How To Increase Your Vertical Leap Without Machines

The first thing you want to do is increase your body weight. This doesn't mean gaining body weight, it means adding weight to your body. This can be accomplished by wearing ankle weights, a gravity belt or even wearing a book bag full of books. Wear this additional weight every day during normal daily activities.

Perform plyometric (plyo) drills. Plyometric training, or jump training, is characterized by loading and contracting a muscle in a short time frame for a series of reps. A simple example of this would be hopscotch or jumping rope. The muscles are loaded and unloaded rapidly causing forceful contractions while recruiting a lot of muscle fiber. A great way to increase your vertical leap would be performing box jumps. This is done by simply standing in front of a plyo box, squatting down and jumping on top of the box. Boxes at the gym vary in height from 6 to 36 inches. Start off jumping on the 6-inch box and work your way up to the 36-inch box.

Here is a sample workout. After a 5- to 10-minute warmup, perform 10 sets of 6 to 10 reps 3 days a week on alternating days. Finish with a 5- to 10-minute cool down. Increase the box size every 2 weeks. Boxes can be found at any fitness store, website or they can be built from scratch out of plywood. After you can successfully hop onto a 36-inch plyo box, start from the beginning and wear the gravity belt. Then run through the whole series of box heights again.

Other great tools for increasing vertical leap are water sprints and jumps. Both of these exercises should be done in shallow water about knee height. This amount of water adds nice resistance. After a good warmup, sprint from one end of a pool to the other. When you get to the other side, squat down and try to leap out of the water. Perform 6 to 10 jumps, then sprint back to the other side. Rest for 60 seconds then sprint to the other side and repeat the whole sequence 10 times. This workout should be interchanged with the plyo box jump workout. For one week do this workout twice and the box jump workout once. Then alternate the following week doing the box jump workout twice and the water workout once.

Being that plyometric training is very intense, the off days between the workouts should be devoted to recovery. But this recovery is not doing nothing. It should be active recovery in the form of light cardio and stretching. This will keep lactic acid at bay and help reduce the chances of pulled muscles and ligaments, and tendon damage. It can be something as simple as 30 to 45 minutes of light jogging or fast paced walking. But this doesn't mean the resistance equipment should not be worn. Always wear the ankle weights or gravity belt. The only time they should not be worn is when you are sleeping or in the pool.

Attending yoga classes on the off days would be good to stretch out your body. Don't wear the extra weights during yoga.

Balance is another important issue when it comes to increasing vertical leap. A good way to increase your balance is by standing on a BOSU. It helps to strengthen connective tissue around the ankles, knees and hips. This will help prevent injuries and make contact to and from the ground a lot more effective. A good way to factor this in is by standing on it between sets while performing the box jump workout. Start off standing on both feet, then work your way up to standing on one foot at a time for 30 seconds.