Improve Your Vertical With Calf Raises

Your calf muscles are an integral part of your vertical jumping ability and are an important area to work on if you want to improve your vertical. There are some great machines you can use in the gym to help work your calf muscles, but if you don’t have the cash for a gym membership, there are some great exercises available for you at home.

One of these exercises would be calf raises.  Calf raises are a great exercise to do at home, as you can do them almost anywhere. All you need is some space on the floor to stand and possibly a wall close by. If wall space is tight for some reason, you can perform the exercise behind a chair and use the chair back for balance as necessary.

To start the exercise stand flat footed on the floor and then slowly lift your heels off the ground pushing your body up until you are standing on the balls of your feet. If necessary, this is where you can use the wall or a chair to help you maintain your balance. At the height of this extension stop for a second and then slowly lower your body back down until your heels touch the ground and repeat. When starting out it would be great if you could get in eight to ten calf raises, take a few minutes break and repeat for at least five sets.

You don’t want to overdo it the first couple nights as it can really work your calf and make for some painful walking the next day if you over do it. As your muscles get used to the exercise you can gradually increase the reps per set up to 20 and then increase sets up to ten.

For an even tougher workout, you can perform this exercise on a set of stairs with your toes and the ball of your foot on the step and your heel over hanging the step. This will allow you to have a slightly further range of motion downwards and prevent you from putting your heel on the ground causing a bit more of a workout.

It’s important to remember this type of exercise will make a difference in your vertical jumping ability over time, but it will require more than calf raises to really improve your vertical. A complete jumping training program requires a full range of exercises that work on all the major muscles vertical jumping requires.

Watch over the next few weeks as I add additional exercises you can use to improve your vertical. For further information on programs you can purchase that provide you with complete training programs to improve your vertical leap check out the Improve Your Vertical Now website or check out The Jump Manual Program.

A Simple Jumping Exercise to Improve Your Vertical

Not everyone has access to a gym, or the latest exercise equipment or even free weights for that matter, but that doesn’t mean you cannot do some form of vertical jumping training to help improve your vertical. There are endless varieties of different training and jumping exercises you can do that don’t require any extra equipment on your behalf.

Now some of these exercises are a bit old school, but they are just as effective today as they were years ago, and some gurus have even started bringing them back into their training systems. Of course, others are time tested and just keep on hanging around; they have just added some specialized new equipment to make them more modern.

When we worked on our endurance and jumping training in high school one of the exercises we all dreaded the most was the stage jump. We had a stage at one end of our gym that was about 36 inches off the ground and we had to stand in front of it and jump up on it, take a few steps over drop down and repeat the process down the whole stage. This really worked on the explosiveness of our legs and helped to build our endurance as the whole team would go through the drill and circle back around to repeat continuously for ten minutes.

After going through this drill a couple of times, your legs started to become rubber, but it was amazing how it quickly helped your jumping ability. I can definitely attest to having extra spring in my step after a few weeks of this old school exercise and you could see it affect your vertical jumping ability.

The modern version of this is referred to as the box jump. It involves jumping onto the top of a box, coming back down and repeating the process. With the modern version, they also have different heights of boxes as this gets easier for the jumper. The bonus with this type of jumping training is your muscles learn to explode, but you don’t get the impact of coming all the way back down to the ground which can save wear and tear on your feet, shins and knees.

Since we are focusing on cost effective versions of this, you can jump up on anything to improve your vertical. It could be something as simple as jumping up to the second step on a set of stairs for starters, or if you are more advanced further up to the third or fourth step. If you are in the city how about jumping up onto a concrete barrier, or if you cannot find a barrier you could try jumping up onto a park bench? If you look around there are places anywhere you can do this.

The important part is to make sure the surface you jump on is stable and the surface area is large enough for you to land on. Also if you are getting tired you need to stop as missing the jump can cause some damage to your shins, especially on a concrete barrier! Work on this exercise for a few weeks and you will jumping higher than ever before.

If you are serious about improving your vertical you may want to look into one of the programs currently available that include complete workout schedules. One of the programs that seems to be garnering plenty of attention is Jacob Hiller's Jump Manual Program.  It includes workout programs for beginner jumpers all the way up to NBA level programs. Take a peek if you want to peak your vertical jumping ability!