Over the past few months I’ve been putting out a lot of information on some of the various modalities I use to increase vertical jump with my athletes. I’ve found that a modified triphasic approach is one of the best methods for this with the initial phase being an isometric focus. Now we’re talking about the next phase including these eccentric exercises for vertical jump.
Check out these 2 Isometric Strength Exercises for Vertical Jump
Now it’s all about the stretch phase of the stretch-shortening cycle or your dynamic movement. Take a jump for example: the portion of the jump where you initially move down and load the movement is the eccentric part of that movement. The more efficient this becomes, the more force you’ll be able to produce out of the actual jump that follows, during the concentric phase.
Training with Eccentric Exercises
I think that eccentric training for vertical jump is so essential, that I break it down even further into two separate constructs:
- Deceleration – Focused Exercises
- Accepting Force
Now these are essentially the same thing because as you decelerate you’re accepting force and vice versa – however the goal is to maximally stress this modality and this approach has really benefit my athletes. Here’s how I do it:
Deceleration
When it comes to deceleration, there’s two ways I like to do this. One is with a high velocity where I may have the athlete perform single leg snap downs, where the athlete balances on one leg standing tall – and then on cue drops down into a bent single legged stance. This forces you to really focus on catching yourself and decelerating through the movement, within the range of motion for your vertical.
- Single leg snap downs
The second way is by utilizing gravity and a bit more force, to train deceleration. I might assign a sprinter step-up where you start with one foot on a bench and the other on the floor. From here, explode vertically bringing both feet into the air. As you land, you are using deceleration to slow yourself down on the descent.
Accepting Force
Your traditional “accepting force” exercises are drills such as depth drops. To do this, you’ll begin standing on a bench or plyo box. From here, you simply step off to land on the ground and accept force through a squat position. This teaches the body to better absorb force, which is responsible for the kinetic energy that sends you skyward in your vertical jump.
You might even want to step this up a notch with some more complicated exercises such as a tuck jump to land in a split lunge position or even vice versa. Both are obviously a lot more aggressive and complex so make sure you’ve got the basic eccentric exercises in before adding these to your program.
Remember that we’re training the lower half to accept as much energy as possible, so that it can create as much energy as possible. Keep in mind however, that eccentric exercises are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting a bigger vertical.
If you’re interested in checking out a full program dedicated to the 44″ vertical jump ย – I urge you to check out the link below:
