Is Cardio Bad for Increasing Your Vertical Jump?
Guest Post by Scott Bias
It’s very well accepted at this point that when you are training to jump higher, what you need to develop and maximize is fast twitch muscle fiber. These are the muscle fibers responsible for explosive quick movements like jumping, sprinting and changing direction quickly. The most effective training methods for this is also very well know at this point. Intense weight training and plyometric exercises are the core of every jump program out there.
Even though there are some general conditioning benefits to training explosively, it can still leave a lot of athletes with a gap in conditioning. Over the course of a 40 to 48 minute basketball game you are going to have to run up and down the court a bunch of times, no doubt about it. This will require a certain amount of stamina and cardio vascular conditioning that you aren’t going to get from your vertical jump workout.
The key is finding a cardio workout that won’t actually reduce your quickness and vertical jump.
First let’s look at how cardio training might negatively affect your vertical jumping ability so we know what to avoid.
Your body responds to what you put it through. It adapts. So if you lift some heavy weight your body will get the message. It will adapt and add muscle fiber in anticipation of needing to do that task again. The same is true for any slow movement patterns you put it through. If you go out and run long distances at a very slow relaxed pace your body will adapt your muscle fiber (and central nervous system reaction time) to that activity in anticipation of needing to do that same task again in the future. In other words it gets good at what it thinks it will need to be ready for in the future.
If you are not using your fast twitch muscle fiber and quick reflexive actions from the brain, (that’s your cns or central nervous system) down the nerve channels to the muscles, why would it need to keep that ability for future use?
It won’t. It’s the age old use it or lose it principle at work here.
So we know that we need some type of cardio conditioning to go with the explosive strength & plyo training but we don’t want something that’s going to hinder or slow down our progress when it comes to increasing vertical jump and quickness right?
The answer here is simple. Avoid slow movement training over long periods. The solution for this is interval or HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training).
HIIT – Basically you want alternating periods of intense exercise followed by an active rest phase.
Why the active rest?
Because you need to accumulate enough actual time doing the intense parts, and if you weren’t resting along the way you would be exhausted before you actually started to receive the Aerobic conditioning benefits.
HIIT can be any number of combination’s of exercises and slow/fast timed sets. It’s best to keep the activity as sports specific as possible to better fit your situation.
Below are some examples of HIIT for Basketball players.
Suicides or seventeens – Sprint back & fourth between two or more lines. Alternate each lap or phase between sprinting and a recovery jog.
Speed intervals – If you are running a mile alternate every 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2 mile between 80% max speed and a recovery jog.
Run in place as fast as you can for 20 seconds – slowly jog in place for 40 seconds. Repeat until 6 to 8 minutes are up.
The great thing is HIIT can be done with weights, medicine balls, weighted vests. Anything you can come up with that maximizes your cardio vascular system for a period of time followed by an active rest period qualifies as HIIT.
Use HIIT along with your current vertical jump training program to get the game conditioning you need without slowing your progress toward becoming an unstobable explosive athlete.
LETS GO!!!
You got this!
Scott Bias
