Jump Higher to Dunk: Athletes in all sorts of sports understand that the ability to jump higher than your opponent is a valuable skill to have.

If you’re interested in improving your vertical leap, it can be helpful to understand some benchmarks. You have your own personal ones, whatever your starting point is. However, if you want to get a sense of where you want to go, you should understand what other people are doing. And this way, learning to jump higher to dunk will be easy and quickly.

 Jump Higher to Dunk: Facts to Consider!

There have been a number of studies on this issue, exploring the jumping capabilities of the normal person to the college athlete. Of course, the specific vertical leap height of the best professional athletes is well known. Based on the studies of your typical young adult, the mean jump height for a man is around 22 inches, with a bit more than a three inch margin. For a woman, this mean height is 14 inches, with a margin of around two and a half inches.

However, if you’re looking to do better than your average person (the people in this study had an average body mass index in the mid-twenties), you can look for a higher level of performance. For example, this same study showed that those men who could jump up 28 inches would be in the 95th percentile among typical males. A woman will have to jump around 19 inches high to reach that same 95th percentile.

Perhaps though you have thoughts of playing sports at the college level; you might want to know what these athletes are doing. This is where you can start to see a separation among sports. Surprisingly, the NCAA Division 1 football players have, on average, a higher vertical leap than do their basketball playing brothers.

 Jump Higher to Dunk: Powerful Tips!

The average vertical leap height for a NCAA Division 1 football player typically falls between 29 and 31 inches. However, the basketball players playing in the same division generally only reach between 27 and 30 inches. This may be accounted for if the football players focus more on strength training than do the basketball players, since strength contributes so much to an athlete’s ability to jump high.

When you look at the highest level of performance, the cream of the crop of the professional athletes, the picture changes altogether. Michael Jordan had a recorded vertical leap of 48 inches, and averaged in the forties. This is almost twice the average NBA player, who has a vertical leap of only 28 inches. Kobe Bryant has been measured in the upper thirties, where he usually stays.

 Jump Higher to Dunk: Review!

Reviewing the 2011 scouting combine numbers of players trying to enter the NFL, the best all have vertical leaps in the low forties. This again shows that the football players seem to outdo the basketball players on this issue. These numbers for football players, in the high thirties and low forties, seems to track what the current NFL players are doing. For example, Plaxico Burress has a leap that just nearly hits 40 inches.

This might help give you an idea of where you want your vertical jump to be. If you need to jump higher, many vertical leap training programs can help you increase your numbers anywhere from eight to 25 inches. Of course, that will all depend on your work ethic and commitment. And this is the basic information to consider when it comes to jump higher to dunk.