The 3 Best Exercises for an Explosive Vertical Jump

Feb 6, 2012

The 3 Best Exercises for an Explosive Vertical Jump

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1. Hip Flexor Stretch – mobility exercise for the vertical jump

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The hip flexors are actually a group of muscles that help pull the knee upward. The problem we have with the hip flexors during the vertical jump is that in the large majority of athletes, the hip flexors are usually extremely tight. Because we’ve become a society that sits around all day (in school, at work, in front of the computer, watching TV, etc), the hip flexors have a tendency to become contracted and tight, almost pulling us into anterior tilt. 

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Tight, contracted hip flexors hurt our vertical jump in two ways: 1) a tight, contracted muscle usually inhibits its antagonist, in this case the glute maximus, which is an integral muscle in the vertical jump. A jumper with a weaker, inhibited glute maximus doesn’t jump very high. Also, a weak glute makes the hamstring work harder, which results in more hamstring strains. 2) a tight, contracted hip flexor puts the brakes on our vertical jump by preventing full hip extension. If you look at the hip flexor picture above, you can see where the muscles attach on the femur and the lumbo-pelvic complex. Just imagine a tight, contracted hip flexor. You can actually see how it’d bring the torso slightly forward and prevent the hip from fully extending. A lack of hip extension = poor vertical jump.

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We do two simple hip flexor stretches throughout our workout:

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Hip Flexor Pulse

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The first one I learned from strength coach Dan John, the hip flexor pulse stretch. Get into a lunge position with the back knee on the floor directly under the hip. The front knee and hip should be 90 degrees. Place the athlete’s hands on his glutes and gently have him push his pelvis forward while keeping his torso still. Hold the position and repeat. He should feel a great stretch right where the pelvis meets the femur on the front of his down leg. Perform 10 two second repetitions on each leg.

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Box Hip Flexor Stretch

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The second stretch is a little more complicated. Have the athlete kneel at 45 degrees in front of the box that’s 8-12?. Have him put his inside leg on top of the box pointing directly forward while keeping the rest of his body at 45 degrees. Again, have the athlete gently move his pelvis forward while keeping his torso still. If necessary the athlete can place his hands on the up knee for balance. If the athlete can’t feel a great stretch in that position, have him raise his hands over his head and lean them towards the up knee. He should feel a great stretch in the front of the thigh of the knee that’s on the ground. Hold that stretch for 15-20 seconds. Perform 3 15-20 second holds on each leg.

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2. Trap Bar Deadlift – the strength exercise for the vertical jump

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A vertical jump program isn’t complete without a strength exercise, the foundation for a great vertical jump. Unless you’re an elastic jumper like Kevin Durant (if you can’t dunk by the time you’re a sophomore, you’re probably not), then you need strength to jump high. According to Newton’s Third Law, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” In basketball terms, that means the more force we put into the ground, the higher we jump into the air. The trap bar deadlift gives us that force.

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I personally like the trap bar deadlift, compared to the squat, because it a) is consistent with regards to range of motion. Athletes have a tendency to decrease their ROM on the squat when they get tired. The large majority do not even squat to proper depth, almost completely negating the posterior chain’s involvement in the lift, which happens to be the key jumping muscles. b) Done properly, it recruits the posterior chain more than the squat. The hamstrings and glutes really get a great workout. c) Easier to learn with less technical difficulty and requires less mobility. Athletes tend to pick up this exercise extremely quickly, especially females.

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Once the athlete becomes proficient at the trap bar deadlift, we’ll have them deadlift off a 4? box to really increase the range of motion and hammer the posterior chain. Once they become really good, we’ll also add some trap bar deadlift jumps to focus on the speed side of the speed-strength continuum.

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3. 1-arm dumbbell snatches – the power exercise for the vertical jump

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When most people think of power, they think of powerlifters, those guys benching 500 pounds and squatting 900 pounds. However, that’s actually incorrect. Olympic lifters are actually a lot more powerful than powerlifters. The definition of power is work divided by change in time. So essentially how fast can we move a weight from point a to point b.

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In basketball, power is everything because time is everything. It’s not necessarily how high you can jump, but who can jump the highest the fastest. Sometimes it’s not even the first jump that counts either; the rebound goes to the guy who can explode up the quickest on the second or third jump.

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Increasing strength doesn’t always translate into increasing power. There are plenty of guys walking around the gym who are strong and slow. Once those athletes create that strength pool, you have to teach them how to use it quickly. There are no better exercises to train for power than the Olympic lifts. The 1-arm DB snatch correlates highly with the vertical jump. It also just happens to be the easiest one to teach, as the olympic lifts tends to be extremely technical. Make sure the athlete just isn’t reverse curling the weight up. The arm acts as a rope. Wrap the knuckles under the dumbbell and point the elbow to the outside. The weight moves because of the powerful triple extension of the ankle, knee, and hip and violent shrug of the upper back. The athlete should actually come off of the ground. Take your time adding weight, as speed is really the focus. You can’t do an olympic lift slow.

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Perform those three exercises twice weekly, and you’ll see your vertical jump explode.

ACL Prevention and Basketball: Does your training program have the requirements

Feb 2, 2012

ACL Prevention Exercises for Basketball Players

We’ve received a few e-mails over the last week asking what we do specifically for preventing ACL injuries. Mike Boyle once said it best ,”There is no such thing as ACL prevention training. There is just smart training and dumb training.”

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That’s really been our philosophy too. Here are a couple of things we do that we consider smart training, especially for female athletes:

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1) Add functional strength

That’s probably the most important component of our training program. If an athlete is too weak to control his/her own body weight when they’re cutting, they’re obviously going to put their knee in situations that can result in injury. However, you just can’t add strength. You have to have it in the right patterns, and it must be proportional. Most female’s quadriceps are much stronger than their hamstrings. That imbalance puts the knee at risk. You also must train the pattern, not the muscle. Strengthening the hamstring in a healthy athlete with seated hamstrings curls is useless because it’s not functional. During basketball, the hamstring never works in isolation; it moves with other muscles in movement patterns. Deadlifts, RDLs, SLDLs, and hip thrusts are much better options.

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2) Improve mobility

Females tend not to have as much mobility issues as males. However, if there is a mobility issue, then there is probably a compensation occurring somewhere in the body that puts the athlete at risk for an injury. For instance, if an athlete can’t get in the deep position in a bodyweight squat whether because of   decreased mobility in the ankle or the hip, the body will try to get the mobility from another joint. Unfortunately, the majority of time it’s from the knee. Gray Cook, creator of the FMS, always fixes mobility issues first. He won’t even look at a strength or stability issue if he finds out the athlete lacks mobility.

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3) Single-leg functional exercises

When an athlete goes from two legs to one leg, the entire movement changes.  Stabilizers become much more involved, certain muscles are “turned on” more than others, and most importantly, compensations between the two limbs cannot occur . When one limb is stronger than the other, the athlete increases his/her risk for injury. If you only do bilateral exercises, you never see unilateral deficiencies.

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Most sporting activities involve single-leg work. Sprinting is basically extremely quick single-leg transition. Changes of direction mostly involve single-leg strength, as does most jumping that occurs in basketball. So even if you don’t understand the biomechanical and physiological differences, it even passes the “common sense” test.

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4) Landing and cutting technique technique

This is probably the component that’s ignored the most at the high school level, and taught first at the collegiate level. Why? My guess would be that it takes a little more knowledge about biomechanics than most coaches have. Who really wants to study moment arms, joint angles, and torque? That’s what collegiate strength coaches are for.

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We can’t put these huge engines in kids, and not teach them how to use the brakes. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening. We have to teach the kids to land softly, absorbing the force through the muscles, to drop the butt during deceleration, and to make sure the athletes have the correct force angles during change of direction movements.  Strength alone won’t cut it. Starting, stopping, jumping, and cutting are learned techniques, just like shooting and dribbling are. Strength alone doesn’t improve those skills, so why would we think it will improve these?

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5) Glute medius activation

This is another tip I got from Mike Boyle/Gray Cook. The glute medius is a small muscle that sits on the lateral side of the glute maximus (non-technical location). Of its many functions, its primary function is hip abduction which provides stability in the frontal plan during running and jumping.  Unfortunately, because of today’s society, this muscle is usually extremely weak and inactive. A weak, inactive glute medius leads to valgus collapse. Valgus collapse makes an athlete more prone to knee problems. Most traditional exercises don’t effectively work the glute medius because it’s too easy to compensate with a stronger, larger muscle.  Every workout we do starts with a glute medius activation exercise, which is usually lateral band walks.

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Injury prevention should be the primary focus for any strength training program, no matter if the athlete squats 100 lbs or 600 lbs.

Vertical Jump and Long Distance Running: Why it’s killing your basketball game

Feb 1, 2012

Which body type is more suitable for basketball?

Long Distance running is killing your vertical jump

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The problems with long, slow distance (LSD) for basketball players are: 1) the energy system that it develops. 2) the muscle fibers it exercises. 3) the plane of motion it trains. 4) the, unrelentless, repetitive nature of the sport on key tendons, ligaments, and joints.

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1) Energy system development for basketball players

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The body creates energy  used by the muscles via one of three ways: 1) aerobically 2) anaerobically via glycolysis 3) the ATP-CP system. Different muscles fibers use the energy systems to different extents depending on the duration and intensity of the activity. Slow, less powerful muscles that are used for longer durations primarily rely on aerobic metabolism. Fast, explosive muscles that provide quick bursts of activity rely primarily on anaerobic glycolysis and the ATP-CP system.

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Basketball is explosive: jumps, sprints, starts, and stops. Cross country is long and boring. So by using cross country as a training stimulus, we’re not really training the energy systems, nor the muscle fibers that we use during basketball. All we’re really doing is making them better at running long, slow distances.  So just because the athlete may be more aerobically fit, they still won’t be in “basketball shape.”

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My high school basketball team had one of the best cross country runners in the state.  His VO2max far surpassed any of the other players. Every year he’d make it to the state cross country meet the week before basketball practice began so he was at peak physical condition. And every year he’d be just like the rest of us during the first week of practice after line drills: hands on our knees, gasping for air. Why? Because he only developed one of his energy systems, which happened to be the one that contributed the least to the sport of basketball. It’s the equivalent of doing bicep curls in hopes your calf muscle would get bigger.

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2) Type I and II muscle fibers

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Next to sumo wrestlers, cross country runners probably have the smallest vertical jumps of any group of athletes.  Why? Because the miles upon miles of running trains the least explosive muscle fibers in the body, the type I fibers.  These fibers are perfect for LSD: extremely fatigue resistant and they’re loaded with mitchondria and bloods vessels to supply oxygen to the muscle.  However, they are absolutely horrible for generating power and strength, key requisites for jumping high and running fast. And to make it even worse, research has shown that LSD training can actually alter the athlete’s muscle fiber type, decreasing the number of type II fibers.

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The running joke  among strength coaches is that if you want your athletes to be weak and slow, put them on a training program designed for long distance runners.  LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, etc have been blessed with a genetic makeup that has much more Type II fibers than Type 1 fibers. Athletes that want power need programs that are designed for power.  The first tenet of strength training – what you train is what you get.

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3) One plane of motion

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Cross country is a linear sport that focuses solely on the sagittal plane. So it would make sense that runners only become efficient in the sagittal plane because those muscles/movements are the ones that are trained consistently.  However, in basketball there is as much lateral movement as there is linear movement, as evident by the extreme soreness of groin area after the first few days of practice. The sagittal, frontal, and transverse planes are all frequently used in a game of basketball. If you don’t train in those planes, you don’t get faster and/or more efficient in those planes.  Put Chris Paul against Usain Bolt, the fastest human on the planet, and CP would make him look incredibly slow on the basketball court. Why? Because CP is quick in all 3 planes, as well as has unbelievable acceleration and deceleration, while Usain only trains linearly and works in the sagittal plane. Once again, the first tenet of strength training – what you train is what you get.

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4) Repetitive nature of running

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Running, even though it’s just bodyweight, is extremely hard on the joints, especially when an athlete’s running form is not correct. The repetitive stress on the foot, ankle, knee, and hip eventually leads to problems. Can you think of a long distance runner that doesn’t have a nagging injury? Once again, we’re stressing one plane over and over and over again without addressing the other two planes. So, common sense would tell you that you’re eventually going to break down those muscles leading to injury. There are clinicians that even believe that it’s not necessarily the amount of force that leads to arthritis, but it’s the frequency and duration that are the primary culprits of bad feet, knees, and hips. The primary focus of a strength training program is injury prevention.  Cross country completely ignores that focus.