Vertical Training: Why You Don’t Want to Jump Habitually

If you want the best results from your training, look for a program that will increase your max explosiveness. But if you do want to stick with habitual jump program, let’s call it optimized, maximized, or even modified habitual jump training. If you’re going to do the program, take away the reps. Well, don’t take them away, but limit each set to anywhere from 5 to 15 reps. Be very careful to get a 5 to 10 second rest between each rep. You do this so that you can get all of the intensity into each rep, and get the most out of each rep. And then notice how high you’re jumping on each rep, and as soon as that height decreases, you can be sure that now you’re training at a submaximal effort. Because before you were clearly jumping higher, so now when you’re jumping lower you are training at a submaximal effort. When you’ve reached this level where you’re jumping lower each time, you want to stop, and at least give yourself some rest before you go back into it. If you’re dead set on doing this type of volume you should know that there can be problems with your joints. So I would recommend lowering the volume when you get to the point where you can’t jump as high each rep… it’s over, stop the set. Even stop the workout if you have to, but if you want you can stop the set, provide a rest period of at least one to four minutes, and then you can go back into the program at that maximum effort. That’s when you’re going to get the most improvement from your vertical jump, So basically, if you’re doing habitual jump training, with massive amounts of volume, you’re training mostly at a submaximal level, and that’s the kind of gains you’ll get from it. If you want to optimize it, I would recommend clustering all of the reps into smaller sets, so that you can get maximal effort to each rep. Then you’re going to get a whole lot better results. I would also recommend that you go into some sort of strength training regimen, so you can increase your overall fiber size, maximize fiber recruitment, and you’ll have a lot more potential gains in your strength. For those of you who aren’t completely convinced that you can increase your vertical jump in the weight room: I promise you, you can increase your vertical in the weight room. The stronger your legs are, the lighter your body’s going to feel, the more explosion capacity you’re going to have to train. I hope this sheds some light on habitual jump training. I’m certainly not out there to bash any program; I just want to help anyone who may be on a habitual jump training program increase their results.