Is Calf Training the Key to Jumping High?

Much like one of our most popular posts is: Is Direct Arm Work Necessary for Sculpted Arms? I wanted to bust some myths with the question: Is Calf Training the Key to Jumping High?

I’m not quite sure how the idea of calves being the one thing standing between you and throwing down a tomahawk style dunk became such a popular, ingrained, and accepted idea. So, I thought it would be a great idea to break down what it takes to get big air and how to prioritize.

The answer is a bit more complicated than just doing calf raises and jumping rope. 

I get such a chuckle out of this idea! The calf muscle is not the whole picture and to really get a comprehensive vertical jump training program you need to make sure you are addressing all aspects of what will help you jump higher.

If you want to test how high you can jump with just your calves, try a max effort pogo jump. Do not allow your hips or knees to bend when you load or land, just use your ankle. 

Now try test number two: a max effort vertical jump. Use your arms, your hips, knees, and ankles for the jump. This one will always be quite a bit higher.

To jump higher, we need to train all the muscles that are involved in a big jump.

Let’s break this down into priorities:

Priority #1 - Look at your Foundation

Are you following a well rounded strength training program? If you're not, you need to get on one. And even though we're training to jump higher, there are other parts of your body on the upper half that assist with jumping. 

As an athlete or coach, you have to be concerned with what's going to happen once you're in the air, right? For most athletes something is happening overhead, that’s kind of the point! 

What’s the end goal of jumping high? Scoring or blocking when in the air! I mean, even pole vaulters need to be pretty concerned with what's going on with their upper body as they go over the bar, but concerning basketball or volleyball, there's some big important stuff that's happening overhead once you are in the air! 

Therefore, making sure that you're training your upper body during any vertical jump training program is extremely important. A strong and powerful upper body with directly assist with getting into the air. In particular, the muscles in the back need to be focused on. 

Priority #2 - Core Strength

Are you training, with specific loading parameters, your core muscles? To attain effective core strength, you need to be training and focused on ALL of the core muscles. These include the hamstrings, glutes, lower back, and abdominal muscles. This area is called the core because it's central to everything that you do as a human and as an athlete. 

It is the glutes, In particular, that are going to give you the lift off the ground. If you are not training to get those muscles as strong as possible, you will be missing out on inches. 

You can try any kind of training for this that you like, just be sure you are qualified to do so. Ideally, hire somebody that knows what they're doing to give you a custom program and coach you. 

Everything from medicine ball throws to dynamic effort strength work, to maximum effort strength work, to repetition effort strength work, to single leg strength work will all be fair game and effective. Squat and deadlift variations are both critical to include, in some form or another.

There should also be included a wide variety of intensities and volumes, you want to be utilizing. A well planned structured program will move you forward, step by step. 

Priority #3 - Develop Explosive Hip Extension

To start to bring things together, is the triple extension. The hip extension is concerned with the hips extending (this and knee extension happen most during priority #2); triple extension is when the ankle, knee and hip all extend simultaneously. That's what actually happens when you're jumping. 

Exercises to include are snatch and clean variations. For inexperienced or young lifters, utilizing the medicine ball is a perfect solution.

Priority #4 - Productive Jump Practice

The training of actual jumping is going to be on the much lighter end of the weight spectrum. Most people are going to be using bodyweight only. Very advanced athletes who are quite strong and have done a lot of strength training, as a prerequisite, may be qualified to do weighted jumps. But you can get a ton of mileage off of just practicing moving your own body. 

Exercises to include for this priority would be bounding, double leg and single leg bounding, all kinds of box jumps, depth drops, etc. Sprinting short distances (starts up to 10yd) should also be included.

Unlike the strength work, the total volume of jumps should be fairly low and should not vary quite so broadly. The focus is primarily on low volume and high intensity jumping. When our main concern is jumping higher, getting in just a few very intense and high quality reps are more than sufficient for development and progress.

On the low end for one exercise you might do 5 total jumps, and on the high end, that might be a total of 15 jumps for someone well conditioned and depending on where they are within their training cycle.

It’s important to remember the goal is a higher maximum effort jump. When you are trying to squeeze out another inch or two, it logically does not make any sense to jump 100 times in a row. And yet, this is how many people think they should train to increase their vertical jump.

Priority #5 - Training Robustness

Finally, we get to the calves! Or more specifically, the Achilles tendon. The goal is to train the Achilles so that it is capable of being as spring-like as possible.  

Conditioning of the lower leg requires a high volume of repetitions accumulated over a very long period of time (years). Many exercises are appropriate for this, but a few examples include: jump rope, sprinting, skipping, and practically any low amplitude repeated jumps. 

One of my favorite drills to use is called aerobic plyometrics. This is for lower leg conditioning, in particular. It will help prepare the joints and tendons and get them sturdiness and resilience capable of handling the impact that comes from jumping.

While the high quality jumps are going to be max effort, or close to max effort, and low in volume, to train robustness you will be using a higher of lower amplitude jumps. It’s always best to start conservatively, but once all is going well you can work your way up to pretty high volume. To progress aerobic plyometrics, I'll usually start people at three minutes, see how they react, and then move up to a continuous 10-12 minutes. This allows the athlete to accumulate hundreds of low amplitude jumps during that time.

Even though this is broken down into five different priorities, this is really the blueprint for what could become an extremely detailed jump training program. 

To determine what you or an athlete will get the most benefit from you need to do testing of some sort to understand basics about where they need to spend the most time training. One athlete will often have different needs than the other.

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Coaching Vertical Jump with a Valgus Collapse

Ahhh, the knee cave, my old friend. This, by far, is the most common strength and movement pattern deficit I see in developing athletes. More officially known as a valgus position of the knee, it signifies not only a severe lack of specific and general strength, but also may be an indicator of poor body control overall (due to other common muscular strength deficits that generally come as part of the "package").

The valgus position, in my experience, is an oversized red flag waving high in the air. This red flag is warning of a looming knee ligament injury.

This is a very important topic, as most coaches, parents, and athletes have no idea how to correct the problem or even identify that it is a very big - and potentially dangerous - problem.

Check out the video where I break down film of an athlete in for training and discuss what I've found and how we're going to fix the problems:

Vertical Jump Initial Testing. Is it Really the Bees Knees?

Given that we train a lot of high school volleyball players at SAPT, I'm inevitably faced - on a weekly basis - with two questions that continually pop up from the players, or, more commonly, the parents of the girls: 1) Why aren't you testing my/my daughter's vertical jump on Day 1 as a baseline measurement?

2) Why aren't you doing a lot of plyometric drills with me/my daughter?

(Note: Although all this is being discussed with regards to volleyball, many of the same principles can be applied to other sports when it comes to verticals and improving change of direction speed)

While the answers to these questions could easily be an entire article series on their own, I'll do my best to summarize my points here.

1) The vertical jump simply isn't an appropriate test for most (but not all) high school athletes. Not only are there other methods of assessing one's athletic potential, but continually making an athlete  jump up and down with maximal effort can be dangerous. Let me briefly explain.

To put it simply: Many high school athletes lack the strength and neural control to execute a solid vertical jump. Just watch nearly any volleyball player do a standing vertical jump attempt on the vertec. However, instead of focusing on their torso, arms, and where their hand smacks the vanes, watch their knees during the countermovement phase of the jump (as they transition from moving down to moving up). What you'll see often resembles my replication in the video below:

May not have noticed that the first time you watched your kid jump, huh? Essentially the athlete is limiting how high they can jump by allowing "force leaks," to take place, in which they end up in sub-par biomechanical position for force production. Not only that, but it is dangerous for their knee health (along with other passive restraints in the lower extremity) to continue practicing like this.

While there are multiple root causes for this phenomenon, a good strength coach can often add a few inches to the athlete's vertical jump by merely teaching the athlete to keep themselves in powerful alignment during the countermovement phase. This involves much more than simply shouting at them to keep their knees out, BTW!

2. Plyometric drills are not a "one size fits all" approach. When you're administering individualized program design for each and every person in the room, as we do at SAPT for all our athletes, it's not a matter of just throwing a bunch of adolescent girls into the same cattle call drills.

Very precise decision making must be made in order to administer and match the exercise to the individual. In fact, any perceptive strength coach who's been in the industry has recognized by now that the more "advanced" and technical exercises (be it jump training, sprint training, medicine ball drills, olympic lifts etc.) will do NOTHING for the athlete unless he/she already possesses the necessary physical and technical preconditions for performing these drills!

As a quick example, we run the strength and conditioning for the majority of the Woodson high school volleyball team (shown in the picture below), who recently won the the district title - and continued to the regional finals and state tournament - for the first time in school history. However, we still give each and every girl on that team an individualized training plan, and this includes their jumping and plyo drills (not the same thing, by the way).

Although all of them together make up a great team, some possess a greater degree of spatial awareness, neural coordination, and strength than others. It would do every individual a disservice to throw them all in the same drills together rather than match the appropriate drill to the person.

Bottom line: Some athletes will be ready for true plyo drills, others will be not-so-ready. A good coach will be able to evaluate the individual and determine where they need to begin along the plyo continuum (if at all).

So, What To Do?

While it is beyond the scope of this post to delve head-first into the myriad progressions/drills that are ideal and appropriate to use, I can at least say that 90% of the athletes I've worked with need to begin by with some variation of drill force reduction. Developing eccentric force absorption and muscle contraction will lay the framework for enhanced concentric strength potential.

What do I mean by this? You can't optimally PRODUCE force until you can adequately ABSORB force. In a vertical jump, the first move that takes place is the force reduction component (lowering yourself to jump) before the actual force production phase (extending body to accelerate upward) during which you leave the ground. The athlete will only be able to accelerate quickly if they are able to efficiently decelerate FIRST.

An example of a Level 1 force absorption drill would be an altitude drop with a stick landing, as shown in the video below. These will drill landing mechanics, develop yielding strength, and create a strong excitation of the CNS.

It looks simple and easy, yes, but you'd actually be surprised at how many top-notch athletes cannot land properly upon initial testing! It is not uncommon to see athletes having difficulty landing properly from a mere 5" box height.

From there, you'll want to progress to elasticity jumps with variable landings in order to the teach the athlete to use his/her active support structures (muscles and tendons) to minimize stress on the passive support structures (bones, ligaments, labrums, etc.).

This will help prepare them the more "real life " scenario come game day.