Increase Jumping Ability:  Increasing your vertical leap can help you play better, regardless of whatever sport you play. A sign of strength and explosiveness, a good vertical leap can take you places other athletes can’t reach. There are specific jumping exercises you can do with the specific intention of improving how high you can jump.

Increase Jumping Ability: Consider these facts!

• First, as with any exercise program, you’ll want to warm up first.

There is no reason to hurt yourself as you’re trying to improve your performance. Good warm ups for jumping exercises include stretches and jumping rope.

Jumping rope is a great exercise to increase your vertical leap in its own right, but when you do it as a warm up, don’t go so hard at it that you wear yourself out.

• A great exercise to use is running up steps on your toes.

This will strengthen your legs and improve your cardiovascular conditioning. The first time up, run the stairs one flight at a time. Walk back down the steps. The second time you go up, take the stairs two at a time. Keep repeating this process until you can’t anymore.

Other great toe exercises are toe raises. You should start these with no weights, but start adding weights as they become easier. Do these raises slowly, don’t let your momentum carry the load. And this way to increase jumping ability is really effective.

Increase Jumping Ability: Facts to know!

• Deep knee bends will also help get you in good shape to explode upwards.

Start with a simple knee bend, keeping your back straight and dipping as low as possible without hurting yourself. Once you’ve done some good sets of these (around 30 to 50 reps total), then make them jumping deep knee bends. This means, start the same way but then you explode straight up from your crouch. As you land, go immediately back into your crouch and jump back up.

• Another type of explosive exercise is a scissor jump.

Stand with one foot on a secured platform. Use the foot on the platform to propel your body upwards, scissor your legs while in the air, and land with the opposite foot on the platform. Repeat now on the other foot. A rep on each foot combines to a single full repetition. Work up to doing three sets of ten repetitions, resting only a half minute to a minute between sets.

Increase Jumping Ability: Closing Tips!

If you can, work your way up to doing a double scissor. This means you’ll land back on the same foot that you used to throw yourself into the air. Once that becomes too easy, you can then do the same sequence of exercises, but starting with both feet flat on the floor.

• There is another good exercise you can do on the same platform.

Stand on the platform with both feet and jump high and backwards of it. You want to land lightly, because you then want to jump immediately back up to the platform once you do land. This can be a particularly dangerous exercise if you’ve not done it before, so ask a trainer to work with you as you start with these sorts of jumping exercises to increase jumping ability.