How To Increase Your Vertical

Posts Tagged ‘plyometrics training for basketball’

Hey,

Whew… I’m getting ready to get winded because this is kinda long but really important so just be prepared .

Alright, so I want to talk to you today about plyometrics training, the importance of it in your vertical jump training and why there’s so much gosh darn confusion when it comes to people talking about and trying to explain plyometric training.

You see, most people are flat out doing it wrong…

And you know, it’s not their fault.

Plyometric training is really not all that easy to understand… There’s so much technical mumbo jumbo that people use and really not enough GOOD information that helps clear everything up.

So my goal here today is to give you a little better understanding of how plyometrics training works, why it works and how you can incorporate it into your vertical jump training program.

Sound good?

Here’s what’s going on with your muscles when you’re jumping and PLEASE, you gotta bear with me here, it’s really tough to explain without any super duper fancy diagrams (I’m not a diagram person, I’m just not all that artistic… SORRY!) but here we go anyway…

What’s actually making you jump is when your calf and thigh are fully extended.  Like when you’re whole skeletal system is completely vertical is when you’re body is in the best possible position to get you in the air.

Now the way I want you to think of your bones is like levers throughout your body and in order to actually move those levers, you need your muscles.

Your muscles, while they’re not really elastic, store elasticity once your bones and body are contracted.

You know… I’m gonna probably just make a video a little later that explains all of this but let’s keep rolling…

Anyway, this whole process of brief elasticity of your muscles and bones being levers takes place all over throughout your body.

So when plyometrics are done correctly, you can really increase your explosion of your muscles by increasing the elasticity and explosiveness of your muscles.

Make sense?

Of course not yet .

Here’s the process broken down for you…

There’s a loading phase, which is done by using your own body weight and gravity and this causes eccentric contraction (some fancy way of saying that the muscle is working as it’s lengthening).

And then amortization occurs (I know, more fancy lingo…).

What that is is just a simple point where there is a very brief pause of your body from the contraction phase to the explosion phase.  This is something that you can’t eliminate and is always there.

The amortization phase is actually the number one key to your explosion and increasing your vertical jump.

It needs to be as short as humanely possible to use the elasticity of the muscle.

Let’s dig deeper here…

So what’s happening is the muscle is retracting as you load and get ready to explode and as you retract the muscle, it gives it a sense of elasticity.  If you have too long of an amortization phase you aren’t going to have the explosiveness that you can truly achieve.

So you want that amortization phase to be as short as possible and it must be followed by an intense contraction in order to reap the full benefit of the neurological condition.

It’s like a big snap back of the elasticity of the muscle and that causes you to explode up.

Now here are some common errors that you want to avoid at all cost (seriously this will make the difference between you being flat out bummed with not getting any results and you being stoked on the inches you’ve gained):

1) Pacing or too many reps…

This is a big one… Too often people think that if they do MORE that they will get better results.  Well that flat out doesn’t work and actually lowers the intensity and the effectiveness of the drill

If you want to get maximum results, you need to focus on going balls out and being as explosive as humanely possible on every single rep that you do.  That’s the only way that you are going to increase the explosiveness of your muscles.

2) Doing an extra bounce (basically doing load, tiny hop, explode process)

Some of the “gurus” out there will tell you to do and to be honest, they’re just wrong…

This actually end up screwing up the entire flow of load and explode and you’re not gonna get the results you’re looking for.

You see, as the ground hits the foot, it olds the muscle and causes the eccentric contraction we were talking about before and then there’s the very brief amortization phase where you are actually at a stand still.

This is followed by a snapback shortening contraction of the muscle where that elasticity of the muscle is put into play and you are propelled upward into the air.

You MUST explode at full intensity and the explosion with release allows the muscles to train in a quicker environment.

And then the contraction being initiated when your muscle is loading puts additional stress on the muscle and will result in muscle growth and development which is exactly what you want .

So here’s how to properly do a plyometric workout:

Proper load (start with gravity and not extra weight)
A super brief moment of amortization.  You literally want to try to eliminate to the best of your ability that brief pause between the loading phase and the explosion phase.  It’s impossible to eliminate it completely, but the shorter the better.

And the intensity of the contraction is going to determine how effective the plyo is.

You want to keep your reps below 15 (I personally like to use 8-12 reps) with sets of 2-4 but absolutely no more than 10 and have proper recovery time.

Seriously, one of the biggest areas where people goof up is when they don’t allow for proper recovery time of their muscles and they actually end up HURTING their vertical jump.

You don’t want to do that… Trust me .

Now if you couple that with the right resistance training program you’re going to have insane results.

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