By now you should have a solid understanding of what the ultimate leg workout for increasing your vertical jump should look like. All the time I see people asking questions like, how many calf raises should I do to increase my vertical jump? Leg Workouts You Can Do at Home to Help With Jumping, Squat Vs. Deadlift for Hamstring & Glute Power, Leg Gym Workout Routines for Women for Muscle Growth, Brian Mac Sports Coach: Movement Analysis, Coaches Education: Sample Long/Triple Jumper's Workout, List of Exercises for the Plyometrics P90X.
The barbell push press provides similar results. Youre able to efficiently utilize the strength you do have when jumping. However what you can do is marry strength and speed work together using post-activation potentiation.
Its fine if we ignore the aspect of specificity a little bit when training purely for strength. Hold a pair of dumbbells while performing calf raises to strengthen the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles in your calves. In the power workouts theres less of a focus on tapering volume and increasing intensity over time as there is in the strength phase. Basically theyre the marrying together of pure strength and pure plyometric exercises into a hybrid. These are similar to plyometric movements except with a relatively light load and the goal should be to move said load as explosively as possible. Before you set foot in the gym, below are six of the most important vertical jump training principles you absolutely have to understand. Now you should have a rough idea of what a strength, plyometric, and power focused workout will look like. The first workout in this section will be more of a power focused routine and the second workout will be geared more towards pure explosiveness. We still want to increase weight gradually but staying around the listed rep ranges is best. Rest as long as you need to between each rep, at least five seconds. And power = a bigger vertical. Squat as you normally would if you're holding dumbbells -- don't squat quite as deeply as normal when you do barbell jump squats -- then jump straight up as explosively as you can without locking your knees. most important vertical jump training principles, Smith Machine Bulgarian Split Quarter Squat, post-activation potentiation in the vertical jump. Additionally, University of California-Riverside track coach Ed Luna recommends that horizontal jumpers perform stepups and heel raises while holding a pair of dumbbells. If there's one go-to exercise to improve your jumping, it's the squat, which targets your quadriceps and gluteus maximus muscles. You can train each of these aspects individually or at the same time, but you need both strength and speed (speed well often refer to as rate of force development) to increase your vertical. If youre playing a sport like basketball or volleyball, its important to plan ahead when it comes to periodization. The vertical jump can be broken down into its strength component and its speed components. Be sure to do some plyometrics on your day off, or if you want to you can add in a few sets of plyometrics after your warm up before you begin your primary strength work. Rose holds a B.A. Best Leg Workout To Increase Vertical Jump, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26439782/. These exercises arent going to develop strength a whole lot, but theyll enable you to generate force more quickly and efficiently. Ive given three examples of different vertical jump leg workouts each with a slightly different training focus. Does Foam Rolling Increase Vertical Jump? Periodization for the vertical jump will typically look like the following. Let me give you a couple of example workouts. Perform a low-rep, high-weight version with a barbell across the back of your shoulders.
Know when your season starts, when the important tournaments are, how long you have during the off-season, etc.
This is where specificity is king. Whats important is that you focus your time and energy on the quads and glutes which contribute the vast majority of the force generated in a vertical jump. Your focus should be on getting stronger. Typically it takes about a third of the volume you used to make the gains to maintain them.
Its really not so important. Thats not to suggest that these exercises are useless or dont have a place, but that certain movements simply carry over to the vertical jump better than others because of the way they mimic triple extension. Once this stuff makes sense to you, youll have a much better idea of what youre trying to accomplish when it comes time to actually perform your workout. This doesnt mean completely ignoring the other aspects of training, but youre simply looking to maintain those areas as well as you can while actively progressing on the focus area. For more info on how you can leverage this temporary increase in performance to instantly jump higher, which is ideal for testing your vertical, check out my full article on post-activation potentiation in the vertical jump.
Power training could also fall into the category of rate of force development. If youre skinny and have barely set foot in a weight room, but have amazing natural springiness, you have a low ESD. Depending on how advanced you are as an athlete and what sport you play and at what level, you may want to experiment with the idea of periodization. Do straight-leg deadlifts to target your hamstrings. Do Boxers Do Mostly Pushups for Their Upper Body. In todays article were going to look at a couple of the best leg workouts you can do to increase your vertical jump. Begin as you would for a standard squat, with a barbell across the back of your shoulders, or a dumbbell in each hand with your palms facing your body. These exercises are all pure bodyweight exercises and are designed to be completed as explosively as possible. Training periodization is essentially just scheduling your training into different focus periods for a given duration. So if I was doing 12 sets of back squats per week during my strength phase, when I move onto the power phase, Ill be able to get away with only 4 sets a week. This type of training is fairly nuanced and requires some understanding of a number of training principles to get the most from your workout. Is Sprinting or Squats Better to Build Muscle? Jumping ability is obviously a key to basketball success, but it's also important for many other athletes, including football and soccer players, as well as track and field jumpers. Below are some exercise highly effective at doing this. The reason we do this is to make tangible progress in one particular area and to overcome plateaus that often arise when youre training everything at the same time. Its easiest if I give some examples first and then explain how it works. Below are a few of my favorites. Let me first preface this by stating that you can use this exact same workout when youre in a leg hypertrophy phase as well, just that the rep ranges will be considerably higher. We increase strength by doing heavy lifts in relatively low rep ranges. My names Harvey and Im training full time in pursuit of a 45 vertical jump.
Weight training can build the muscles you need to jump higher and farther. If I was in the plyometrics phase, Im doing just enough to maintain my strength gains, while focusing my effort on jumping. 6 Reasons, How To Instantly Jump Higher With Post-Activation. These exercises barely resemble the vertical jump but thats okay because our objective is simply to make the muscles involved in the vertical jump as strong as possible. Your explosive strength deficit (ESD) is the difference between how strong you are and how well youre able to make use of that strength in the vertical jump. A speed workout on the other hand is the complete opposite. This is simply to ensure youre able to perform quality reps with maximum explosiveness while youre still fresh. Your goal with these plyometrics is to get your CNS to fire up your muscle fibers as quickly as possible here. When training for speed or explosiveness or rate of force development, the objective is to condition your central nervous system to be able to use those strength gains in the sport specific movement of the vertical jump. The idea is that youre tricking your CNS into thinking youre performing the loaded movement still, even though youve switched to a pure bodyweight unloaded exercise. The below would be considered strength exercises. Youll actually find that you can temporarily jump higher after performing weighted movements directly beforehand. Youre already strong, you just need to learn how to use that strength quickly to create power. Although you jump primarily with your legs, don't ignore your core and upper-body muscles, which also play roles when you jump. This is when youve successfully taught your CNS how to actually utilize those earlier size and strength gains in the specific movement of jumping efficiently. Studies have shown squats to be far more effective than leg press when it comes to vertical jump progress.1https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26439782/. The lat pulldown and the bench press can also be part of an upper-body routine to help increase your jumping ability. The barbell power clean -- in which you lift the bar from a squatting to an upright position -- is a total-body exercise, so you'll strengthen your upper body while you also hit the quads, hamstrings, glutes and core muscles that contribute much of your jumping power. Do progressively more challenging sets of the latter two exercises, lifting 40, 60 and 80 percent of your one-rep maximum weight.
Be sure to read my extended piece on periodization in vertical jump training if youd like more information. in communications. What that means is instead of sitting there doing leg extensions or leg press all day, get in the squat rack and under a barbell!
During each phase, your focus is on one single objective while you put the other aspects of training on the backburner. As I mentioned earlier, its important to still be doing some jumping and explosive movements while in a strength phase. If you can squat really heavy but cant jump very high, you have a high ESD and need to focus on rate of force development. For example, if Im in a strength phase, most of my training volume is geared towards increasing my strength and Im just doing enough to maintain my power and explosiveness. Its really quite simple. Barbell or dumbbell lunges also target your quads and glutes. M.L. Importance Of Training Your Core To Improve Your Vertical, 5 Reasons Your Vertical Jump Isn't Increasing, Why Did My Vertical Jump Decrease? By understanding the training principles mentioned at the beginning of the article, you should now be able to construct a well-designed, personalized leg workout thatll have you improving your weaknesses while getting stronger and more explosive. Power exercises are often referred to as speed strength or ballistic exercises. In vertical jump training what this looks like is following a power or strength movement with an unloaded/plyometric variant. These would all be viable exercises if we were looking to train for strength specifically. Exercises such as jump squats and cleans are just as helpful for horizontal jumpers as they are for other athletes. Most plyometric exercises are performed without weights, but you can do barbell or dumbbell squat jumps to combine weight training with plyometrics.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. He has contributed to a variety of national and local publications, specializing in sports writing. You cant simply walk in the gym and start lifting weights randomly and expect it to be a particularly effective vertical jump workout. Youll typically be jumping your highest after that final plyometrics phase. He also advocates leg curls and extensions to target your hamstrings and quads, respectively. If you are going to do a workout where youre incorporating a variety of each of these exercises, some strength and some RFD exercises, then its a good idea to do the plyometrics/speed work first, before your strength training. Plyometric training is also a must for building the explosive power you need to defy gravity. Horizontal jumpers -- including track and field athletes such as long jumpers and triple jumpers -- can perform many of the same exercises as athletes trying to improve their vertical jumps. You want each throw to be as powerful as possible. But do it in a way thats smart. Some athletes need to work more on their strength than their RFD and for others, its the other way around. Before we look at how to construct the perfect leg workout for jumping higher, its really important that you understand what factors that will contribute to your vertical improving. Rose has worked as a print and online journalist for more than 20 years. If you try to do depth jumps after your legs are already wobbling from some heavy squats, you risk injury and your CNS simply wont process the jump work as well as we want it to.
When Im not in the gym, Im researching and writing about all things sports performance so you can become a better athlete as well!