How to add 10" to your Vertical Jump in a Month | Training Outline

Unveiling the Vertical Jump Program and Athlete Success All right. Welcome back to Define Gravity podcast with Zach Goodman. Today I'm going to give you a vertical jump kind of program outline or progression that we had from this past month. I shared on social media that at least one of our kids, he had a nine inch increase to his vertical jump. He went from into the 20 ones into the 30s and this was from September 2nd to September 30th. So basically a month, maybe a little under a month that we had throughout this training cycle. There was a lot of coaches that reached out saying, hey, will you, you know, talk about what you guys did. Will you share like the training cycle? And I put on X that I would talk about the training cycle, what exactly we did and how this athlete was able to make such good progress. He was not the only athlete that had really, really big improvements over the last, you know, really month of September. We had a lot of athletes, at least a few that I can think of just within that class that had went up, you know, 6 to 8 inches on their vertical. I think my biggest improvement for the month was a kid that went from about 1515 five into like the 20 fives, like within this month, a kid that just started training with me, a wrestler that that went up like 10 inches on his vertical jump. And of course, everything else kind of went up too. So yeah, let's kind of hear what we're talking about today. OK? So we train four times a week. If you listen to the podcast, you know that we train an upper and lower split. We're training the upper body Mondays and Thursdays. We pair that with our Sprint work, and then we're training our lower body Tuesdays and Fridays, and we pair that with our jump work. That's kind of a general outline of what we follow all year round. That doesn't really change at all. OK, so we train four times a week and this athlete, we're going to cover just the lower body training. We can talk about sprinting. We recently got a treadmill this past summer. So I can and kind of breakdown what we're doing with that. We've seen some really, really good Sprint PRS. This particular kid, I'm going to overview his training today, he gained 3 miles an hour to his 20 yard dash. So he went up not not across a 40 yard fly he gains, He went up 3 mph on a 20 yard dash. So from zero to 20, he had three miles an hour to that. You know, our goal is to try to get his 60 yard down as he's a baseball kid and he's going to do all the testing and stuff PBR. So he had some pretty outstanding Sprint progress as well, along with all his other stuff. So if you guys want me to talk about Shred Mill and talk about what we're doing with that, I can. Detailed Tuesday Lower Body Jump and Strength Session So lower body training twice a week, OK? We train Tuesdays and Fridays with the lower body. So I'm going to kind of outline what we did, OK, We always start every lower body workout with loaded jumps. OK, This particular training cycle we start with our dumbbell jumps. That's pretty typical for us. We always start with our dumbbell jumps first. That's kind of like the way I like to structure. I like to jump and then squat. So we'll know this particular way we did 4 Max effort dumbbell jumps. We've been experimenting with upwards of eight to 10, but with time purposes, with the first month of school kind of underway to make sure that, you know, kids are not only getting their training done, but they are kind of getting it done in an efficient manner. We had to peel back the volume a little bit with the dumbbell jumps from you know what we're using about 8 to 10 dumbbell jumps over the summer to about four. But this particular athlete did not do any 8 to 10 dumbbell jumps. He was using 4 the whole time because he really just started working with me. So we did 4 Max ever dumbbell jumps. This particular athlete already has a training history. He's already relatively strong, not extremely strong, but you know, already has some muscle mass. He's already lifted some weights. He's a pretty active kid. He's going to be, he's a junior in high school now, a pretty solid athlete, not a freak or anything, just a solid kid that you know, has has hit some weights and done a little bit of bodybuilding type workouts. So we already had some prerequisite muscle, so he did 4. We started the workouts with four dumbbell jumps. OK, these are Max effort on the OVR. I'm wearing my OVR shirt. Not sponsored or anything, but I like their products. We use their products almost every single day so big fan of them so shout out to them and Michael Fahey who who's one of their Co founders. OK so we did our 4 dumbbell jumps on the OVR jump. So every single day we come in from lower body he would do he would follow 303540 waves. That means that week one of the wave, he did 30 LB dumbbells in each hands. He would take 4 dumbbell jumps. He would track every jump that he did. The next week he did 35, next week 40. So a three-week pendulum wave with the with the dumbbells that was based off of his box swap. This particular kid, he's gained about 60 ish pounds to his box swap, maybe a little bit more. So he actually started with like the 20s, but then we kind of progressed him pretty much right away to the 30s because I realized, oh, this kid has a lot of juice to squeeze and the and the strength. So I just bumped him right to the, the 303540 wave kind of right off the RIP. And with his box squats particularly like we had to do a little bit of technique work, like we had to really focus on him unloading the hips and pausing in the bottom. He, he's never really done that style of squatting before. So that was something we kind of had to work. But dumbbell jump 303540 about 30 to 60 seconds between and we tracked that twice a week, every single week. So he's getting dumbbell jump frequency 2 * a week, about four Max separate dumbbell jumps all tracked, and again, trying to PR those every time. After our dumbbell vertical jumps, we went right into unloaded vertical jumps. So there's basic vertical jumps on the OVR. We did about 6 on average. If it was a good jump day and kids were really, you know, hitting PR, sometimes I just let them keep jumping just to see what happens. This particular kid was hitting PR basically every session or pretty, pretty damn close. Like I said, we went up 9 inches on his vertical jump and there were some kids that I had a kid go up 10 inches on a vertical jump this past month. But I have. It's pretty typical when kids first start training to add about four to six inches of their vertical jump, like right off the RIP. Or if they're coming in from like an in season where they don't train very frequently, they usually can put out about four to six inches in that first month. Then after that, as they become more trained, we're looking at about an inch, inch and a half, two inches a month pretty much going forward every month. And again, that will determine if the kids gaining body weight that might slow, if the kids not getting body weight, that will speed up. So again, it just kind of cycles throughout the year, kind of works out every year. So vertical jumps, we did about 6 Max effort, all the OVR jump, same thing, 3060 seconds between each of his jumps. He was able to you know, PR those most days and then we went into our strength. So we would do Dumbo jumps, vertical jumps. Then we go right into our strength. We did box blocks into foam. We're using a 12 inch box, 6 inch foam pad. If you want that pad that I use, I don't buy it awfully FTSI get them off Amazon. You're much cheaper. We have them for all of our kids for every rack. If you want that, either go on my X and like search it or message me and I I can send you the link to that, But I've a lot of coaches have asked about that. I've sent it to every single person who's texting me or messaging me about it. OK, so those foam pads are available on Amazon. They're just a really like cushiony, like very soft foam pads. So they sink right into that 12 inch box. It's really awesome. If I might do a podcast, that why we kind of change to the soft pad. The the short answer is it's cute kids to push their feet more. They really can't hinge when they have that soft pad. Secondarily, it's allowed them to recover a bit faster, so they're able to squat heavier more frequently. And that's really helped us, especially because kids that are young that really don't want to push their feet yet typically want to hinge other squats. So that's kind of helped me out quite a bit. But box went into foam. We follow our brief maximal tension wave. This is a very typical one for us. We went 545342 OK, and again, that was per session. So again, they're like 3 by 5 and then do a three by four and load, then back to a three by 5 keep load the same and Rep then just triples, add more load, then the fours keep load the same and Rep. My buddy Michael Fahey, he did an outline in XI think I commented on it basically outlining kind of like how I sent the what we talked about on his podcast, how I set up a three-week wave on my bench manual. I have a bunch of example waves that we'll use the the one that he, I think outline was like, I think it was a 645342. That's a that's a pretty good one that I use, but this one went 545342. That's kind of what he followed where this particular athlete after box Watts again, his box went up like 60 lbs over the last three ish weeks of training. So his box what really flew. It was awesome. That's why his vertical jumps also flew. His relative strength rose pretty quickly. Barbell RDLS, we did those afterwards. So we went squat, we jump, we squatted, we did our barbell RDL. We always do a heavy hinge after we squat. We did high box step UPS. This is something new that I haven't had the kids do yet, so I've really been experimenting with high box step UPS. What I mean by high boxes is instead of stepping up in like a 12 inch or 16 inch box, kids are stepping up in like 18 to 24 inch boxes. And what that allows, if you look at the knee, it allows deep knee flexion, kind of a unilateral deep knee flexion type movement. It's a little bit different than anything else we've done. So you're also overcoming combination. It's just a different stimulus. And so we did a lot of high box step UPS. This really the last like 6 weeks or so. This athlete use a 24 inch box just based off his height. So when he steps up, he's getting really deep knee flexion to step up with weight. And that's been awesome. I also noticed this really trained the heck out of the hip flexors and all those muscles that are really into that pushing that acceleration phase. And it's a pretty low stress movement as far as the low back goes. So you can train these pretty hard and not feel super fatigued afterwards. So I like these as accessory movement. And then we wrapped up with ATP March. We followed A454560 wave so kids would March with heavier weights for 45 seconds, 45 seconds, you know, try to increase load the second week. And then the third week we bumped up to 60 seconds. I'm not a huge fan of like the, you know, two-minute, 3 minute marches. I know some people use it to really long duration marches. I'm more of a fan of stacking heavier load marches for shorter periods of time. That's just, that's just what I prefer and that's kind of what I've seen kids are, are more consistent with and they kind of push you a bit harder, especially with the load if they know if they're not going to be in the ATP for, you know, two or three minutes. So that was session 1, jump spot, squat, heavy hinge, high back step UPS, March. OK, we did that every Tuesday. Friday Lower Body: Rack Pulls and Unilateral Training OK, our lower two, we did dumbbell vertical jumps and vertical jumps again. So we're repeating. We're jumping twice a week, Max effort, exact same way as we did Tuesday, but we do this on a Friday box squad into foam. Again, we'll find a brief maximal tension method in the waves that I kind of have set up. So again this if we squatted for the particular first week was a set of five, you know, sets of five on Tuesday, Friday would be sets of four. We increase load, OK. We're using the undulating kind of periodization model where we're changing schemes, we're changing volumes and intensities daily and it kind of looks just again kind of like a undulating periodization scheme. We're not just starting with high reps and going down to low reps We are undulating every week, OK. But again, on my bench manual that I've I put out in the summertime that outlines everything on there. So if you want to look at that, feel free to hit me up. That is available. So box squats, rack pull, this is something that we've been pushing quite a bit to last like 9 weeks of training. I love rack pull so much. We do these out of the mid shin. So we have straps in our racks. We don't have the pin. We have pins on the other side. We have a sword X racks and straps. So we'll set the strap to about the middle of your shin. And I love rack pulls for athletes. I feel like it allows a lot of our kids to start hinging really heavy really quickly because they're pulling out of, you know, right off of a strap. I feel like it also allows you to accumulate a bit more reps pulling out of the rack. Plus it puts you in a dis not an advantageous position for most kids. Most kids really, that middle of your shin is a pain in the ass for a lot of a lot of lifters and athletes that kind of overcome that first initial pull off the floor. You get some momentum acceleration from the bar. You can kind of like kind of outrun that that shin to knee when you put the bar right in the middle of your shin, you can't really outrun it from the floor. So it really builds the hell out of posterior chains. So a big fan of that. We followed A553 wave. So we did some sets of five week, one sets of five in Week 2. We did this once a week and then triples in the last week. OK, I like rack pulls. Typically for reps I've done them up to 8 reps I've done them down to 1 Rep for my athletes, especially because we squat so heavy. I prefer them to use them more of as an accessory supplemental lift and more of like a Max effort type lift. And that's just what we do. Front foot of a split squats after the rack pulls we used to, so we used to do front foot of a split squats off a 12 inch box. I lowered that height to a 45 LB bumper plate, which is about 3 to 4 inches off the ground. So they'll elevate slightly elevate the front foot and they use a 45 LB bumper and they do split squats. And what I'm looking for there is I'm looking for that knee to go over the toe. I'm really looking for like really deep flexion and looking for their head flexions and work really hard to be them basically fully extended. It's what I'm looking for, the front foot elevated split squat. And those are awesome. So we did those and then we finished up Fridays we're going to reverse hypers to traction the spine. OK. So that's kind of the outline of what we did for those two lower body workouts. Unlocking Vertical Jump Gains: Core Principles and Results Again, we're jumping twice a week. We are heavy squatting twice a week. We are heavy hinging twice a week. We are getting some unilateral stuff and then we are getting traction and we are addressing the foot and ankle. We do additional foot and ankle and like short ground contact plows and things on our upper body days before we Sprint. This is just kind of covering the the vertical jump progression. Again, if you guys want me to outline what we did for the Sprint and upper body stuff, I can do that. But this is really what drove this kids. This kids jump up, OK. We got him stronger on productive exercises, OK. We were able to add a lot of load and and a lot of strength to those increases route of strength. He jumped very frequently, probably more food than he's ever jumped in his life. And we disrupted the combination through loaded jumps guy using the dumbbell jump wave on the OVR. So this cable was able to track every single jump he did, get feedback on every jump he did and be very intentional about pushing those numbers up. And that's really the recipe to drive, to drive the jumps is that you need to be very intentional. You need to jump frequent and intense, and then you need to swap frequent and intense. The volume doesn't have to be crazy, but you have to hit frequent intense exposures if you want to drive those numbers up pretty quickly. OK, this kid still, he's in an offseason right now, but he's still playing baseball and doing baseball stuff. So it's not like he's completely away from everything else, but he's not in like the middle of a hard grinding season. So that helps out him quite a bit to drive those verticals up. Conversely, the kid that had a 10 inches in vertical, he's in like wrestling season. Like he's travelling. He just wrestled the tournament this last week. Luckily for him, he's not cutting any weight. So we haven't been able to like worry about any of that as far as his numbers go. Like he has a lot of energy. He's actually gained. He went from 177 to 197 in literally like a month. Like he gained that much weight. He's never really lifted weights before in his life. Literally gained like 20 lbs. Yeah, I think he said he was 197 at his peak and then like he you know, was really 192 but 177 to like 192 ish. Most days he was 197 going into a meet and he cut a little bit of water off and waited 190 and wrestled it in a meet and I think Tennessee or something like that. Anyways though had great progress followed the exact same progression. Different loads obviously cause different athletes, but the same like kind of exercise scheme sequence training sessions set up all the same thing had ton. I've had athletes that have trained me for a while hit 3-4 inches PRS this training wave. So it's just been really productive for all of our kids. And again, not every kids going to level up or NPR at the same rate, but you're going to see predictability of systems work. They repeat over and over again. Every kid gets results, every kid improves. Again, the only thing that kind of holds them back is like how much they sleep, how much they eat, their genetics. And then there's stress outside of the training sessions. But again, all you can ask for in a training session or all you can ask for in a training wave is does every kid that applies effort consistently see improvement? If that's happening, your training is solid. Not every kids going to add 6 plus inches to their vertical jump, but again, this is a very clear outline of I had like 10 athletes add more than 6 inches in vertical jump and literally this month of trading. So if there was any productive trading wave, this is what I can give you. Setting Future Goals and Accessing Training Resources This is exactly what we did. We are our training wave changes next week. So we are changing some exercises out, we're changing out some main lifts, we're changing out some accessories. So we will see how the training continues to progress. But I'm pretty happy with that first month of school kind of where we're at, where we're going. Hopefully a lot more kids adding into the 30s, hopefully more kids adding into that 30 fives. And hopefully we can get some athletes into the 40 inch club on the OVR hitting 40s. And the OVR is like a 45 or something, a typical system. So it's been fun because it's been challenging, right? And it also kind of reminds me is like when that bar is sad, like kids think it's 40 thought really like kind of another jump system that might be like a 4445 inch vertical. It just makes me feel like we like when our kids go away and we go to combine and stuff, we out jump everybody we went to. I sent some kids over the summer to a few schools that were using jump mats still and out and they were sophomores and out jumped everybody that had the highest jumps for their class, highest jump in their position groups, highest jumps there. So again, I like training on a system that's a little bit lower because you know when kids go away, they're going to hit huge PRS. It's awesome. So no, the everything's been awesome. I'm I'm trying to get more of these podcast things out. It's just I post so much on on Twitter. I just need to start turning in some of that content that I put on there just in the podcast for putting out. But if you have any questions, let me know. That's been it for this training. Hopefully you got some out of this. Hopefully you kind of see what we're doing. Again, if you need clarification things, message me, text me. You have my number. I'm more than happy to kind of overdo some of the things we're doing. And again, if you want access to my athletes training, train heroic Ioffer literally full access to everything we do every single week all year round on there. So I have coaches, I have athletes on there. I have all, I have parents that have kids that pay for that. And again, it's not customizable to you, but it's exactly what my kids are doing. So there's people who will follow verbatim. There's people who will take certain things, take the dumbbell jump waves, take the box squat waves, and they'll use it for their own training. So that's available. And if you want customized training, it's also available. If you train ROIC, message me, I'll have you fill out a form and we will dial in your training for your specific situation. OK, So both of those things are available if you are interested in kind of learning more, doing more of the system that I'm using for my kids. OK, Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it. OK, I am out of here.