What Is The Best Exercise For One Foot Vertical?
So one foot bounce, the first thing that you want to look at is specificity. So in terms of specificity, what ranges of motion are you hitting in the movement For a one foot jump that's a quarter squat, right? It's different from a two foot jump, you're in a half squat. Second, what muscles are the ones that are used the most? In one foot, you use your lower leg a lot so your calf, your hamstring, your glutes, that posterior chain you're going to use it way more than in a two foot jump.
Isaiah:And then of course there's knee extension so you would use your quads as well. Third thing you want to look at, so we looked at the range of motion which you're in a four squat, looked at the muscles that you use. The third thing is you want to look at the ground contact times. For a one foot jump, for a speed jumper elite, speed jumper they're on the ground for like seventeen hundred to 18 or point one seven seconds to point one eight seconds. A power jump is going to be a little higher like point two seconds.
Isaiah:So from there, the exercises that are most specific, that are most similar to those three things are the ones that are going to help the most. So just take it for a further step down. So anything in the weight room, anything that's going to train the quad in a quarter squat is gonna help a lot. Any hamstring exercise is gonna help a lot especially with the knee a little bit more in extension, not a lot of flexion. So like think of like Nordic when you're at the very bottom, right?
Isaiah:That's gonna transfer a lot. Hip thrust is gonna transfer a lot. Deadlift is gonna transfer a lot. Pain cleans, right? Pain cleans, very high rate of force development, shorter ranges of motion, that's gonna transfer a ton.
Isaiah:Then on the plyometric side, plyos are going to transfer way much, way more because the ground contact times are shorter. So depth jumps, single leg bounding, single leg hopping, sprinting, all that stuff is going to be the most specific so they're going be the best exercises for jumping. But of course in training you always want to go general to specific. So you want to start with things that aren't as specific like deep squatting, that type of thing, more hypertrophy ranges like eight to 12 reps and then over the course of the year right before you want to jump high you want be doing those more specific exercises. Diet is very important but more important than that is tracking your calories.
Isaiah:For jumping, you want to be as lean as possible. You want your body fat percentage to be ideally under 10%. For you, you look like you're pretty lean, it doesn't, it looks like you're naturally lean so it's not something that's probably going to be a huge emphasis for you right? But generally you just want to eat clean, stay away from processed foods, you know don't eat junk food, candy, pastries, stuff like that. You want stay away from that stuff.
Isaiah:You want to get in and out protein at least one gram per pound of body weight. I know you're from Serbia so you probably use metric system. Yeah, I know about it. Yeah. So as long as you're getting enough protein and then you're eating cleanly and you're eating at a level, for someone like you, I would eat at a slight floric surplus.
Isaiah:So what I would do is use an app to track like your calories, like how much you eat. Track it for two weeks straight. Two weeks straight, track exactly how many calories everything you're eating. Don't change how you eat. And then write down your body weight.
Isaiah:Test your body weight every morning and then at the end of two weeks you're gonna be able to tell, okay I ate on average x amount of calories and my body went body weight went up, stayed the same or went down. And then you'll know around how much how many calories you need to eat. For me personally, I use intuitive eating. I only track for a short period of time, three years ago, that way I could tell around how much I need to eat to maintain weight and now I just, I eat cleanly, I eat until I'm full and then I don't over eat. As soon as I'm full, I stop eating, I get hungry again, I'll eat again.
Isaiah:Your body generally is really good at telling you when you need nutrients, right? And aside from that, I just try to drink a ton of water throughout the day and yeah that's pretty much what I do for diet. For reference, when I was 16 I was about five foot eleven so a little bit shorter, a little bit shorter than you. And my vertical was I believe, this was actually right when I was going to turn 17, so around when I was 17. I was around five foot eleven, six foot, I had a 34 inches running vertical and I think like a 28 standing vertical just for reference and I believe I could squat around two twenty five, my deadlift was like right at three fifteen, power clean was probably around like 185 I wanna say at that time.
Isaiah:A year later, so this is when I was 17 about to turn 18. I could do between legs dunks, vertical was getting probably close to 40 maybe at 40 inches. I was six'one so closer to your proportions and I was was clean two zero five, two zero five pounds. I could deep squat like two seventy five pounds. Deadlift was probably around three forty ish around there.
Isaiah:I didn't test front squat very much around that time. Those were basically the main three lifts I used to test a lot. And then when I started getting close to like a mid forties vertical like forty, forty three, 44 around there, I was like 19, 20 years old. I was able to deadlift three sixty five. I could power clean two twenty five, two thirty five around there.
Isaiah:Squat was like three fifteen and yeah, I think those were my numbers. Squat might have been like two ninety five, then yeah, all those numbers just started going up from there. I do not over complicate rest days at all. Typically when athletes ask for recovery workouts, the traditional stuff that you think about is like ice baths, massages, foam rolling, right? That type of thing.
Isaiah:All those things are recovery modalities and there isn't there's not enough research to back that stuff up. Most of the beneficial effects from recovery modalities are just placebo. You know what a placebo is? I don't. A placebo is basically when you think there's going to be a benefit behind something and then there is a benefit but it's psychological, right?
Isaiah:So it's like the traditional way is like, you know like medicine, like when you take a pill for a headache. There's experiments that have been done where they give people sugar pills. This is pills that have sugar inside of it, doesn't have any medicine inside. And they tell the subjects that hey take this pill and in fifteen minutes you're going to feel pain relief. They take it, guess what happens in fifteen minutes?
Isaiah:They experience pain relief. But it's because of the psychological effect of it. So icing, massages, formalin, all that stuff, that's gonna be all placebo effect basically. So my advice for recovery days is be a vegetable. Do as little as possible, get as much sleep as possible, eight to ten hours.
Isaiah:Just getting enough sleep is gonna do 99% of the recovery. That's number one, is getting enough sleep. Everything else, it's my advice for it is if it makes you feel good, like let's say you like massages, you enjoy them, or you like ice baths and you enjoy them, keep doing it because the psychological effects are going to help you. But if it's a struggle and you're forcing yourself to do you know like take a cold shower or something like that, it's actually going to be a stressor and it might not help you recover. Yeah that's basically my outlook on recovery.
Isaiah:Nope. Short answer is no. It's not going to stunt your grove, it's a myth. The number one thing for preventing injuries is to do elastic work, play your sport, run, sprint, do plyos, jump. All that stuff is going to strengthen your ankle and your lower leg and the exact amounts that you need to handle the sport that you're playing.
Isaiah:And then the second rule is try to go as long as possible without sprained an ankle. The number one predictor of a sprained ankle is have you sprained your ankle in the past. The longer you can go playing your sport, doing intense loading and activity without going through an ankle sprain, the stronger it's gonna get. And if you do go through an ankle sprain, there are things that you can do to rehab the process. The number one thing I like to do is just banded ankle circuits.
Isaiah:So you get a band, wrap the band around your foot and then go this way, boom, practice this way, practice up, down. And that's going to help with getting your ankle back to 100% health. But the number one thing is just loading it in the weight room, loading it through plyos, elastic work in your sport. Number one is jumping honestly like that is going to be the most specific thing and you can do it anyway, alright. If you're stuck, if you're stuck at home and you can't make it out to the gym, the best thing you can do is literally max out the jumps.
Isaiah:Like I used to, when I was in high school, my house had a really high ceiling. I still remember the height of the ceiling. It was 10 feet and eight inches and I always like practicing because you need to jump about six to eight inches above the rim to be able to dunk. So I knew I was like I can just barely touch it. I know I can dunk on the day.
Isaiah:And I literally would just for like an hour or two straight, I would just try to touch, try to touch my ceiling. So that is like the number one thing. Everything else is gonna have such smaller loading compared to the weight room that I would honestly just prefer athletes to just jump if you're indoors and you don't have access to the weight room. So for two foot jumping, it's actually very important. Just how you use the muscles in your lower leg to jump.
Isaiah:Remember I was saying the most specific exercises are the ones that target the muscles you use when you jump? Yeah. When you jump off two feet, the muscles that you use a ton in your upper body are your traps, shoulders, right? That's that's this. Yeah.
Isaiah:When you when you swing your arms back like that, that's all traps, upper back, shoulders. And then same thing, when you do the upswing, that's all shoulders right here, a little bit little bit of chest. So very important for two foot dungeon pain, specifically your relative strength. So you wanna get stronger compared to your body weight when it comes to your upper body. For one foot, it's not as important.
Isaiah:You don't use the the arms as much. With one foot, you just wanna be as light as possible, basically. So you're a you're a one foot jumper, so sprinting Yeah. Is gonna help you a ton. And it's also one of the best things you can do for your body composition for keeping your body fat low.
Isaiah:As far as guidelines for sprinting, earlier in the year, you want it to be more general. So that means do more acceleration work, right? Starting at three point stance, exploding out of it. Start at like around 20 meters and then as the year goes on, you wanna extend the distance that you're sprinting, lower the ground contact times and do a lot of upright sprinting. So it's very different.
Isaiah:The first part of the sprint, you're using a lot of quad, you're driving your legs hard into the ground to get going. Upright sprinting is different. It's way more elastic. You're gonna use your tendons a lot more. You're gonna use your posterior chain, your hamstrings and your glutes way more.
Isaiah:So you wanna extend the distances. So in the beginning of the year, it might look like hill sprints six by 30 meter or six by 20 meters. Alright? At the end of the year, it might look like three sets of a 110 meter sprints. Alright.
Isaiah:So that's how you wanna extend the distances out and change the sprints over time. Yeah. The shorter the sprint, the less rest that you need. Usually, I like to to rest about one to two minutes for every 10 meters that you're sprinting. Yeah, when it when it comes to exercises, there isn't a quote unquote best exercise.
Isaiah:They're all tools that you can add to your toolbox. So for squatting, they all have a different benefit. So like a back squat, the total loading is gonna be way higher, but you can do deep squats, right? Deep squats I would use it earlier in the year, increase my potential as an athlete. Then as the year goes on, I might finish the year with half squats.
Isaiah:And I might lower the weight and then do rhythm quarter squats even farther into the year for for the one foot jumpers. And then another reason you want to use multiple variations of exercises is because one of the most important training principles is the principle of variety. If you the whole objective of exercise is to induce an adaptation. So there's an organism. Right?
Isaiah:The organism is me and you. We're humans. Around the organism is the environment. Right? Okay.
Isaiah:Fitness is the ability for that organism to survive the environment. The environment for us is the weight room. That's your training. That's the environment. That's what you're trying to survive.
Isaiah:The higher your fitness, that means the better you're able to handle the weights. Right? The stronger you are, the faster you are. So the thing is when you subject and then the whole point of it is to induce adaptation. Adaptation is just your body changing to be able to handle your environment, to be able to survive the environment.
Isaiah:What happens though is if you subject an organism to the same stimulus over and over and over again, the ability for that organism to adapt decreases over time. So let's say put organism under you start doing heavy squats. Your progress is gonna go like this at first, but then it's gonna go and it's gonna level out over time. So that's where variety comes in. That's a back squat.
Isaiah:But then, what happens if you introduce a front squat? Oh shoot, your body doesn't know what's going on. Boom. Really quick adaptation. Levels up over time.
Isaiah:Alright. Now we're gonna do a split squat. Boom. And then it levels off over time. Now we can go back to back squats, but guess what?
Isaiah:Now we're gonna do half. And now you can load it up even more. Same thing. Alright? Then you might do two step squats where you go halfway up, back down, all the way up.
Isaiah:More time under tension, more variety. And you just keep doing that, keep doing that. And generally, you don't want to you don't wanna do that too frequently because you're not your body isn't gonna adapt. It's not you're not gonna give it enough time to adapt to a single stimulus. That's why we use training cycles.
Isaiah:So in a four week period, we wanna have a selection of like eight to 10 exercises and we just focus on those exercises and then during the next four week period, we switch those exercises out, bring a new a new set in, same thing, three weeks of training, one week V load, introduce new exercises and that is the secret to making progress over years and years and years. Because there's athletes out there, like your average jump program is three months and the guys just repeat the same three months over and over and over again. And that's why with THP, that's one of the things that makes us different is we have like a 100, a 100 plus training cycles. Like we have like ten plus years of training that we can do and it's always going to look different. Depending on the skill level of the coach, you can get creative.
Isaiah:Right? The more creative you can be with exercises, the more long term progress you can get. And you just, being creative is easy, you just got to think, what uses my quad? And if it's a compound movement, even better. Because jumping is complex, use a lot of intramuscular coordination, so you want to choose exercises that are also complex and have a lot of intramuscular coordination.
Isaiah:So, it is a myth that athletes need to palm the ball to be able to dunk. It's all about momentum. So I always show a drill. I don't know if I have a basketball with me right now. Actually yeah, I got this one right here.
Isaiah:So this is the basketball, right? I can palm it. Right? I can palm it. It's a small small ball.
Isaiah:I can do any trick dunk without using my fingers. So I can literally like transfer like this. No no fingers. Right? Right?
Isaiah:I can go behind the back, no fingers. That's because I learned how to use momentum. The best way to learn how to use momentum, low run dunking. Right? If you don't have a low run, you don't have access to that, I put up a video on my YouTube of like all drills like pistol pearmerevic drills and stuff like that.
Isaiah:You wanna practice that stuff and you can even do that as a drill. Not using your fingers and practice transferring. And just the more reps you get in, you should learn how to use momentum. For one hand dunks, it's all about pushing are you left handed or right handed? Right handed.
Isaiah:So if you're right handed, it's all about using your left hand to push the ball as hard as you can into your right hand, and then you wanna keep your wrist bent like this. So you push it, keep the wrist bent, fingers wide, and that's going allow you to have a ton of control on the ball. And then you just rep that out, eventually it becomes muscle memory and then you don't need to palm the ball. You'll be able to dunk with better efficiency than someone who can palm the ball. Yeah, that's a it still follows load management principles.
Isaiah:The first thing you want to do is ISOs follow your pain. Your pain is going to give you all the information that you need. So for ISO's, the guidelines is you wanna do three to five sets of forty five seconds. You wanna be at like a three out of 10 at the beginning of the set and that should drop down to like no pain by set three or four. Sometimes a little bit of pain but as long as there's a decrease.
Isaiah:As long as there's a decrease by set three or four that means you are at the correct loading, the right exercise for the ISO. You can basically do that every six hours.
