When athletes are learning how to increase vertical leap they are often bombarded with pages of information that results in a brain overload! When we are trying to learn something new often we go out trying to find out as much information as we possible can about the subject. In this case we would go out and try to find out as much as we can about how to increase your vertical jump. When it comes to learning how your body works when you jump and what muscle areas and energy you need to increase your ability to jump many athletes get confused from conflicting information. Don't worry, I was at that stage once before as well where I was trying to sort through the pages and pages of information that I had found out about how to increase vertical leap. Oh, and don't forget the shelves of books and reams of information scattered across my desk.

When it comes to working out one of the important factors is to have good nutrition. Did you know that when you are training your body it is using carbohydrates and proteins to fuel your body. But what happens once it runs out of these fuels? It starts to break down your muscles and use them as an energy source. This is why it is important to have a healthy, balanced and nutritional diet to prevent you from losing muscle power instead of gain it.

A common question I am asked about how to increase vertical jump is if hereditary factors plays a role. Yes some people are just naturally gifted jumpers because of their fast twitch muscle fiber to slow twitch muscle fiber ratio. The more fast twitch muscle fibers you have the more efficiently you are able to create force in a minimal amount of time. However, when it comes to this ratio you may not be able to change the fibers. However, you can change how quickly to recruit the generate power and also how much force they can generate. So realistically, if you think about hereditary factors, it does not play a major role in how high a person can jump.

Another factor that many athletes don't know about when learning how to increase vertical jump is that there are different types of strength that affect how well you can recruit muscles to generate force to jump. When learning how to increase vertical jump we can split strength into 3 sub categories of absolute/limit strength, explosive strength and reactive strength. Absolute/limit strength is the foundation of all strength and is often the one that needs to be improved first before any of the other strengths. When we are learning how to increase vertical jump we need to focus on doing minimal reps with maximum effort because we are trying to train our explosive muscles, not our endurance muscles.