How To Jump Higher With Strength Gains – How Important Is Strength?

Strength is INCREDIBLY important for your vertical jump training efforts. When you are looking for a solution to increasing your vertical think first of all, at increasing your strength in general. If I gave you a backpack with a bowling ball in it, you strapped that sucker on, and tried to jump, what would happen to your vertical? You wouldn’t go far.  More than your vertical, your quickness would be all but destroyed and any agility you had. Why?  Because your relative strength just went to nothing.  Relative strength is how strong you are in relation to your body weight or the force of gravity. Of course, when you are heavier in relation to your own strength your whole body feels… uncoordinated, weak, slow. Becoming stronger makes it easier to contract a given muscle and thus makes it easier to perform a given movement.  The stronger you are, proportionately the less resistance the contract will feel. How strong is too strong for vertical jump training? As  soon as you are strong enough to render your the weight of your own body a “non issue” your focus on strength can end, and your focus on quickness and explosiveness can be 100% merited. What do I mean by rending the resistance of your body weight a non issue?  Let me explain… Take your bicep, as a simple movement to understand.  A curl. Let’s put a shot put in your hand.  How fast can you curl that shot put? You can curl that shot put faster by doing two things; increasing your strenth or decreasing the weight of the shot put. So, lets replace the shot put with a tennis ball.  Now your contraction time just got better.  In fact, you can probably curl the tennis ball at the same speed you could curl the weight of your own hand. Your other option would be to make your bicep so strong that the shot put feels like a tennis ball.  When the resistance becomes so light that the contraction time is no longer affected by additional strength, strength become obselete. So at this point additional strength and the mass that comes with it, would begin to a small degree to hurt your vertical jump. So, the moral: When additional strength is no longer needed to increase the contraction time of a given muscle, the focus should be on quickness, reactive strength (plyometrics strength, form, and CNS functioning. This can usually be determined in a functional situation.  Meaning when your vertical stops increasing due to strength training, your focus should be elsewhere. Before you jump to the conclusion that you are too strong… Very few individuals ever get anywhere close to this level of strength. CNS (central nervous system) deficiency and other areas of improvement can also keep you from being able to use strength that would otherwise be a benefit to you. The solution: 1. You need to add methods of converting strength to explosive strength (strength that can be used quickly / during a vertical jump). Explosive and ballistic lifting, synaptic facilitation,  combined plyo and strength days are all great way to ensure your strength is converting to your vertical jump. 2. Cycling or periodizing your training program from strength to explosive focuses will help you convert your strength to vertical jump specific explosive strength. Of course this is just an overview, but you get the idea. 99% of you can start working on strength, and if you add my suggestions from solution 1 (see above) you will be making gains for a very long time. It is only when you reach a plateau or you would like to prepare for competition and convert your strength on an explosive cycle that you will even consider option 2. Many programs and trainer leave out solution 1 which I find to be very effective. So…  Get strong, really really strong. Squat 1.5 your body weight than move to 2X your body weight and assess your situation. Of course there are other ways of increase your vertical, but if you are wanting the greatest possible gains, strength should DEFINITELY be a part of your overall strategy.