Three Tricks to Double the Effectiveness of your High Jump Workouts

Hey Jumpers,

Doing any sort of workout will help your jumping.

Doing track and field exercises will help your jumping more.

Doing jumping exercises with a few small tweaks will help you jumping even more.

Here are a few little tweaks you can make to make sure your jump training is as effective as possible.

1) Mimic the Jumping Pace
If you are doing lunges, don't take each step as if you were a workout instructor for a senior citizen center. Make each step quick, poppy, and fast, mimicking the speed and explosive nature of the high jump.

2) Mimic the Jumping Motion
Using the lunges example again, don't just step, drive your knee up and swing your arms to simulate that takeoff motion. Make each step deep just like your penultimate step and then drive high in between (without jumping) to simulate that final step that leads you into the jump.

3) Create Your Own Training
Back in the day I struggled like crazy with my final step: swinging my arms up hard as well as driving my knee high. So, I started doing "penultimate skips", basically I would jump off one foot, driving my knee high, swinging my arms high, land, and go right into a jump off the opposite foot. This let me practice this motion over and over again while focusing on only that part.

In on sentence, I guess I could sum up this entire email by saying: try to make your training mimic the actual jumping motion.

Best of luck to everyone as some bigger meets come up, as well as some region and state meets in the next few weeks!

Gregg

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