Guest Post by Scott Bias
Training Tip to Increase Your Vertical Jump
This vertical jump training tip is a very simple but extremely effective thing you can do to maximize your training results over time and it’s also very easy.
First, let me ask you a question. Where were you and what were you doing on Friday, April 22nd – 2011 at four o’clock?
Hanging with friends? At school or work? At the gym working out? If you ask anyone that same question you will get pretty much the same answer right? They will say “I have no clue where I was or what I was doing at that time”. It’s too far back to remember the details.
Even if you remember that you were at the gym working out, do you remember which exercises you were doing? How much weight? How many reps? What did you eat after the workout? How did you feel and how fast did you recover the next day?
Now imagine what it would mean to your training and progress if you had a film crew video taping every workout you’ve done over the last few years. Every detail is recorded from weight to reps to post training meal etc… You could review this video any time you wanted to and see what you did wrong, what you did that got results and how far you have progressed over time. This information would be priceless because it would go a long way toward keeping you in the improvement zone, preventing you from making the same training mistakes over and over again and getting you to your goals a lot faster.
But the problem is 99.9% of us don’t really have the resources to hire a film crew to follow us around recording everything and even if we did it would probably inflate our egos so far that we would stop training as hard and start posing for the camera right?
This brings us to one of the most effective and under used vertical jump training tips available and it’s easy, cheap and almost as good as having the video history of your training.
The vertical jump training log.
During and after every workout, simply write down how you felt, what you did, what weight you used, number of reps, energy level, post workout nutrition and any other notes you think of that might be relevant. Use a notebook. Use your smart phone. Use what ever you can to get your valuable training history recorded for future reference and it will pay off like you can’t imagine.
If you are using The Jump Manual there are tracking sheets provided for this purpose but it’s very easy to make up your own or just record everything as notes.
I started doing this a few years ago and was simply amazed when I looked back over the previous years training. Bad habits jumped of the page. I noticed that I would tend to start certain plyometric drills or different types of Olympic lifts and never stick with anything long enough to see real results. It was like a movie of a guy jumping from one thing to the next searching for some magical exercise and never sticking with anything. If I had never started keeping a training log I would have never realized I was even doing that and probably would have never corrected that mistake.
Now, every year around late December/ early January, I reveiwed the entire years training. This only takes about 30 minutes and it gives me a fantastic snap shot of every exercise phase, change in nutrition and injury/recovery that I went through. This puts me in the best possible frame of mind to start the next years training, allows me to set better goals, choose the most effective methods and avoid last years mistakes.
Do this one thing in 2012 and I promise you it will take your vertical jump training to another level.
Work hard – Train hard.
Scott Bias
