This article is going to give you the top tips for jumping higher. Jumping higher has many advantages in life, and especially in sports. By learning how to jump higher, you can increase athletic performance in sports such as basketball, baseball, football, and soccer.

1. The first tip is to not over train. If you tried exercising your jumping muscles everyday, you would most likely give up after a week or two because of exhaustion. I recommend training four or five days per week at most.

2. Before you begin training, you need to warm-up. Warming up consists of warming up your muscles and stretching. Some great ways to warm-up are using a jump rope, or running up and down stairs. However, your warm-up should only take a few minutes, because you don't want to wear out your legs before you start training.

Now, I will give you some common exercises to help train your jumping muscles.

3. A great exercise to do is squatting. Squatting mainly trains your quadriceps and glutes, but also trains your hamstrings and lower back. Since your quadriceps are so important for jumping, you need to do squatting regularly to help train your muscles.

4. Another activity you should be doing is sprinting. Sprinting builds muscle on your legs, which should add to your jumping ability. If I could give you just one tip on how to jump higher, it would be to sprint more.

5. Running stairs is great for your vertical leap, but I have an excellent variation. The best way to do it is to run up the stairs one step at a time, but only run on your toes. By doing this you will help train your calves, which are also extremely important to jumping higher.

6. Besides using the jump rope to warm-up, you can also jump rope to help build muscle in your legs. Also, the jump rope is excellent for cardiovascular conditioning, which is helpful for many sports.

7. When you're training your legs, you need to make sure that you have proper nutrition. Since you are trying to build muscle, you need to take in a lot of protein. Great protein sources include red meat, fish, eggs, and dairy.

This article gave you some great tips to help train your legs to jump higher. If you follow these steps, and don't over train, you should be well on your way to increasing your vertical leap.

If you'd like to learn more about vertical leap training, including how you can add 6 inches to your vertical leap in just 60 days, click here for more information.

About the Author

Michael Wittmeyer is a vertical leap expert.