Maybe now you are working hard to stand out during the school team selection competition, or bugged by a bunch of show-off friends bragging about how high they can do their vertical jumps.  Vertical jump is in fact a key to level up the overall performance in sports like basketball, football, volleyball and track or field athletics. If one tries to seek, there are a few ways to improve vertical jump, a skill which gives advantages in both sporting events and recreational competitions.

Many people mistakenly assumed that, how high a person can jump is dependent only on the strength of the leg muscles, while a truth is, movements of many other body parts are important as well. So, if you found a vertical jump improvement program that emphasizes on training your abdomen and arms in addition to the legs, chances are, it will work better. If you are planning to train yourself to take a higher leap into the air, consider a few training methods suggestions bellow.

Leap ups: First stand up with your shoulders apart at maximum width, look straight ahead, squat down to one fourth of your height, then immediately take a jump. The purpose of the training is to strengthen your muscles and make respond better to the jumping maneuvers.

Stretching:  Not a well known training method but doing so can improve flexibility of an athlete, it provides good fluidity to the moves.

Calf raises: To do this, first you must place your heel on an object higher than the ground, for instance the first step of a staircase or a book, the idea is, to jump as high as you can into the air, then land a slowly as you can. Do the exercise firstly with one leg, the later switch to the other.

Step ups: For this exercise you need a stable chair or a heavy bench. Stand on the edge of the seat with one leg, then get off edge by yourself or have someone push you off. While floating in the air, switch the other leg forward, and at the end, the leg that was stepping on the seat before should be on the ground and the other leg should be on the seat.

Thrusts up and burnouts: First stand up and put your shoulder wide apart, then straighten up your legs, and put your knee joints in locking position, next, take as jump with only the thrust of your feet, meaning, the only leg joints that are allowed to move are the ankles. Once you land on the ground, immediately orientate your body back to the straight up position like initially.  Some people choose not to move their arms while jumping, others let them be natural. But the focus of this exercise is how you use your toes to propel yourself upward. Muscles that are utilized in this exercise are those of the feet and side of the thighs.

Sit ups: The purpose of this exercise is to strengthen your abs, which provides more stability when you do a jump. To correctly do this exercise, you need to first lie on a surface flat, then bend your knees, raise your torso towards the knees, take a short pause when you reach, then lower back into lying position gradually.

Additional techniques: Huge assortments of additional exercises are available to increase the height of vertical jumps, challenging ones are like toe curls, box squats, using elastic rubber bands, backward flexing, weighted sit ups, snatch grip dead lifts and tossing a ball while taking backward leaps.