It’s funny, really. The basketball public generally believes that skills like jumping ability and quickness are innate skills – you are either born a great leaper or not. Basketball people generally believe that the be
st athletes make the best players. Therefore, basketball talent is born, not made. However, every day, millions of players play basketball and train to be basketball players. Seems foolhardy if players are born, not made, right?
The greatest myth is jumping ability. People look at a player who is an explosive leaper like Russell Westbrook and believe that he was born that way. After all, some of the best leapers brag about their 7th grade dunks. Not Westbrook:
To be honest, I was never really jumping that high when I was younger. I had to work on it. I didn’t dunk for the first time until the last game of my senior year in high school. I didn’t really start dunking regularly until college. I just work on my legs and my core: Running the stairs, squats, working my hamstrings and quads. Then just sit-ups for my core.
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This video is pretty awesome and I enjoyed watching it. Yeah, you are born for that talent and it’s up to you how you’ll nourish it.
A fundamental law of how to jump higher in any sports is that all people were created equal. Even women have the same ability to build muscles as a man. They can train to make the same height gains as men. The key to having an amazing vertical jump is to increase the right kind of muscle training. Plyometrics are the best way to train and increase fast twitch muscle fibers to get the vertical jump you want.