jump is held by a shot putter weighing close to 300 pounds! Everybody wants to follow programs written for basketball players. However, as a whole, they don’t work. If you want to know how to jump high, look at the commonalities between the athletes who actually have had success boosting their vertical jump. There are many different ways to get to the same end result, but the principles never change. Anybody who ever increased their vertical jump did so because they boosted either the force behind the movement (consisting of strength plus the ability to rapidly display that strength) or the efficiency of the movement. That’s regardless of whether they trained with platform shoes, rubber bands, weighted vests, weights, or whatever. Instead of haphazardly engaging in various training methods and maybe getting lucky and impacting one of those qualities, why don’t we start with the end result? Then we can work backward and find the quickest way to our end goals. So what if we ask ourselves, what is the quickest direct way to improve the coordination in the vertical jump? What is the quickest way to improve the maximum force production in the vertical jump? What is the quickest way to improve the ability to rapidly display that force? The answer to any of those questions isn’t difficult. For example, let’s take the case of improving maximum force potential. Some would have you believe they’ve invented some new age gimmick or training technique that is the end all and be all to develop that quality. However, we should look at a sport where the ENTIRE SPORT is based on who can develop the most force. What sport is that? Powerlifting! If such and such gimmick was so effective for force production, why aren’t any top powerlifters using it? Now, how about taking the short line approach toward improving the rapid display of force? If something is really a miracle for increasing this quality, why isn’t it being used by Olympic athletes like high jumpers, triple jumpers, sprinters, and long jumpers? There is no shortage of information on this. Through over fifty years of research and observation, it’s quite clear that the most potent training methods to improve the rapid display of force are variations of the following: 1. Most important: Practice the specific movement (jump if you’re a jumper, sprint if you’re a sprinter). 2. Lift light weights with great acceleration (use jumps squats and other various explosive lifts). 3. Engage in plyometric “shock” training (i.e. depth jumps). Numbers two and three are frequently not even necessary. Are there any secrets here? No! So basically we can just put those things together and take the shortest path toward reaching our goals. So and so (insert coach's name here) says that they have come up with a new cutting edge system called (insert system name here) that promises to give me a 50-inch vertical jump in 100 days. Which is more likely—some 20-year-old dude has with a professional client list of 100s and has miraculously discovered a bunch of top secrets for vertical jumping or some internet marketer thought he could make a buck so he decided to pass himself off as an expert and make up a bunch of BS? Ever notice how these “gurus” always claim to be the secret coach to hundreds of elite level athletes yet they never can tell you who these athletes are? I have yet to hear of a professional athlete who has any problem telling anyone who their coach is. If a coach helps an athlete, athletes by and large want to help their coach out by spreading the word. In fact, name me one top level professional athlete and in a day or less I can probably tell you who their coach is. What are some tips to help improve my vertical leap right away? The day you’ll be satisfied with your vertical jump is the day you have the strength to squat two times your body weight at under 10% body fat while having the movement efficiency to jump back and forth over a knee high cone or string 20 times in ten seconds. If you wear regular basketball shoes, stop wearing them and get a pair of Nike Frees to train in. If you're over 10% body fat, clean up your diet and drop some fat. If you have a tape measure, you can measure your waist and get a pretty accurate estimation as to how fat you are with this formula: body fat calculator. What type of training split should I follow? Either read my Vertical Jump Manual and follow any of the routines from there or follow these generic recommendations. If you’re a beginner with no strength training background, see www.higher-faster-sports.com/singlelegpower.html or use the following. You should alternate between the two workouts for a total of 2–4 training days per week. Session A: Prior to your workout, choose one performance oriented exercise and one movement efficiency exercise. With the performance exercise, you’ll be performing movements that you can easily monitor for progress. These include measured vertical jumps, timed sprints, jumps onto a high box, and broad jumps. For these, choose a movement and keep doing sets until your performance starts to decline. Take your time between each effort. You should generally do 3–8 sets. Then move on, choose a movement efficiency exercise, and do the same thing. Performance movements
Movement efficiency/potentiation movements
Strength training
Session B: Pick again from the above list of movements and performance exercises and perform one of each prior to your workout. Strength training
If you are an in-season athlete, use the following. Day one:
Day two:
Day three
For everyone else, use the ultimate split and gear it toward either strength development or explosive development, depending on the area where you need more focus. What are some of the biggest mistakes people make when training for an increased vertical leap? By far the biggest mistake is lack of recovery and too much plyometric volume. The reason for this is really three-fold. 1. Most of the sports involving lots of jumping inherently involve excessive amounts of activity. A perfect example is basketball. The average basketball player runs over five miles during the course of a game and jumps hundreds of times. Would you take a sprinter and make him run marathons as part of his training? Most basketball players play multiple times a week year round. This volume of training has a negative influence on the capacity to display bouts of extreme fast twitch characteristics like jumping or sprinting short distances. 2. Most of the individuals who lean toward jumping oriented sports tend to have less than optimal ability to recover. What type of athlete plays football? The natural mesomorph (muscular individual) usually plays football. What type of individual leans toward basketball or volleyball? The natural ectomorph (skinny and frail individual) usually plays these sports. Through years of practical observation, it is known that most ectomorphs inherently struggle to make gains in speed, strength, power, and muscle size. They also have a reduced capacity to tolerate large volumes of activity. 3. Most of the information on the market promotes large volumes of plyometric work. Most of these individuals are already getting much plyometric work through their sport. This ultimately means that they end up focusing 90% of their training in an area where they should be only focusing 10%. Along the same lines, there are a substantial number of people who have the exact opposite problem. Instead of training with too much volume, too much conditioning, and too much plyometric work, they do the exact opposite. They focus all of their time and energy on strength work yet have no conditioning or movement efficiency and their body fat is too high. This is the type of cat you usually hear say something like, “Well, I put 100 pounds on my squat but I can’t jump any higher now than I did.” What they fail to mention is that they piled on 20 pounds of body fat and never spent a single second playing any sports or carrying out any movement drills. Do any of those other gimmicks like jump soles and rubber bands work? They might work but only for this reason. Let’s say I take a group of fat people and give them a fake magic pill. I tell them that the pill will make them lose 25 pounds in three months. I then take them out and run them five miles each and every day. Three months later, all of them have lost 25 pounds. Was the pill responsible for the weight loss? No. They lost weight because they got up off of their butt and exercised. All training gimmicks work the same way. All of them have workouts that you have to do along with the gimmick. Doing anything is better than doing nothing. How important are things like hyperplasia and fast twitch muscles? Hyperplasia (the creation of new fibers) is of no relevance because the protein content (or size) of a muscle cell (not muscle) determines how much force that cell produces. Add up the total amount of protein in all cells and that determines the maximal potential force production. For example, let’s take two people. They each have ten muscle fibers of the same size. Person A doubles the amount of fibers he has so that he has twenty. Person B doubles the size of the ten that he has. What will the difference in force production be? There will be none whatsoever. Fast twitch content is important because fast twitch fibers reach maximum tension quicker. So the more fast twitch muscles you have, the more force you will be able to generate in a rapid movement. However, it’s only really important from a starting point. Let me explain. Let’s say your thighs measure 20 inches around, and the muscle fiber distribution in them is 50% fast twitch and 50% slow twitch. This means that of the total 20 inches of muscle in your thigh, half is slow twitch and half is fast twitch. Let’s say your best friend Jack has thighs that measure 20 inches around, and he’s 75% fast twitch and 25% slow twitch. Even though you both have the same size thighs, Jack is likely to have an advantage in power, speed, and strength over you. You’re more likely to be geared toward marathon running. So how can you increase your fast twitch content to that of Jack’s? Well, which muscle fiber type gets targeted with resistance training? The fast twitch fibers are targeted. This means that when you increase your muscle size through weight training it is the fast twitch muscles that increase in size. So let’s say you resistance train your way to 30-inch thighs. In going from 20 inches to 30 inches, the size of your existing fast twitch fibers doubled or even tripled. Even though the total “number” of fibers in your thighs may not change, the total distribution in your thigh is 75% fast twitch and 25% slow twitch. You were able to double or triple the size of your existing fast twitch fibers. Now you will be geared more toward functioning like an explosive athlete. How important is flexibility training? Khadour Zhiani says that all he does is flexibility training. A minimum level of flexibility is necessary, but too much is just as bad as too little. As for Khadour Zhiani, see the above description of the guy with 20-inch legs and a 75% fast twitch ratio. If you couple that with 5% body fat and a perfect bone and tendon structure, you could get results sitting on your ass playing video games. How important is nutrition for gains in the vertical jump? What type of nutrition plan do you think guys like Vince Carter, Michael Jordan, Spud Webb, or (insert whomever you want here) follow? Most good athletes eat copious amounts of food. Usually a significant portion of that food is made up of items that aren’t necessarily super clean. After all, McDonalds was the fare of choice in the last Olympic Games. From a performance perspective, it’s important that you get enough of the basic macronutrients—protein and carbohydrates. As the above example should illustrate, where you get those macronutrients isn’t really important, at least not in the short term. KFC or chicken breast? Thirty years down the road there might be a negative impact, but in the short term, the body can run off anything. However, when it comes to making changes in your body’s composition (losing fat or gaining muscle), what you eat is more important for the following reasons: 1. Losing fat is mostly about reducing calorie intake. The problem with most standard diets is that it’s very easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and thus easier to put on and/or lose fat. Which is harder to overeat—apples or Pop Tarts? Additionally, it’s difficult to drop calories and stay somewhat full when your diet is made up of Pop Tarts, sodas, children’s sugary cereal, and Big Macs. 2. Gaining lean muscle mass without piling on an excessive amount of fat requires a good protein to calorie ratio. The average diet is terrible in this regard. I like a protein intake of 1–1.5 grams per pound of body weight. For example, take a 150-pound athlete trying to consume a gram of protein per pound of body weight. The standard American diet is about 15% protein. This means that if the athlete took in 3000 calories, he’d be getting 110 grams of protein. The protein to calorie ratio is too low. At 3000 calories, he should easily be able to get in 200 grams of protein. I usually tell people to make a gradual change toward a better diet. Try to eat more of the things you can shoot or grow and try to consume less of the things that are in a box or processed. I suggest a gradual change because what often happens is a young person starts reading about nutrition and suddenly thinks that they have to have a perfect diet. So someone who is used to eating children’s cereal, Pop Tarts, fast food, McDonalds, or KFC gets on an ultra strict plan. Now all that he’s eating are egg whites, oatmeal, chicken breast, salads, potatoes, and broccoli. What’s going to happen? Nine times out of ten he won’t get enough to eat and will feel like crap within a week. Strength and performance loss will soon follow. The inevitable binge is the result. So instead of making wholesale overnight changes in your diet, I suggest that you make gradual change to more of a natural diet. Most young people who need to lose weight can drop all the fat they need just by cutting back on what I call the “Cs”—Cokes, candies, cakes, crackers, cereal, and ice (c)ream. What about post-workout recovery drinks? Is there really a window when the body can absorb more nutrients, and can they really impact recovery that much? There is a period post-workout when the body can make use of more nutrients, but it has really been overblown by supplement companies. As long as you take in protein and carbs within a couple of hours after your workout, it really doesn’t matter if you get them through a drink or food. Consuming 30–50 grams of protein and 50–100 grams of carbohydrates is about right. Drinks can be convenient particularly if you’re not hungry afterward. However, I recommend that you take in the bulk of your nutrition through real food. As for post-workout nutrition and the belief that taking in certain nutrients or drinks will allow your muscles to recover faster so that you can train more often, this is also overblown. Whenever you train, you deplete muscle glycogen (carbohydrate) stores. Having full glycogen stores means that your muscles have the energy required to fuel intense contractions. Depleted glycogen stores make you weak. A 200-pound man probably has about 500 grams of glycogen stored throughout his entire body. Even if all of those stores were depleted, they can be increased with one day of high carbohydrate eating. The questions are: A. How much glycogen is depleted through “normal” workouts? B. How long does it take to restore glycogen stores from normal workouts? C. Are glycogen depletion and repletion the limiting factors from a recovery standpoint? A typical workout might deplete 50–100 grams of glycogen. A marathon might deplete 500 grams. Most likely your workouts are more “typical” than that of a marathon runner. If a marathon runner can refill 500 grams of depleted glycogen stores in 24 hours, how long do you think it will take you to restore 50–100 grams? One hour? Two hours? Four hours? The point is that the ability to restore depleted glycogen stores between workouts isn’t much of a limiting factor. So why is it difficult to train and perform at 100% day after day after day? Things like micro-trauma (muscle damage) and nervous system fatigue induced from your workouts are more limiting from a recovery standpoint than repletion of glycogen stores (which is what supplement companies focus on). The damage inflicted to your muscles during your workouts is the reason why it’s hard to repeat balls to the wall workouts one day after the next. Your muscles need time to repair themselves. The best thing you can do to ensure proper muscular repair and neural recovery are: 1. Get enough sleep. 2. Eat adequate calories. 3. Make sure you rest long enough in between workouts. There are a few other things you can do like using saunas, contrast showers, and ice baths. These can help improve recovery to a minimal extent, but rest is by far the most important thing. The typical recommendation is 7–8 hours of sleep per night and enough recovery time between workouts so that you can note progress in some fashion most of the time when you repeat a particular workout. If you’re not strong in a workout, you most likely haven’t recovered. What about Olympic lifts? Olympic lifters always jump very high, and rumor has it the lifts are excellent for vertical jump development. Olympic lifters jump high because they’re strong and explosive. The Olympic lifts don’t do anything special, but, like plyometrics, jump squats, and other explosive oriented movements, they can help an athlete more quickly express the strength that they already have. In my set up, the Olympic lifts can be used as an exercise choice if an explosive oriented movement is needed. There is nothing inherently special about them, but they are an effective tool. |
