Getting A Jump On Landing Safely
At a certain age, your body reaches its maximum height, but for tunately, especially for athletes, there are ways to increase your vertical jump.
“You can do basic exercises, such as squats, deadlifts and traditional strength training exercises to improve your vertical jump,” says certified athletic trainer Daniel Mar Chong of MAR Training. “But you should not just focus on exercises that increase muscular power but also work on stability in the ankles and knees.
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Kainoa Mitchell demonstrates lateral jumps. Starting with both feet on the ground and shoulder-width apart, and knees bent at about a quarter-squat position, jump over the hurdle by extending and driving through the hips. ‘Try to be as efficient as possible,' says Mar Chong. ‘You're trying to use your body to lever into the ground. A lot of kids who are untrained, their knees will knock in when they take off so they're losing some of the force they are generating. You want a nice straight lever into the ground."
“Also, like any athlete, you need to be able to work on your core. If you don’t have good core strength, then you’re not going to be able to control your body up in the air. You also need rotational control because, in most sports, you’re never really jumping straight up, you’re kind of jumping and then turning or jumping at an angle.”
In sports performance, Mar Chong adds that for as much as you can accelerate you have to be able to learn how to decelerate, so for as high as you learn to jump you have to be able to land from that jump. “It doesn’t matter if I can teach you to jump 40 inches up in the air, if you don’t have good control in landing you’re going to blow out your knees fairly quickly,” he explains. “Also, anytime you go into plyometric exercises or anything involved with jumping, it helps to have a trained eye to help you with technique and positioning.
If you’re really serious about improving your performance, you should enlist the support of someone who’s trained.”
Mar Chong, who specializes in sports performance and is a former athletic trainer for University of Hawaii, shares a couple of exercises that can improve your jumping ability. For more information, visit martraining.com.
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