Increase Your Vertical: How to Jump Higher in Three Easy Steps

Step 1: Increase your base strength

Your base strength is the maximum amount of force your muscles can generate. Increasing your base strength will give you a larger amount of raw power to draw from to jump higher. This is especially important for beginners who don’t have a lot of strength to begin with.

Think of your base strength as water flowing through a pipe. Increasing your strength fills the pipe and increases the water pressure so that more water is passing through.

There are several things you can do for strength. The most effective exercise for building a very strong lower body is the squat.  Squats will build strength in all of your jumping muscles as well as increase your flexibility.

Step 2: Decrease your response time

Jumping requires you to generate a tremendous of force in a very short time. How high you jump is dependent on how much force you can produce in the time it takes for you to achieve lift off. You can’t change the time it takes for you to leave a ground, but you can increase the amount of force your muscles can produce in that time period.

 A lot of people aren’t able to fully utilize all of their potential force and therefore are not reaching their full potential. Decreasing the response time of your muscles allows your muscles to reach maximum output in a shorter amount of time.

Think of your response time as a pipe with water flowing through it. When you decrease your muscle’s response time, you are increasing the size of the pipe, allowing more water to pass through it. This is only effective if you have more strength than you can generate in a short time, which is why it is step 2.

A good exercise to teach your muscles to produce power in less time is to do depth jumps. Depth jumps will increase strength as well as increase your muscle’s ability to absorb a jump and explode up with very little time in between.

Step 3: Decrease the load

This should be simple enough to understand, the less weight you have, the higher you will jump. There is balance between losing fat and losing muscle. Everyone is different and you have to find the point that is right for you. You want to make sure that you maintain your strength, even if it means losing fat at a slower rate.