Scientific Foundation of Increasing Vertical Leap
While looking through journal articles to put together my strategy to increase my vertical leap, I came across two particular articles that serve as a major portion of my scientific rationale for my training programming. One is a study. The other is a literature review. Looking over what is there, I think the literature review gives a good encapsulation of what we know.
The study is entitled, The maximal and submaximal vertical jump: implications for strength and conditioning. Jumping involves three main muscle groups. If you ever hear the term "triple extension", it is referring to the action of the big three leg joints, the ankle, the knee and the hip. At the ankle there is extension (plantar flexion), where you rise up on your toes. At the knee there is extension, where you straighten the leg. At the hip there is extension where the legs extend down. Going from a seated posture on a chair to standing up and rising on the toes is triple extension. Jumping is explosive triple extension. The findings of the study suggest that while ankle and knee extension increases modestly going from submaximal to maximal jumps, hip extension increases more dramatically. This suggests that strengthening muscles involved in hip extension will have a greater impact on efforts to increase vertical leap.
To compliment this, in The Vertical Jump: a review of the literature and a team case study, one of the interesting findings presented is that the relative contribution of the muscles at the various joints to the jump is 40% from the hip, 24.2% from the knee, and 35.8% from the ankle. Taken with the study, hip extension looks like the best target for training. It suggests that an increase in explosive hip extension will translate to an increase in maximal vertical leap height, and will give the best bang for the buck because of its bigger contribution to jumping as the intensity of the individual jump increases. Training extension at the ankle will likewise have a good effect, but the improvement will likely not scale up as sharply as the intensity goes up. Training knee extension will help, but not by anywhere near the amount that hip extension will. I think the vast majority of exercises that actually help will incorporate all three joint movements. The ones that don't (squats and deadlifts) usually can have plantar flexion added at the end of the movement to "level up" the exercise to something more specific to jumping.
A few more tidbits from the literature review include that Olympic style lifts (cleans) increase vertical, plyometrics increase vertical, Olympic style lifts might correlate more strongly with increased vertical than plyometrics, increase in 1RM of squats or cleans correlate with increase in vertical, and increased body weight through weight training in college football players correlates with increased vertical. This is also where I adapted the notion of 100 jumps per jump training session, even though the article only implied 50.
Combine these with the idea of specificity, and you have most of the rationale of why I am training particularly like I do. I try to choose exercises that closely mimic, or approximate the way I actually jump when playing basketball, or volleyball, I perform those lifts explosively, and I try to get 100 jumps per session (up from 50 mostly because I often don't do a lot of jumping outside of my workouts). It is amazing how many Youtube videos on how to jump higher don't really follow these basics. They might put together a demanding workout, but often the wrong (or less effective) muscles are emphasized (hip flexion training isn't going to make you jump higher).
The study is entitled, The maximal and submaximal vertical jump: implications for strength and conditioning. Jumping involves three main muscle groups. If you ever hear the term "triple extension", it is referring to the action of the big three leg joints, the ankle, the knee and the hip. At the ankle there is extension (plantar flexion), where you rise up on your toes. At the knee there is extension, where you straighten the leg. At the hip there is extension where the legs extend down. Going from a seated posture on a chair to standing up and rising on the toes is triple extension. Jumping is explosive triple extension. The findings of the study suggest that while ankle and knee extension increases modestly going from submaximal to maximal jumps, hip extension increases more dramatically. This suggests that strengthening muscles involved in hip extension will have a greater impact on efforts to increase vertical leap.
To compliment this, in The Vertical Jump: a review of the literature and a team case study, one of the interesting findings presented is that the relative contribution of the muscles at the various joints to the jump is 40% from the hip, 24.2% from the knee, and 35.8% from the ankle. Taken with the study, hip extension looks like the best target for training. It suggests that an increase in explosive hip extension will translate to an increase in maximal vertical leap height, and will give the best bang for the buck because of its bigger contribution to jumping as the intensity of the individual jump increases. Training extension at the ankle will likewise have a good effect, but the improvement will likely not scale up as sharply as the intensity goes up. Training knee extension will help, but not by anywhere near the amount that hip extension will. I think the vast majority of exercises that actually help will incorporate all three joint movements. The ones that don't (squats and deadlifts) usually can have plantar flexion added at the end of the movement to "level up" the exercise to something more specific to jumping.
A few more tidbits from the literature review include that Olympic style lifts (cleans) increase vertical, plyometrics increase vertical, Olympic style lifts might correlate more strongly with increased vertical than plyometrics, increase in 1RM of squats or cleans correlate with increase in vertical, and increased body weight through weight training in college football players correlates with increased vertical. This is also where I adapted the notion of 100 jumps per jump training session, even though the article only implied 50.
Combine these with the idea of specificity, and you have most of the rationale of why I am training particularly like I do. I try to choose exercises that closely mimic, or approximate the way I actually jump when playing basketball, or volleyball, I perform those lifts explosively, and I try to get 100 jumps per session (up from 50 mostly because I often don't do a lot of jumping outside of my workouts). It is amazing how many Youtube videos on how to jump higher don't really follow these basics. They might put together a demanding workout, but often the wrong (or less effective) muscles are emphasized (hip flexion training isn't going to make you jump higher).
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