Three Simple and Valuable Things You Can Do to Improve Your Vertical Jump

I know, jumping higher and higher is a dream of all, it was mine and therefore yours, too.

It is not impossible, indeed!... And I am going to tell you more. You can get the best results, not only working very hard. You can do all you want, but there will be a point beyond which you cannot go.
Thus, where and how can you act?

The steps that you must accomplish to appreciably improve your vertical jump are basically three:

1. First, you can act effectively on your body weight, that should be as perfect as possible. The fat is a sinker and it has greater inertia than the muscles, thus greatly reducing your movement speed. Your training must therefore always match with a proper nutrition. Eating too much and badly is contraindicated for any sport. In particular you should pay attention to high glycemic index food (bread, rice, and especially refined sugars, etc..), because their excessive intake brings to rapidly increase fat deposits.

2. A second thing you must think about is improving strength without adding too much muscle mass. You must therefore work with loads or weights to strengthen back, shoulders and quadriceps.

3. A third thing you must do, is expressed in a very simple concept, but too often neglected by many athletes and I am going to disclose it: do you want to learn to jump better and higher? Then, you must jump! You have to practice jumping! Sounds odd, huh? Yet any skill improves by repeating itself, running it again and again even in various forms.

Only in this way you can begin to learn how to really bring out your true vertical jump maximum expression.

5 Levels To Be A True Champion

To become Number 1 in sports, first of all you have to know what distinguish this number from numbers 2, 3, 4,...

Imagine a building composed of several levels and try to figure out at which level you are.

Level #1
To the basis, you’ll find all those who makes sports just…for sport. They do sports for fun, in Sunday tournaments. They train a bit, they have some fun, and they sometimes go out for dinner on Friday nights. There is nothing wrong and nothing to blame in this, it’s one of the many ways to practise sport. Tournament is a break between a laugh and another. Result is not that important. This people try not to improve but to keep form at most, the right compromise between efforts and fun.

If you don’t fit in here, you can try to go a little up:

Level #2
In this level you’ll find players who live on the brink of victory. They train and work hard, but they're never on the level. They probably have the best shoes on the market, but when it comes to go in and show, they could be barefoot. They’re pushed buy a strong passion, the only reason that keep them in gym, but they’re dominated by fear of mistake and so they will hardly improve.

If you don’t even feel to fit with this level you can go up a little bit:

Level #3
Here you’ll find good players, who work hard and aren’t worried about doing mistakes because their purpose is to improve. In tournaments, if they have to make decisions, they do it without worrying about consequences, the important thing is to take the best choice among those available. They aren’t infinite talented, but their courage and their constancy make them strong and able players. They won many trophies and personal awards and are always a good example.

If you don’t find yourself among these athletes yet, then you have a talent who stays on the top:

Level #4
Here you have the luck to have amazing physical gifts and the skill to propel them daily with hard work and efforts. Often your matches come from divine inspiration and your play is fluid and always inspired. You are one of that few players in the world that do thing with ease and it’s good to see you play.

But, in my personal rank, there is an additional level in the building to examine: the Foundations, where Real Champions are.

Level #5
In this zone, there are certain players not remarkable, not visible, but who are the most important. Maybe they aren’t the most talented, but they are the ones from whom you can learn the most part of sports and life. Their choices are never rash, but they contemplate situation, conditions, times and people.

I met many players and many champions, but they are really a few thing without the foundations. I saw teams made of wonders lose because without these elements, I saw little teams grow battleship-like because of the presence of one or two of them.

All of us can go to the foundation because we’re not talking only about talent, about physical qualities, about performances, but about the person you are before the athlete.

How To Improve Standing Vertical Jump

Let's get quite right into it...


The main component to increasing a standing vertical jump is strength.
This is why you will find many dunkers who have skinny legs, can jump out of the gym on an approach, but ask them to stand under the rim and jump and you will be surprised at what you see.
During an approach jump velocity can be gathered, and if the jumper is coordinates that forward momentum can be transferred to upward momentum.
A seasoned approach jumper will have also strengthened their tendons and the plyometric response of their body. Basically their body and tendons work together to use the energy from the approach and send it skyward. You can see this effect for your self by jumping off a small height and seeing how much higher you jump when you have jumped off a box. If possible keep raising the height of the box until the jump no longer increases. This is the height at which you want to be practicing your box jumps.
Everyone should be jumping higher from an approach jump than with a standing vertical jump. If it is not the case, than there is something counter productive with your approach.


By increasing your strength you will be able to improve your standing vertical jump, however the gains will also transfer over to your approach vertical jump.
Training plyometrics (like box jumps) with low ground contact time, and a focus on intensity is going to yield a greatest gain on your approach jump, however it will also show small improvements on your standing jump. Learning to perform the counter movement quickly, will alloy you to take best advantage of the plyometric ability you already have.
Increased flexibility is going to allow you to have greater mobility for both jumping styles, but will yield greater gains in the approach vertical jump which requires more limb movement and mobility. Hip mobility is extremely important.
Improving jumping form is a very good way to increase your vertical, especially your approach vertical. Proper from will help you utilize forward momentum, use glutes and quads correctly to explode, maximize the plyometric effect, properly use your lower back and erectors to create upward momentum, and use your arms to increase your vertical. Once again form will have the greatest impact on your approach vertical, although small gains can be realized in your standing vertical.

Jacob Hiller - Jump Manual

Your Winning Mental Training Program in 6 Moves

Mind’s the limit. As long as mind can conceive that you can do something, you can do it if you really believe it 100 percent.
(Arnold Schwarzenegger)

How Can You Develope a Winning Mindset?
It’s puzzling the number of athletes who pay a little attention to body’s most important muscle: the one that stays between ears. Whoever makes this mistake is meant to mediocrity; equally, teams that ignore mental training are easily detectable, they have low ratings and aren’t able to reach the compactness needed to go to the top.

Mental strength is usually the resolutive factor. Great athletes know how to take control of their own thoughts and their own emotions, and all of us canlearn to do the same. As for every art, many practise is needed, but it’s worth it.

An expert trainer will teach every physical technique as long as they will become automatic and habitual, but a top trainer knows that a fundamental part of training develops in mind.

Try not to fall in the trap of dedicating all your energy exclusively to physical exercise. Complete all your efforts with a mental training, that will strengthen your positive thinking and your positive emotions to get positive results.


Here are some effective techniques to sharpen you mental capacities. Results will be very surprising.

The six phases

1. Deeply relax your body.
2. Develop consciousness and attention.
3. Examine your narrow beliefs.
4. Take the control of your thoughts.
5. Become master of your thoughts.
6. Use a positive creative imagination.

Remind, the key to the success lies in training these capacities until they will remain deeply stuck in your unconscious.

11 Simple Rules For Your Optimal Nutrition

Do you want to improve your health status by following an optimal diet?

Follow these simple rules:

1 - Do 5-6 meals a day
Eat frequently holding by you daily caloric requirements. To feel better, be good looking and a have good health is important to supply energy to your body gradually throughout the whole day. Don’t let too much time pass between two meals, not more of 4 hours. Plan at least 3 principal meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner and 2-3 light meals or snacks. In this way you will have more energy and won’t be hungry. An active person (who does sport) that eats frequently (every 3-4 hours circa) accelerates metabolism keeping the energy levels stable all day long. Reducing the number of meals metabolism get slower and less calories will be burnt.

2 – Combine carbohydrates and proteins in every meal
Our body works better with the right equilibrium of proteins and carbohydrates. Proteins are essential for muscles formation, immune system keeping and insulin levels stabilizing, thus providing constant energy all day long. Moreover proteins sate better and appetite decreases. So avoid a carbohydrates-rich nutrition, and offset proteins and carbohydrates.

3 – Choose right portions
Portions’ dimensions are important to the weight control. By and large a portion is equivalent to the quantity of food you can hold in your hand’s palm. For example, if half a cup of rice or of chicken breasts stay on the palm of your hand, thus that is your portion. Do the same with vegetables and all the other food. For main meals choose a portion of proteins, one of carbohydrates and/or vegetables from the list of the 7 foods. Eat at least 2 portions of vegetables a day.

4 – Plan meals in advance
Before you begin your training program, try different recipes and choose those that are more suitable for you and the best matches. Thus you will be ready to get off on the right foot. So, if you can, prepare meals in advance or program your menu of the day, or of the week, so to decrease temptations and to follow more easily your program.

5 – Improve the wrong choices
Instead of the usual chocolate snacks, eat an energetic bar only. Use skimmed milk or partially-skimmed milk, not full-cream. Choose a low fat yoghurt instead of full-cream ones. Cook meat on the grill rather than frying it with oil.

6 – Drink at least 10 glasses of water
When you follow a training, nutrition and integration program is very important to drink water, at least a glass during every meal and 4-5 during the day. If you drink “light” beverages (sugar free), tea or coffee, because of their diuretic effect, you’ll have to compensate drinking at least another glass of water.

7 – Don’t eat immediately before or after training
If you can, train in the morning as you wake up with empty stomach to burn more fats.
Moreover, eating not before an hour from training increases even more the fat-burning effect. Last, don’t eat immediately before you go to sleep.


8 – Use high quality supplements
Supplements can help in covering nutritional lacks and in increasing performances. When you buy supplements, choose those Companies that invest in research to improve efficiency of their products.

9 – Find right motivations
Put a purpose and write it so you can see it in every moment of the day. Shoot some photos “before” the beginning of the program and set a date to shoot photos “after”, trying to reach the physical form you want.

10 – Aim to constancy rather than to perfection
It will occasionally happen to eat meals or snacks that are out of the list of the recommended foods. When it happens don’t let you go, enjoy your “distraction” and come back to your program with the next meal.

11 – Reward yourself!!!
Sometimes award yourself with your favourite food: pizza, ice-cream, etc…

How To Eat And Keep A Good Physical Shape Without The Fear Of Fat

Keeping the shape is not a mirage, following a few simple tips you can reach a good physical form and preserve your health. Lipids are important nourishments for our body, they not only bring calories, but as for carbohydrates and proteins, they have very important metabolic functions and so they have not to be demonized.

As usual is the quantity to make the difference, and a food can be useful or harmful according to its quantity. Lipids are an important source of essential fat acids and liposoluble vitamins (A, D, E, K), which are all necessary for life. The spreading sedentariness put us up against a long series of problems and often our answer isn’t to gift us with some spare time, but instead it’s to blame someone or something: but it’s not lipids’ fault!

Obesity and overweight found their richest soil in social progress: a great availability of food and a very few physical effort to get it; it determines a radical change in lifestyle, which brings to a poor expenditure of energy and consequentially brings to a population that tends more and more to over weight and often to obesity!

If you add to all of this a poor knowledge about foods’ nutritional value, it’s easy to understand how this condition can become a spreading social phenomenon. The most expert nutritionists ask people to read nutritional tags and it’s common in supermarkets to see people reading labels on boxes. But it’s equally easy to see how sometimes those people reject bakery food containing butter preferring the ones containing vegetal fats, without understanding that foods containing butter are of higher quality. And it’s equally easy to see people having snack with four chocolate “innocent cookies”, without realising that they just brought in a calories quantity equal to a 100 g pig steak!

The meaning is: it’s the global caloric balance to make the difference, that is calories brought in within a day! Changing dietary habits can yet be very hard and it represents a key point on which many diets fail: if I use to keep on my desk cookies or snacks, it will be very easy to go over the daily caloric quantity and then I won’t reach the goal I set. So it’s very important doing snacks, in mid-morning or mid-afternoon, that have a little caloric contribution, but with a filler effect, to allow you to arrive to the main meal a little hungry and without any difficulties.

Examples: fruit, yoghurt, vegetables, etc….To avoid: cold cuts, chocolate, candies, fast food, gassy drinks and any sweets. It’s a good habit to have a complete breakfast and if you have not enough time for a lunch because of you work, it would be a good alternative to eat a well balanced equivalent meal.

Features of a good equivalent meal:

- Balanced in carbohydrate, protein and lipid quantities:
- It has to give a good sense of surfeit
- Good digestibility and good taste.

Equivalent meal arises to be sure about what is brought in, to exceed not about those calories which represent the typical referral parameter.
Another good suggestion is to entrust to expert professionals, avoiding those dangerous diets “lemon-based”…”apple-based”…”melon-based”…or any other summer ideas up to-date.
A safe loss of weight, and above all lasting, always passes by expert professionals, doctors or expert nutritionists.

Always remember that too many calories mean too many fuel, and our body doesn’t waste it…it absorbs it in the form of lipids, but again…it’s not lipids’ fault!

Tips to Improve Strength

During a sport season, strength is a very important feature in every work program, especially during wintertime, even if is good to do recalls during the whole year.

Strength has many different components (stamina, power or speed), when you are on the court being strong means to be able to push efficiently with “longer gears”, and this makes the difference from an athlete to another.

For example, how can strength be trained? Recent studies have shown that training in gym using is useful to young people and beginners, less useful to an evolved athlete because it determines a lag in reaching physical shape at the beginning of the season, also because, once you stop training with loads, 4 up to 6 weeks occur to burn off muscular fatigue.

Moreover, a wrong usage of loads can give a muscular mass increase and a very negative consequence for your weight/power ratio (that’s true for many sports) with a consequential loss of performances.


Bearing that in mind, we have to admit that with the cold season, when light hours go decreasing, temperatures become less pleasant and more importantly you find yourself in that period from November to December, when you can dedicate to other sports (the so-called cross-training with run, swimming, cross-country skiing, walks on mountains) and it is possible and useful to withdraw with gym and generally with indoor training. The aim is to keep a minimum amount of aerobic and muscular tone conditioning using a “circuit-based” work, through which different muscular areas (legs, arms, torso’s muscles) are involved, using loads that are about the 50-60% of the maximum for two minutes circa of use.

Thank to this method, cardiac frequency keeps a low rhythm, that is an aerobic work, muscles work with no fatigue thus keeping tone and stress resistance. Very important is the work of “transfer” done on bike or on spinning bike, after work done on machinery.

Period to be dedicated to this kind of work in gym, generally lasts not more than six weeks.

How can strength be fed? The supplementary feeding during workout or following the sessions during which exercises are planned for the development of force, is very important, especially with regard to recovery. After every workout it’s necessary first to reinstate the sugars used in efforts given the importance of amino acids and proteins; hard work leads to micro-lesions at the level of muscle tissue that must be quickly repaired, so as to allow, during the anabolic phase, improving of the contractile ability of the muscle itself and expression of the force.
Only in this way you can get some good improvements.