How To Become An Elastic Jumper
What's up, YouTube? My name is Isaiah Rivera, world's highest officially recorded vertical at 50.5 inches. And today, I'm going to be doing a q and a answering your questions. Without further ado, let's get into the first question. I am a very force reliant athlete.
Isaiah:Tips on becoming more elastic, more plyos? Well, to answer this question, first, let's go over why plyometrics are even effective. And to answer that question, first, we need to understand the role of strength and force when you jump. Okay? So strength is basically your ability to apply force to an external object.
Isaiah:Okay? And in jumping, that external resistance is your body's weight. So the more force you can apply to your body weight, theoretically, the higher you can jump. Now having said that, who are the most forceful forceful athletes on the planet? It's usually power lifters and Olympic weight lifters.
Isaiah:They have the highest relative strength levels in the world, especially at the lighter body weights. Relative strength is how strong you are compared to your body weight. Absolute strength is just the max amount of weight that you can push regardless of your body weight. So, that is what strength is. And, force, if you don't know what force is, it's mass times acceleration.
Isaiah:So the more mass you accelerate, the more force you're applying. And when it comes to your body weight, that is the resistance that we are pushing against to jump. Right? That that's also why strength training applies why transfer so well to to jumping. But having said that, why are the strongest athletes in the world not the highest jumpers?
Isaiah:Right? Why aren't Olympic weightlifters and powerlifters all walking around with 50 inch verticals? Because there is another constraint when it comes to jumping and that is the role of time. When you jump, right, a two foot jump. So, this point in the jump when you're going one two, the point from here when my heel first touches the ground to when I'm off the ground on my best jumps ever is about point two six seconds.
Isaiah:So, I have point two six seconds to apply force into the ground. The higher I can get that peak force within that time frame, the higher I'm gonna jump. The higher my velocity is going to be at takeoff. Jumping high is all about what was your max velocity at toe off. K?
Isaiah:So, when you look at a power lifter, yes, they're able to apply an insane amount of force, but they have however long a one rep max takes. Right? It could be five seconds, it could be ten seconds. You have ten seconds to apply as much force as you can. But, what can you do in point two six seconds?
Isaiah:Right? And, when especially for beginners, the more you increase your strength, the more that's gonna be correlated to to your peak force within that given time frame up to a certain extent. Right? There's gonna be a be a point of diminishing returns. So if you get a beginning athlete and you just get his squat stronger, they're going to jump higher.
Isaiah:But as let's say you get their squat to 200 pounds. You if you get it up to 300 pounds, 400 pounds, 500 pounds, they're gonna keep seeing incremental gains, but if they're not periodizing correctly, if they're not doing plyometrics, if they're not jumping, they're not gonna they're gonna see that taper off and not see as much of a transfer. Now, how so you know how to increase strength. Right? How to increase the max force you can generate.
Isaiah:You just do strength training. But, how do you get your peak force to go up in that given time frame? Because if you take two athletes. Right? Let's take athlete a who can squat 300 pounds and athlete b who can squat 300 pounds.
Isaiah:But if athlete b can get to 80% of his max force within point two five seconds and athlete b can only get to 50 of his max force. Athlete a is gonna is gonna be able to jump higher. So, in order to train that, that's called explosive strength. Alright? Explosive explosive strength is how much how much max how much peak force you can generate within a given time frame.
Isaiah:It's also known as power, and an even better term actually to describe that is impulse. So, in order to train that, have to do exercises that increase your explosive strength. The best thing to do that are plyometrics, actually. And, a plyometric activity is anything with a stretch shortening cycle. Stretch shortening cycle is an eccentric muscle contraction followed by an isometric muscle contraction, and then a concentric muscle contraction.
Isaiah:If you don't know what those three are, an eccentric muscle contraction is when your muscle is lengthening under load, an isometric muscle contraction is when the muscle is staying the same length under load, and a concentric muscle action is when the muscle is shortening under load. Anytime those three muscle contractions are followed right after another, it is a stretch shortening cycle. So just to explain it, right, when I squat down, eccentric, there's a brief isometric condition here, and then when I jump up, that there's a contract concentric muscle action. What's cool about that is that the faster you can get your stretch shortening cycle, the more it can augment force production. So if you look at a force velocity curve, has an there's an eccentric side of it, there's a concentric side of it, is positive, negative.
Isaiah:Right? Negative side of the curve, positive side of the curve. For eccentric muscle contractions, the higher the velocities, the higher those eccentric muscle contractions are. Right? The higher the forces you're gonna see.
Isaiah:And then if you are a strong enough athlete to eccentric eccentrically generate all that force and then push up, you're going to jump higher. Reason being is you're gonna be able to stretch your tendons more. So what's really interesting is when you think of, like, an elastic athlete, a lot of athletes think that they're, like, they're getting more out of tendons. You are getting more out of the tendon, but the way you get more out of tendon is by getting stronger, more forceful, more explosive. Your explosive strength goes up.
Isaiah:And you do that through plyometrics. The reason plyometrics are so effective is when you look at the definition of what a plyometric is, a plyometric exercise, it's usually an exercise where you're eccentrically overloading your muscle. And what happens is over time, as you eccentrically load them more, you get more efficient. You get better at doing the plyo, and then you start eccentrically loading it even more, even more, even more. And it spurs on more adaptation because you're overloading your muscles and tendons.
Isaiah:Right? The way adaptation happens is through overload, and plyometrics self intensify as you get better. And, there's a bunch of different ways you can do this, but there's also something called the law of specificity. So, the best plyometric for jumping higher is going to be actually jumping. It's gonna have the most transfer.
Isaiah:So, for an athlete like you that is extremely forceful, but you're not elastic, you just need to jump more. Now, the way to do that is a very complex answer. You have to periodize your training correctly. You have to jump at the correct volume so you don't get hurt. You have to periodize your strength training correctly as well.
Isaiah:And then, you have to surf the entire force velocity curve. We don't wanna just stay at extremes of the force velocity curve. We wanna surf the whole thing so that you have variety and so that you don't plateau. But, the short answer is yes. Do plyometrics, jump more, take away the lifting a little bit because you also might be fatigued from from lifting a lot, and you should see more gains from that.
Isaiah:I know that was really really science heavy. If you have any questions on that, comment down below and I'm going to get to as many of them as I can. I know this is really complex stuff, but it is worth spending your time learning learning these things. Alright. Let's see what the next question is.
Isaiah:Is your training good for footballers? So, I'm assuming you're talking about, in America we call it soccer, anywhere else in the world it's called football. Yes. Our training is extremely helpful for any sport where there's running, change of direction. At the end of the day, everything comes down to applying force into the ground.
Isaiah:Right? When you think of a cutting movement, right, you're running, you stop all your momentum, and then deflect it one way, that's all force production. And if you want to have it transfer more to your sport, you just need to practice the sporting movements. Right? Same thing I was saying earlier.
Isaiah:How do you bridge the gap between force and explosive strength? It's through doing highly specific plyometrics. The most highly specific plyometric you can do is your sport. Right? But you have to be practicing it at max intent.
Isaiah:That is a thing. You're only gonna see adaptations for plyometrics if they are performed as intensely as possible. Next question is, do I still do plyometrics? I'm seeing a theme here. You guys are really interested in this.
Isaiah:I do still do plyometrics because I jump. Right? Jumping is plyometric. But I'm assuming you're talking about the the exercises that you see out there. Depth jumps, jumping exercises, lunge jumps, that type of thing.
Isaiah:Those exercises aren't as highly specific for me. Remember, most specific thing you can do is two foot jumping if you wanna jump higher off two feet, or one foot jumping if you're trying to jump higher off one feet. Pyometrics, over time, we have learned that they serve as more of a general stimulus for me. Alright? So we do keep it in the plan.
Isaiah:It's just it's never I'm never gonna be doing it right when I wanna jump high. Alright? So I there's always periods of time where I work on different things. There's always periods of time where I'm working on hypertrophy, which is the cycle that I was working on this last time. I work on max strength.
Isaiah:I work on rate of force development. I work on plyometrics. All that has a time and place in my training. It's just that the bulk of my work is going to be done doing the boring stuff. Right?
Isaiah:These general cycles. That's gonna be 90% of my training is just building potential for me to take advantage of plyos and more specific cycles later on. So I we we always have the saying at THP, we're training to train. We do these cycles to increase your potential, and then we do the specific work to actualize that potential. Can you explain more about cycles and microcycles?
Isaiah:So, this is really easy. These are terms that are used in periodization. Periodization is literally just planning training so that you can peak your performance at a specific time of year. And, periodizing training, even if you don't have traditional competitions, it's still really effective to periodize your training because it allows you to make long term progress, minimizes plateaus, and minimizes risk of injury. So, within a plan that we periodize, think of periodization as just planning training, we plan it in cycles.
Isaiah:And, there's different types of cycles. There's microcycles, mesocycles, and macrocycles. Think of it as big to small or small to big. Microcycle can even further be broken down by a training day. So you have a training day that you can plan.
Isaiah:A microcycle is usually a one week period. A mesocycle is usually a one month period. And then a macrocycle is anything longer than that. Usually, it's about a three to six month period, but it can go as long as four years. Right?
Isaiah:There's a an Olympic macrocycle, just every four years, and they plan the training accordingly. That's literally all it is. It's how we plan a training day, a week, a month, and then multiple months to years. That's all that's all cycles are. And then within those cycles, we're going to have different focuses.
Isaiah:And there's different ways that you can that you can periodize the training. Right? You can focus on just one quality, which is usually what is done in block periodization, where you just only lift weights. Then you might only do power work, and then you might take weights completely out and do depth jumps on one block. That's block periodization.
Isaiah:But then, there's it goes into even further. There there's sequential periodization where you work on one quality at a time. Concurrent periodization where you work on all qualities at the same time. Conjugate periodization where you work on one quality with a decreased focus on other ones. At THP, we do sequential conjugate periodization where we'll focus on all qualities, but mainly just one.
Isaiah:Right? Sometimes two, but then we keep other qualities at lower volume so that we can maintain those. So that's kind of a broad overview on periodization. So I really should have brought water out here. I'm freaking parched.
Isaiah:After which cycle do you get the most vertical gains? So, the cycle that I usually jump the highest in, it's actually varied and it's changed as I progressed through my career as a jumper. Oh, there's a water bottle out here. I've been saved. You guys just got saved because I was this was gonna be a very short video if I didn't have water.
Isaiah:So the cycles that I've jumped the highest is usually when I do a lot of hypertrophy work and max strength work, and then I taper off of that max strength work. But this last cycle this last vertical jump test where I jumped 50.5, literally the highest jump of my life, what my training looked like up until that point was September. And, you gotta look at the months before. A lot of athletes will attribute their performance to whatever they did the month prior, but it doesn't usually work like that. You have to look at the last six months to a year.
Isaiah:All that work that you did leads to a performance months late a good performance months later down the line. Something that happens really frequently with THP athletes is they'll hop on our coaching, they'll stay on maybe for six months, they're really freaking fatigued, so their vertical might stall out a little bit or something like that. They'll hop off because they think it's not working. It happens almost every time. A month later, they'll come back and they'll be like, yeah, I hopped off your training, jumped the highest of my life.
Isaiah:Usually, you back off, you you had a lot of fatigue and you recover. They jumped the highest ever, and then they end up getting hurt trying to train train themselves, and then they they end up coming back to THP. So, you can't attribute it to what you did the month before. You gotta look at the last six months to a year. Because that's why we train.
Isaiah:Right? So before I jumped my highest, I did hypertrophy work. Then it got really specific with max strength work. Got really really freaking strong. Then I did eccentrically overloaded training.
Isaiah:Got hella fatigue. Was jumping lower. Then I did plyos. Again, super fatigued. My vertical was down to like 46, 47 inches.
Isaiah:And then, I did an entire month where I tapered. Right? I did a a taper is basically a cycle where you're doing decreased volumes. That way you can recover and super compensate. Did that, brought my power clean back up to where near all time highs, and then I jumped my highest ever.
Isaiah:So, it's not necessary that I jumped my highest after a certain cycle. It's was I able to string together about five to six months of good training? That's when I'm I jumped my highest. I jumped my lowest when, you know, I have a lot of competitions. I wasn't overloading my body, and then that's when my barnacle is kinda like iffy.
Isaiah:And then I'll do a cycle, maybe I'll I'll jump a little low after it, and that's when my performance is down. But my best performances are when I strung together six months of training where I'm overloading my body. That's the key. I was overloading my body, subjecting my my biological systems to an environment that it's not used to for a long period of time, and then I back off and recover, and then it's almost always my best performances ever. So, it's a lesson.
Isaiah:Look at the last six months of training. Alright. What keeps you motivated to keep working on your vertical? I'm not I'm not motivated. I have almost completely stopped setting goals, and I make the work the goal.
Isaiah:I've realized that I think as humans, our purpose here on this planet is to work. And when it comes to training, I don't rely on motivation whatsoever. There might be a day where I'm really motivated to get after it. There might be another day where I'm not motivated to work after it. But I've I've been doing this consistently for so long, and I've set my habits so that I don't miss them.
Isaiah:And I train every single day, and I never miss a day. That at this point, it's I just enjoy the process, and that's the key. My goal isn't to jump higher. My goal is to show up every day and train. And as a result of that, I end up jumping higher.
Isaiah:But, I detach myself completely from from the outcome. I'm not I'm not outcome dependent at all. My goal is literally show up every day and train and wake up the next day without feeling more pain. So, as long as I show up and I ask myself, is what I'm doing today gonna make me feel better or worse tomorrow? And, make sure the answer to that is better.
Isaiah:And, then, I'm progressively overloading my body over time using training principles. Right? Applying the principles of progressive overload, variety, specificity, and load management. That's it. I jump higher as a result.
Isaiah:So, yeah, no motivation whatsoever. I've just decided that this is the thing that I was put on this earth to do to and I'm gonna try to make my habits conducive to showing up every single day. Let's see. What's the next question? Can oh, I guess this is a good good point to put this in.
Isaiah:How many THP plans there? Is it just the 99 a month one? We only have one plan. It's the 99 a month one. That price is going to go up.
Isaiah:We're not exactly sure when. Once we hit a certain number of clients, we're gonna jack up the price to to what it used to be, which was 700 a month. And then, we're gonna close slots probably for a couple months. That way, we can focus full quality on the athletes that we have. So, yeah.
Isaiah:I would get in as soon as you can. That way you can lock in that price. But we just have one plan. That's it. One plan for everybody.
Isaiah:Alright. Conventional deadlifts or sumo deadlifts to jump higher. So this is a gonna be a good lesson on variety. The answer is do both of them. There is a time and place for every exercise.
Isaiah:Every exercise is a tool. There's actually a later question here. What are the only three exercises I need to jump higher? That is the wrong outlook to approach exercises with. The it's the wrong frame of mind.
Isaiah:You gotta think of everything as a tool, and every tool can be used. And the reason every tool can be used is because of the training principle of variety. So, when it comes to training, there is the whole purpose of training is adaptation. Adapting is basic is your body making biological changes so that it can survive your environment. When you train, you're subjecting yourself to an environment that it that your body's not used to.
Isaiah:So, body, and as a consequence, is gonna adapt. That way, you're able to survive. Right? And, you become more fit. That's what fitness is.
Isaiah:So, one of the laws of adaptation is the law of accommodation, which is basically when you subject your body to the same stimulus over and over and over again, You adapt to it at first, then the adaptations taper off, and eventually they decrease. So if you do, let's say, three sets of five, that's the stimulus. And let's say it's the first time you're ever doing three sets of five for a back squat. Three sets of five back squat, and then a thirty minute jump session once a week. And, you're doing that, whatever, four times four times a week.
Isaiah:You're gonna adapt to it. You're gonna recover. You're gonna be jumping higher. Then, as you keep doing it, your jump performance is gonna taper off, and then eventually, you're actually going to decrease. And, you're gonna keep jumping lower and lower and lower and lower.
Isaiah:That is because you are accommodating. That's what accommodation is. In order to avoid accommodation, there's the law of progressive overload and the law of variety that you need. So progressive overload just means that you need to increase the volumes and intensities gradually over time. So an elite athlete is gonna need an extremely high volume, extremely high intensities compared to when he was just a beginner just to maintain their vertical.
Isaiah:And then variety is changing though those volumes and intensity. So, you can undulate the volumes, undulate the intensities, and that's gonna subject your body to variety, and it's gonna keep it adapting. And, the other way that you can implement variety into your training is by changing the exercises that you do. So that's why sumo deadlift and conventional deadlift are both tools. Right?
Isaiah:Eventually, if you only do conventional deadlift, you're going to adapt to it. And you can keep changing the volumes and intensities over time, but eventually, you're gonna have to change it up. So you might add pauses. Alright? You might eccentrically overload that deadlift.
Isaiah:You might and then you can play around with sumo deadlifts. You can elevate it. You can add bands to it. You have to implement variety. And, generally, we like to change exercise complexes about once a month.
Isaiah:And if you do that, you'll be able to keep making progress over the long term. How do you get comfortable pushing high weights when cleaning cleaning? I limit myself. Number one is get healthy. I always get scared on catches if my knees are hurting.
Isaiah:If I am completely healthy, I have no fear when I clean. Second thing is have good technique. Right? If you have really, really good technique, then you're not gonna be as scared when those heavier weights come. So practice like crazy with lighter weights until your technique is perfect.
Isaiah:Finally, you have to see those heavy weights frequently. You have to fail. Once you fail a bunch of times, you're gonna realize it's not that bad. And then, finally, just practice full cleans. When you do full cleans, you're gonna get really good at catching in that deep position, and then you're not gonna get scared of catching in a half squat.
Isaiah:Because the worst thing that happens is it just rides you down into a full squat, and then you can just squat it up from there. Let's see. Whenever I train harder, get sick. I can't figure out why. So, this is actually an issue that I have as well.
Isaiah:It's because if you train really hard, you get fatigued, and when your body's in a fatigued state, your immune system becomes more compromised. So, do one, maybe don't push. Don't don't go from zero to a 100. Gradually increase the volumes and intensities over time. And then, do eat clean, eat healthily.
Isaiah:Right? Take your vitamin c. Get your vaccine if you if you need them and if you believe if you believe in that. But, yeah, that's pretty common issue. I usually just train through it, to be honest, which extends the time that I'm sick for.
Isaiah:But, hey, I've been able to continue making progress despite it. And then, let's see, we have one more question. I jump high enough to dunk, but I can't when I have the ball in my hands. Oh, I actually skipped two two questions up here too, so I'll get to those as well. That's a really common issue.
Isaiah:The reason you don't jump as high when you're going off the dribble is because you don't have your arm swing. Right? When you don't have the ball, you can use your arms. Studies have shown that that can add up to 10% on your vertical, sometimes even more. Two, you might not be practicing it as much.
Isaiah:So, if you wanna get better off the dribble dunks, you have to do it Three, I forgot what the oh, the ball is a mass. Alright? So, even though it's a small mass, it's still gonna decrease the amount of height that you get from it. So, it's not it's not uncommon to see six inches of vertical decrease from having a ball in your hands. So, just understand, you're getting here without the ball dunk off the dribble, you're gonna have to get even even higher.
Isaiah:You're gonna have to get, you know, like, be able to touch ten ten, 11 feet to be able to dunk off the dribble. And then, if you wanna dunk off two hands off the dribble, that's even more vertical that you need. So, it's completely normal. Practice more, practice on a on a rim where you can make two to three out of 10 attempts, and then just work your way up, and you'll be dunking off the dribble in no time. Alright.
Isaiah:And then, the last two questions. What are your best tips on how to jump higher? One, jump frequently. If you're a one foot jumper, jump off one, max effort, max approach as frequently as possible. Same thing if you're a two foot jumper.
Isaiah:Next, get stronger on compound lifts. Become obsessed with technique on the lifts. Become obsessed with your technique with jumping. Make sure everything's perfect. And the last tip is stay healthy.
Isaiah:Track your injuries. Every single morning, track your pain levels, and make sure that week to week they're always getting better. If it's getting worse, that means you're doing too much. So stop doing what hurts. Find out exercises that are gonna be analgesic for you.
Isaiah:Analgesic means that it's gonna be make you feel better. It's gonna make the pain feel better. Always always keep your health in mind. Load management is always number one. Being injury free not injury free, being able to manage the injuries so that you can still train and jump.
Isaiah:That's number one. Those are my best tips for you to for jumping higher. And then the final question, what kind of food food should I be eating when trying to increase my vertical jump and athleticism? I'm not a huge diet person. I generally just try to eat cleanly, stay away from processed foods, stay away from fast foods as much as possible, drink enough water, get at least one gram of protein for your body weight, and then track your body weight and how many calories you're eating so that you're either maintaining your body weight.
Isaiah:If your body fat's above 10%, make sure you're in a caloric deficit so that so that you get to that 10% or less body fat. And if you're below 10%, eat to maintain or very, very slight caloric surplus, and you'll be good to go. But that's it for the video. If you have any questions, leave them down below. The discussions on these videos are usually pretty cool.
Isaiah:And like always, if you wanna jump higher and have me personally coach you to do so, go to thpstrength.com. You won't regret it. Like the video too. Subscribe, and I'll catch you guys tomorrow. It's jump day, testing my vertical.
Isaiah:Super excited.
