Plyometric Workout

Need a plyometric workout routine with the best jumping workouts and plyometric exercises? Here at the #1 Plyometric Workout site we have all the information you need to create your own personal training with the best exercises to jump higher that will work fast for you to learn how to jump higher now.

First off, you obviously need stronger legs in order to jump higher. How do you get stronger legs? By working out doing the normal type of stuff that you did in high school if you played football. For those of you that have never played a sport or had a coach that didn’t know how to train their athletes properly (99% of them) then you are at the right place.

The best exercise is the simple squat. You need to make sure that you have proper form when doing squats, it’s very easy you just make sure to stick your butt out like you are sitting in a chair and you don’t want the knees going in front over your toes. Will squatting make you jump higher? Yes is will but it is not the only jumping exercise that will do so and it will not be greatly beneficial without combining it with some other workouts. Now obviously squats do not workout your calves at all so you need to work them with some calf raises. Squats are typically done slowly with great control on the way down and the way up but you should speed them up a bit since you want to have speed as well as strength to get power.

If you go to the gym on Monday and do squats and calf raises you should not go back and do them again on Tuesday. If you are not sore on Tuesday you did not push yourself hard enough by using enough weight. You NEVER want to train when you are sore so make sure you give yourself time to heal before working out again.

So you build up a bit of strength in the legs but will strength alone get you the vertical leap you are looking for? No! You have to incorporate plyometrics! A plyometric workout is very different than a strength building workout and you need both to get the best results possible. Plyos are done with only your body weight and they known simply as jumping exercises most of the time. They are done using plyometric boxes or other platforms. The key with plyometrics is the amount of time you spend in contact with the ground in between reps. You should do them as if the ground is on fire and you want to just bounce off of it as fast as you can. These are not done on the same days as your strength building workouts. For a video explaining a little more on plyometrics Click Here.

Looking for a vertical jump training program that will teach you how to jump higher to dunk?

Lets take a look at a few things that you will need to focus on in order to learn how to jump higher in basketball, volleyball or any other sport. The key is to not over train! That is really the hardest thing for everyone to follow when they are super motivated to get results. Kids think that the more they train the higher they will jump. This is not true, because it is actually when your muscles are resting after an intense workout that you are getting stronger. The muscle needs time to recover after you tear it to pieces by jump training. So if you are sore, that means that you should not be working out, you need to just listen to what your body is telling you and take it easy until you are not sore anymore. But not all soreness means that you are training the right way. You can go run 7 miles and your legs will get very sore if you aren’t used to running that much but does that mean that you will jump higher once your legs heal up? No! The type of training that gets your legs sore has to be done correctly and this is accomplished with a plyometric workout. Plyometrics workout your muscles in such a way that they learn to have a more in sync reaction time which results in more power. You can’t speed up the reflex reaction of your muscles, it’s just impossible to do and physiology doesn’t work that way. But you can teach more of your muscle fibers to fire at the same time and that is how you get that extra power that plyometric exercises are famous for producing.

The main purpose of any plyometrics workout is to develop the fast twitch muscle fibers and train them to react at the exact same time. This means that you can’t actually speed up the rate at which the reaction occurs but you can train to make each fiber fire at almost the same time and this will in turn cause more force and power.

When people want to learn how to jump higher, they often times go about it in every wrong way possible. Plyometric exercises are to be done with fresh legs, not at the end of a hard leg workout where you have exhausted them. This might be good for building muscle because you are trying to recruit new muscle fibers that usually don’t get a workout because the other fibers are tired. But with jumping you aren’t trying to get your muscles to grow and get all big and bulky. You are trying to teach your muscles to react a certain way when they feel a stretch in your knees from bending. When you bend, the patellar tendon in the knee is stretched and this will cause a reaction that happens so fast your brain isn’t even aware of it. The nerve impulse goes to the spinal cord and then back to the muscles to tell them to straighten fast because the patellar tendon is getting stretched. It is the way your body naturally tries to protect itself. It doesn’t know if it is going to keep getting stretched until it breaks, so it straightens your leg as fast as possible. This is why when a doctor hits your knee with the rubber mallet, your foot kicks out. The doctor is causing that tendon to stretch and your body reacts accordingly. A plyometric workout is the best way to learn how to jump higher.

So before you think you have jump training all figured out, you need to be aware that you train very differently when doing plyometrics. Be smart and follow a well designed jump program. Click Here to see the program I recommend.