Plyometric Exercises to Develop Vertical Displacement

What’s the best plyometric exercise to use when trying to increase ones vertical jump?

The first thing you have to ask is this – are plyometrics the best exercise the improve your vertical jump?  Not what you expected, I’m sure!  Plyometric training is aimed to improve predominantly one of about six subqualities of strength – stretch-shortening cycle, reactive, elastic strength, and speed strength are some of the names for this strength sub-quality.  The strength qualities as I generally present them are in the following order :

Control / stability

General strength / hypertrophy

Maximal strength

Explosive strength

Stretch-shortening cycle strength

Strength Endurance

What about the other 5 strength qualities, that ploymetrics generally speaking don’t affect?  The possibility is that improving any of these sub-qualities could lead to improvement of your vertical jump.  The key to a fast improvement is finding out which is the weak link and fixing it – it may be the stretch-shortening cycle (and therefore plyometric training is applicable) – it may not be. 

The two most likely limiting strength sub-qualities are maximal strength or the stretch-shortening cycle.  Here’s one way I use to determine which of these two is the potential weakness, and then I know how to address the greatest limitation to your performance.

Conduct a vertical jump test and a triple jump test (either 2 leg or altnerating leg for the trip jump) and compare it to a group of similar people who have done the same two tests.  Check your rankings. If you are one of the better in the vertical jump but amongst the poorest in the triple jump, I would suggest focusing on your stretch-shortening cycle through plyometric-like drills.  If you are one of the poorer in the vertical jump but amongst the best in the triple jump, I would suggest focusing on your maximal strength.

So you can see it is not a simple matter of which ploymetric exerices are best to improve vertical jump! It should be, initially at least, which EXERCISES are best to do to improve my vertical jump!

For the record, my favourite vertical jump plyometric drills are as follows, and developed in the order in which they appear (progressively!):

Single leg on/off box jumps (low height obviously!)

In-depth jump (2 legs – low box to ground to higher box)

Depth Jumps

Hurdle Jumps

© Ian King and King Sports International, Inc. This article is not to be reproduced in part of whole in any format without written permission of the author.

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