How To Jump Higher For Basketball

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how to jump higher in basketball. Now, in basketball, when you're jumping, like in any other sport, you're working a key set of muscles in order in your lower body. We're going to talk about those in detail now and show you exercises you can do to improve them.

First of all, to push off, when you're leaving the floor, you're working your ankle. To get your ankle stronger, you need to get stronger calves. Next, you bend the knee.

To bend the knee, you need stronger quads. You push off from the hip, you extend the hip, you need stronger hamstrings and glutes. So, these are the 4 key muscles for getting more strength, more power and to be better in basketball - the glutes, the hamstrings, the quads and the calf.

So, you need to think of exercises, or when you think of exercises which work all those, one really, really good way of doing this is doing a squat followed by a jump. Here, squat down, jumping up, squat down, jumping up. The jumping up bits really cool, where you leave the floor, because that's the bit where the ankle flexes really work to drive up and you're working your quads, hamstrings and glutes like we said.

To add an extra realism into our training, we can do a couple of things. The first thing we're going to do is make you a bit off-balance because when you're playing a sport like basketball, you're not in a static way, just jumping up and down .You're moving and dodging all the time.

So, for this exercise, as we jump up and down, we're going to do it the same but only land on one leg. This adds an element of balance and proprioception and kinetic awareness to make it more similar to a game time situation. What that does is stabilizes and neutralizes the muscles, tiny ones all around the ankle, they get to fire all the time when you land because you're off balance and they get stronger.

The stronger they are, the less chance you are going to wobble or fall over. And once you've got the hang of the last exercise, you add another specific element into it, such as holding a ball. It doesn't have to be a basketball, but as long as it's kind of heavy and it makes you think about something else other than your feet, then it's a good idea.

So, to do our jumps, landing on 1 leg while holding a ball, you can see I'm slightly off balance because I can't use my arms to stabilize anymore which is just like it is in basketball. If you're holding the ball or diving to get a ball, you can't always jump quite cleanly so it makes it much more kind of specific to a real basketball situation. So, that's my tips to jump higher in basketball.
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