The Truth About Jumping Higher
What is up, YouTube? Welcome back to another video. My name is Isaiah Rivera. I have a 50.5 inch vertical world record. This is Austin Burke, and he has an alleged 47 inch
Austin:We have no idea anymore.
Isaiah:47 inch vertical off one, and then an another alleged 44 or 45 inch vertical off
Austin:two feet. I I do have an official 46 off one.
Isaiah:Official 46. But I've seen them jump higher.
Austin:That's that seems like I just don't know anymore.
Isaiah:But
Austin:and then we both 43.5 up too.
Isaiah:There we go. Those are the official numbers. A legend. So, yeah, we both jumped pretty high, and today, we are going to reveal the secret of jumping this high. But before we learn about the secret, I wanna give a big shout out to our sponsors over at thbstrength.com.
Isaiah:They are the premier vertical jump coaching on the planet.
Austin:Pretty good.
Isaiah:They've trained multiple elite athletes to get even better and even more average athletes to become elite. Mhmm. So if you're interested in jumping higher and getting rid of knee pain and really any injury that's out there, they're pretty good at it. Go to thpstrength.com to sign up.
Austin:You know you know what we should do?
Isaiah:What?
Austin:We should give them a discount. How's a 10 per you know what? 20% off to the first 10 athletes who sign up with the code podcast. Right now, go to thpstrength.com and the first yeah.
Isaiah:20%. That's crazy.
Austin:First 10 athletes who sign up using the code podcast will get 20% off their first month. So if you're weary, now is the time to try it. But do it fast, because there's a lot of viewers. Alright. Cool.
Austin:Code podcast. Let's do it. Podcast.
Isaiah:Remember, only the first 10 people. Only first 10. So act now.
Austin:I hope they don't kill us.
Isaiah:You know, pause this video, go to tspstrength.com, and sign up now. Dude, I hope
Austin:they the sponsors don't drop us for this. This is crazy.
Isaiah:Yeah, they might. They might. We might get fired.
Austin:No, I
Isaiah:hope not. Alright. Well, without further ado, let's officially introduce a topic, and it is gonna be the truth about jumping higher. Mhmm. And the truth about jumping higher is that as you get better at it, as you start jumping higher and higher and higher and become more advanced, it becomes way easier to detrain.
Isaiah:Absolutely. If you don't know what detraining means, it means that you basically lose the adaptation that you've gained. That the specific adaptations we're talking about in this case is vertical jump height. It's the entire reason we train, right, is to jump higher. If you keep the same training load, let's say you have a 24 inch vertical and then you train all the way up, let's say you're doing three sets of five back squat and you get all the way to where you have a 30 inch vertical doing that three sets of five.
Isaiah:If you keep doing those three sets of five, you're not gonna always have a 30 inch vertical. Eventually you're gonna get to a point where you reach that peak and then you're gonna slowly decrease and decrease and decrease. So the sad reality, the truth about jumping high is that the training needs to get harder just to even maintain your vertical. And then if you wanna keep jumping higher and higher, you need to keep training harder and harder and harder. And what is the downside of that is it can become very mentally challenging, very mentally taxing to sustain that.
Isaiah:So having said all that, now that you know kind of the science behind why that happens, I guess we'll start with you Austin. What are some challenges that you've had in sustaining that level of performance? Obviously we've all gone through ups and downs in training. Mhmm. Why why do those happen for you?
Isaiah:And I guess what are the obstacles that you face in get in getting there?
Austin:I think understanding the d training that you just explained. 2022 was my best year ever of dunking. I trained very hard leading up to it in 2021. And then 2022, I was jumping my highest, but I was so afraid to overtrain and jump bad, you know, every session that I just maintained the full year. And then when I got injured
Isaiah:What do you mean by maintaining? Like, what exactly were you doing?
Austin:I was jumping once a week. I was, you know, barely doing anything in the weight room. Maybe pushing 60% on squats. Nothing too crazy. Slow slow strength.
Austin:My weight room sessions were not hard at all. And that worked at maintaining throughout the full year, but when I injured my meniscus in December, I when I finally came back, doing what I was doing to maintain didn't work, it was extremely frustrating. I couldn't even jump relatively close to what I was jumping the year before. In the past year, I spent trying to replicate everything I did in 2022, which obviously did not work because I was just in a state of constant, what is it like? Yeah.
Austin:Depletion? No. I was always no. Not even depletion. Not depletion.
Austin:I was always detrained. Yeah.
Isaiah:So you're doing it's a very common mistake that guys make is you jumped your highest in 2022. Yeah. And you attributed that to the training that you were doing in 2022. But effects of training are delayed. So when you're doing a training cycle, that training cycle isn't gonna cause the vertical jump gains you see later that week or that month.
Isaiah:The reason you see adaptations and and the results of training is from the training that you were doing two, three, six months before, And then you actualize those gains with later training cycles. So Austin was jumping his highest, attributing that to the training he was currently doing, which is very common error. And then when he tried to replicate it this last year, you couldn't get to that level. Right? And we we had a lot of conversations where you were depressed because I was so pissed.
Isaiah:Were washed up.
Austin:I thought I was done. And it wasn't until we started really increasing the intensity of my training is when I started hitting those 45, 46 inch numbers again off one foot.
Isaiah:And it's the the hardest you've ever trained. Right?
Austin:A 100%. Right now? A 100.
Isaiah:Yeah. And that's yeah. It it basically lines up with what the research shows, and it's that the training has to continue getting harder. But the downside to that is there's a lot of psychological negative psychological effects with that if you have the wrong mindset. Mhmm.
Isaiah:I know for me, I had to make a shift from being very goal oriented to being very process oriented because the training is freaking hard. Like, even today, we're gonna do this podcast. We're doing our ISOs right now, and then we're gonna have to go and destroy ourselves in the weight room like we've been doing in the last month. Two hour sessions. And and the the horrible part is that we're gonna do that just to jump low on Friday, right, because we're fatigued.
Isaiah:Mhmm. So it's ridiculous amounts of training for marginal results in the short term, sometimes worse results in the short term. And it's really just investing. Like, we're investing into the future, which for us, since we're periodizing training, is to jump high in the summertime. So right now, we're busting our asses in the weight room so that we can have a glorious summer of of jumping high.
Isaiah:Right? Yeah. But, yeah, the truth about jumping high is that it is very mentally taxing. It's not glorious. Lot of times you see the highlights on on Instagram, but the highlights are really just five to 10% of the actual sessions.
Isaiah:Most of the sessions, very fatigued, jumping really low, you're going into the weight room sessions not feeling like working out. So is there anything that has like helped you? I I have I have things that I that I've done, but is there anything that has helped you to stay consistent, you know, to not get demotivated?
Austin:I I definitely think switching from goal oriented to process oriented has helped, just because in 2022, my goal I was just my goal is to jump to my highest every week, hit new dunks, and post content on Instagram. Whereas now, I'm just I'm happy if I get one session. I'm just focused on getting better every single day. Jump training and dunk training, once you hit that elite level is a full time job. You gotta watch every little thing, what eventually what you eat, how you're sleeping.
Austin:So I kinda just, yeah, it's just about being process oriented rather than making sure I jump every week for my ego. Yeah. Which is hard because, you know, everyone thinks I'm washed up every other week. So it's cool.
Isaiah:Something that has helped me stay process oriented, because it's easier said than done. Right? Like, focused on the process and don't care about the goals. A mental switch that allowed me to do that is I made the work the goal. So I didn't make the goal the goal.
Isaiah:So right now, my my ultimate goal at the very moment is 51 inch vertical. It's always to jump higher, but that sets the path, and then what I do is I make a mental switch, a mental flip, and I make the work the goal. The work in our case is showing up and doing the workout that is written on my app, on my on my training app. And I'm happy if I just show up and do the workout, right, and hit the numbers that that are supposed to be hit. When it's dunk session day, I don't make the goal to, you know, hit a new dunk or hit a certain vertical.
Isaiah:No. I just make dunking the goal, like, the actual jumps. Make sure I'm jumping max effort. That's it, and that I don't over jump. Those are essentially my my two goals.
Isaiah:Go in there, jump as hard as I can, the result of it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I'm dunking, if I stick my elbow in the room or not, whatever. I just make sure the goal is max effort and that I don't over jump and I'm not jumping through pain. As long as those three things get done and as long as I made the goal the goal of showing up and training every day, eventually you will jump higher and reach that all to your goal, but make the work the goal and you will stay consistent. You will stay disciplined, especially if you do it consistently enough to where a habit is built.
Isaiah:That's one thing that has helped me a lot. Another one's meditation. Mhmm. Meditation has helped a ton, which by the way, for the guys that are currently on THP, and if you're not on THP, this might be an incentive for you to get on there. I actually have a mental training guide of everything I did.
Isaiah:How I meditate, what books I read that allowed me to have a good mindset of being process oriented and how to build good habits, how to stay disciplined, how to deal with bad jumping days, how to deal with injuries, all those things. I have an exact process for each of those things. But meditation, huge, huge, huge role in building those that mental fortitude for it.
Austin:Yeah. I definitely think, like, you can see a shift in my training just from 2023 to now going from goal to process because last year, essentially wasted a whole year of me, you know, trying just to have one good session. Like, it was ridiculous. The other thing too is that helped is definitely being around Isaiah. Him moving back and then switching that mindset.
Austin:I just kinda copy everything he does. He is literally the best in the world, and I just whatever, you know, with the training sessions or his mindset on certain things, just try to emulate that to the best of my ability. It saves a lot of effort because I can just look be like, alright. What is the best doing who lives four minutes for me that I spend most of my time with? And let's copy that.
Austin:And it's really everything he says.
Isaiah:Yeah. And that's huge. Like, being part of a community is huge because, like, one of them might get demotivated, but me or Austin or John, we're gonna hold each other accountable to to showing up and and getting the workout in. And yet another THP plug is you get a community when you sign up for THP, and then you also get access to me. Like, literally direct access to me where you can talk to me about about this type of thing.
Isaiah:But, yeah, community's freaking huge. 100%. Because at the end of the day, like, we're social creatures. Humans are social creatures and Socrates. Yeah.
Isaiah:A lot of a lot of the motivation for anything is because of how you're perceived by people. 100%.
Austin:You know what
Isaiah:I mean? Like, it is very ego driven to think that way but people can lie as much as they want. Everybody's driven by having affirmation from their peers, from family, from friends and that type of thing and if you surround yourself with people that are in that community, like it's gonna motivate you. It's gonna keep you motivated in training. So if you're not in the dunk community, urge you to do it, you know, post on Instagram, DM people that are around the same skill level because that's the most motivating thing you can do it, especially early on.
Isaiah:Yeah. I always found I found CJ and Steven early on, Nico, Nico Christie, guys that were like around the same level as me. We got into a group chat, you know, we would send each other our training, what dunks I'm trying to hit, when I would lower him, I would send them send them my dunks. I was really competitive too. Like, I was always trying to, like, catch CJ, in terms of what dunks we could hit.
Isaiah:You have people to compare weight room numbers with. So putting yourself in a community is gonna be huge as far as keeping yourself motivated, and it's just fun.
Austin:It's a lot more forgiving now than it was when we started because there's only it was so clicky. I feel like in 2038.
Isaiah:Yeah.
Austin:Like, we were everyone was just like, if you weren't in the core group, it was hard to infiltrate, and then but now it's everything's very open. Everyone
Isaiah:And it's so much bigger too now than it used to be. Like, I I I used to know everybody in the dunk community. Like, now, like, I don't I don't know most peep most dunkers out there. I'll find, like, this just random freaks that can jump high, I'm like, wow. How did I not know this person?
Isaiah:But I think that's a pretty good overview.
Austin:I mean, the only other thing would be injuries. Oh. Like, new injuries popping up as we train more and more. Because we're just talking about this.
Isaiah:That's another truth of the truth behind jumping high is injuries are going to pop up.
Austin:Mhmm.
Isaiah:That is an inevitability of of jumping high. It's like I always like to give the example. It's like a high performance car, like a Formula One race car or a car that that you tune to go faster. When you push the limits of human performance, issues will pop up. You're gonna push all the tissues in your body, your ligaments, your tendons, your bones, your muscles.
Isaiah:You're gonna push them to their limits. And when you push anything to their limits, things will break, things will give. So I think one is accept the fact that injuries are gonna happen. One of John's mentors has this saying that I love, injuries don't go away, they just move around. Alright?
Isaiah:So when I when I got my the original problem I had was tendinopathy, knee tendinopathy. When I took care of that issue and got super healthy, guess what started happening? I started producing way higher peak forces, and then boom, my muscles started freaking tearing. So then I had to address that in the weight room. And then then I got so strong in the weight room that I started having back issues, so then I had to address that issue.
Isaiah:And then then I was super healthy, started jumping off vert a lot and going opposite plant and all this stuff, and then PFP popped up and then took care of that issue. And then an ankle issue might happen because then now you're starting to bring in more speed into a jump, and your your ankles aren't used to all that all that force going through them. So then you take care of that, and then it the cycle just goes on and on and on and on, and it's not going to stop. Mhmm. A new injury is always going to pop up.
Isaiah:So how do you handle that? Because injuries get you depressed. So how, like, what what do you do? One, first the understanding that it's gonna happen. Don't get mad at it.
Isaiah:Mhmm. It's just something And adapt. Yeah. Just notice it. Notice it notice it appearing and don't react emotionally to it.
Isaiah:And then
Austin:educate
Isaiah:yourself. So Alex Ramosy says this a lot. He says anytime you're you're depressed is because you feel like you have a lack of options. Mhmm. Right?
Isaiah:If you're anxious is you get overwhelmed by all the options. Depression comes from not having a path, not knowing what to do next and the way you overcome that is by educating yourself. Alright? So educate yourself about the injury from a reputable source,
Austin:Cough cough THP, by the way, we know we know about every jump related 20% off first month podcast,
Isaiah:co podcast. But educate yourself. Educate yourself about the injury. Follow the research. Don't follow the random Instagram page that says that they can they can help you out.
Isaiah:Follow the research about the specific injury that you're dealing with, and then start taking steps towards getting better with that injury. And what's really cool, like, with mental health is if you're making progress, doesn't matter how messed up you are, like, you're gonna be feeling good.
Austin:Yeah.
Isaiah:Like, take an ACL tear. Let's say you were to go through an ACL tear. You know, it's gonna be really depressing initially, but as soon as you start going through the rehab process and you see results, it's like your baseline happiness will already be increased compared to, like, if you're completely healthy and you have a bad session, you're depressed. That depression from that is gonna be a lower level of sadness than when you're in the middle of rehab and you see progress. Like, you're gonna be happier.
Isaiah:Definitely. Because it's just it's all relative. Like, it's all relative to what you like your previous date was at. So just understand there's gonna be fluctuations in your emotions and stuff like that, and then just inform yourself and always be making steps towards recovering and the injury. And always ask yourself, is what I'm doing today gonna make me feel better or worse tomorrow in terms of pain?
Austin:That's good.
Isaiah:Answer that question correctly and you'll be
Austin:I think a good too is getting rid of the timeline. Whatever, Unless you have an event, get rid of that internal
Isaiah:Preach.
Austin:Yeah. Timeline. Like, you don't need to be healthy by June 1 for absolutely no reason. You don't wanna give yourself three months for a knee injury.
Isaiah:Just that season that you're in the middle in in high school, guess what? You're gonna be in five years, you're not gonna care.
Austin:Yeah. Literally. Just do it. Just do the pro go through the process, and you it'll be a lot quicker than if you keep evading it. Yeah.
Isaiah:So if you have an injury and you have a tournament in two weekends, just skip the tournament. It's not gonna matter. I remember there was games where I was thought I felt like I had to be ready for in high school.
Austin:Flu game type of thing?
Isaiah:Yeah. Well, like, had, like, knee pain and I was like, I gotta play in this game. It doesn't freaking matter. It's I'm not, like, right now, I'm trying to have test my vertical and all that stuff, and it's, like, funny how important I used to think certain or, like, dunk events, certain dunk events, how important I thought they were, and I could have just skipped them, ended up healthier, made more progress a lot more quickly.
Austin:So 100%.
Isaiah:Get rid of the timeline. Doesn't matter. I don't care how important you think whatever you have is about to be, it's not important in the grand scheme of it all. So that is actually amazing advice from from Austin. Just get rid of those time lanes.
Austin:Is that John?
Isaiah:John's here. Wow. Alright. It was good idea doing the podcast.
Austin:I think that was good.
Isaiah:Alright. Cool.
Austin:That's pretty much it, everybody. What is that? The sponsors are back.
Isaiah:What are they saying?
Austin:They're saying sign up at thbstrength.com, and for 20% off your first month, use the code podcast. It's only for 10 people. So if you made it this far, there's a chance there's still spots.
Isaiah:Yeah. But not for long. Nope. And then, if you are on YouTube, like the video, and if you're on a podcast platform, please give us five stars. It'll push it out to more people, and it'll incentivize us to keep making this.
Isaiah:Because when we when you get views on these, it's very motivating to keep Yeah. True. Keep doing it. So, and then like always, leave a comment. We'll get back to it, as soon as we can, and I'll catch you guys in the next podcast episode.
Isaiah:Peace out.
