No Weight Training = Jump Higher
9:46 pm in Weight Loss Activities by seph
So your goal is to improve your vertical jump as quickly as possible so you can be dunking a basketball by the time the season starts right?And you already found some training tips on how to jump higher and everything points toward lifting heavy weights at the gym but the problem is you don’t have a gym membership.
Even if the few weights you have at home were heavy enough, you don’t have anyone to spot you so that you could lift that heavy weight safely and go all the way to failure and beyond right? So you’ve done some more research on jump training with body weight exercises and plyometrics but no one seems to be getting great results from this method alone right? This is no reason to give up on your goal or even put it off until some day when you might have access to a weight room.
What you need are some effective non-weight alternatives for vertical jump training.
In this article, we focus on a method I have developed called Elastic Strength which is a combination of body weight strength exercises and the plyometric stretch reflex rolled into one which will help your body learn how to jump higher. To best explain the idea, let’s take a look at some standard body weight exercises and then compare them to the elastic strength method.
Pistol squats. So, normally you are standing on one leg and you slowly squat down until your quad (thigh) is parallel with the floor (or lower) and then return back up to the standing position. This is a great exercise overall for building strength but since the resistance is limited to your body weight alone it is tough to get a comparable work out as doing a standard squat with weights on a bar. In order to make this exercise more effective for the explosive type of strength you need when jumping, we need to overload the muscles a little more.
The easiest way to do this is to speed up the movement and the rate at which you are performing the exercise. The result is the muscles get overloaded at the point where you quickly change direction ie… stop the downward momentum, reverse it and spring back up quickly. if you stop the exercise at the bottom as you would in a standard pistol squat the downward force is now lost. Now because you are in a relatively week position at the bottom of the squat, this is very difficult to do. What we need is a way to speed up this change of direction without reducing the overload on the muscles too much. Here are a few ways to accomplish this.
The Elastic Strength Training Method
1. Using a chair – Briefly touching your butt to a chair before raising back up. (Do not sit down). This helps reverse the downward momentum and start the upward momentum so the exercise becomes more explosive and plyometric. Make sure you are lightly making contact with the chair and not bouncing off the chair or it will result in not enough muscle overload and not be effective.
2. Hold on to a rope – Hold on to a rope for balance and to help speed up the change in direction. This is a great way to get leverage at the bottom of the squat allowing you to speed up the movement while only slightly reducing the overload on the muscles.
By adding the force of momentum to body weight and making each exercise more plyometric in nature we can achieve much higher overload capacity on muscles and get better results than standard body weight exercises. This concept applies to just about every body weight exercise including Hypers, The glute ham raise and Lunges. Work Hard, Train Hard.
You can teach yourself to jump higher, with hard work you will achieve your goals.
