Are You Ready To Take Your Vertical Jumping To The Next Level?

If you want to increase your vertical jumping height, you need to practice and do exercises. But which exercises are the most effective? Is there a best way to exercise to generate the maximum results? How can you work to improve without getting burned out? Here are some tips that will help you increase your vertical jumping the right way.

Don’t forget to warm up. Before you begin jumping or exercising, you need to stretch to warm up your legs. Many of the routines created for swimmers to stretch out are ideal for jumpers, as well. It’s also a wonderful idea to spend several minutes jumping rope or running stairs. This may also be included as a part of your exercise routine, but you should always begin with exercises like this to get warmed up before moving on to other more intense exercises.

Strengthen Your Legs. To build strength, you want to focus on performing appropriate exercises slowly and methodically. You should plan for each rep of a particular leg exercise to take about nine seconds from start to completion. For instance, slow toe raises and deep knee bends help strengthen your leg muscles and can be performed either with or without added weights.

Beef Up Those Muscles. While you don’t necessarily have to have a sculpted Mr. America body to be a great jumper, you do need strong, toned muscles. Having a toned body that is in overall great shape also improves your metabolism, lowers body fat, strengthens muscles and bones, and helps your muscles and body burn calories even more effectively. And burning calories results in energy to power your jumps. So focus on exercises that will shape and tone your muscles.

There are a few rather routine exercises that can really increase your vertical jumping height. These are perfect additions to your vertical jumping training program. Many are quite simple and you can do them each day to build your strength and endurance in addition to training for higher jumps.

Jump rope. Jumping rope with a simple inexpensive jump rope is a very effective exercise to improve vertical jump heights. Get a rope that is easy to swing comfortably and start out jumping on both feet, then alternating jumping on each foot individually. This is a great exercise to do while watching television. Start out by jumping rope for 10-minute bursts of time and gradually increase the level of intensity of your jump roping workout. Remember, though, speed is not the goal here-higher jumps is-so make sure you are focusing on that.

Deep knee bends. Start out in a normal standing position with a nice straight back. Slowly bend your knees to lower your body down, maintaining that straight back. Stop short of getting deep far enough to where you would be in a relaxed low position so there is still tension on your leg muscles and then slowly raise your body back up again to resume the original standing position. Go down slowly and come up slowly, counting approximately four seconds on the way down and another four seconds on the way up. Do 15 reps like this each day and gradually increase the number of reps after a week or so of practice. In addition to building power and muscle in your legs, this exercise also tones your thighs.