Highest Jumper In The World Breaks Down His Workout Routine

[0:00]I went from barely able to dunk a basketball when I was 16, to later breaking the approach vertical jump with a 50.5 inch leap.

[0:09]And today, I'm going to break down exactly what my week and month of training looks like.

[0:15]To understand why I do what I do, you have to understand what the whole point of training even is.

[0:21]First, you have to start with a goal. My goal is to jump higher. For example, let's say you can currently jump 30 inches, and let's say your goal is to jump 40 inches.

[0:29]At your current state, your body physiologically can't produce that much force that quickly to achieve a 40-inch jump.

[0:38]So we train to induce changes in your body that will allow you to do that.

[0:42]This could be making your tendons stiffer, it could mean getting your muscles bigger and stronger, it could mean teaching your nervous system to fire more quickly, or all of the above.

[0:54]These changes are called adaptations, and we want our training to induce the right adaptations that will cause you to jump higher.

[1:03]And I generally try to follow four laws of adaptation, that if you follow these four laws, those changes in your body will happen.

[1:08]The first one is the law of progressive overload. Simply stated, in order to cause changes in your body, you need to subject your body to harsher and harsher environments in the way of training.

[1:17]The training literally needs to get harder month after month, year after year.

[1:22]The second law of adaptation is the law of accommodation. To understand this law, let me explain to you some biology.

[1:27]You are an organism. The stuff around the organism is the environment, and the objective of the organism is to survive its environment.

[1:37]If you subject that organism to a new environment, let's say it's harder, there's going to be changes that happen in your body that are going to cause you to handle that hot environment.

[1:46]However, if the environment stays the same, those changes will stop occurring. There is no point for your body to change physiologically if it doesn't need to.

[1:55]Because those changes take energy, valuable energy that could be spent trying to keep you alive instead.

[2:01]The way we combat adaptation is variety. So the training needs to look different, week to week, month to month, year to year.

[2:09]The third law is the law of specificity. The more similar your training looks like, to the thing that you're trying to improve, the more it's going to transfer.

[2:16]It can be similar in terms of the joint angles that you hit, how quick the exercise is, how much force is generated in the exercise, and how hard you are trying.

[2:27]And then the final law of adaptation is the law of individuality. Basically, everybody is different, everybody is going to adapt differently to different stimuli.

[2:39]So what I'm going to explain has worked really well for me. However, it might work differently for you.

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[2:50]And we use that information to give you a training cycle that we feel is going to most improve your vertical jump.

[2:59]We literally have hundreds of training cycles that we have perfected over 10 plus years of training thousands of athletes.

[3:05]So again, go to THPstrength.com and there is currently a discount on the website, so go check it out and take advantage of it today.

[3:12]So, now we know that we need to cause some adaptations, baby. And in order to do that, you need periodized training.

[3:19]Periodization is a fancy word that just means we want you to peak your vertical at a specific time of the year.

[3:26]And I use a fancy type of periodization called long conjugate sequences systems.

[3:30]Long, meaning my training cycles last a few weeks, conjugate, meaning I focus on a bunch of different qualities at the same time,

[3:38]such as max strength, the task that I'm trying to improve, which is max approach jumping, plyos, power exercises, general strength work.

[3:48]And I focus on all these at the exact same time with extra emphasis on one or two of those qualities.

[3:52]And finally, sequence means that I focus on a different quality with each passing month.

[3:58]So, now that you have a good base of understanding for training adaptations, here is my weekly routine.

[4:04]I have two high-intensity days, this is on Monday and Wednesday. I start every high-intensity day with three to five sets of knee extension isometrics.

[4:15]I hold each isometric for 30 to 45 seconds. Each isometric is done at around 70% effort.

[4:20]This level of effort for this amount of time allows uncrimping of your tendent fibers.

[4:26]It basically gets them from linked together to unlinked together, and this allows you to load that middle part of the tendon.

[4:35]And this load stimulates the tenocytes to produce more collagen.

[4:38]If you don't know what any of that means, you can go Google each word, but basically, it allows your tendon to get healthier.

[4:44]It warms the tendon up for the activities that you're also going to do later that day.

[4:47]Then I do dynamic flexibility, which is basically things like leg swings, bodyweight squats.

[4:54]The whole point of that is to raise my body temperature, increase the range of motion without decreasing force output during my workout.

[5:01]Then I do a barbell warm-up, and the whole point of this warm-up is to go from general to specific.

[5:06]The ISOs were super general, the dynamic flexibility was a little more specific. Now we're doing hang cleans, power cleans, squats, and RDLs with an empty barbell, which is basically as specific as you can get for the lift without actually lifting hard.

[5:20]At this point, I'm super warmed up and I'm going to start my explosive lift of the day.

[5:25]This could be a power exercise like an Olympic lift, such as a snatch or a power clean, or it can be a loaded plyo like a hex bar jump, a barbell squat jump, medicine ball jump, or it could be a legitimate unloaded plyometric like a death jump, bounding, and double leg hopping.

[5:40]From there, I move into my main knee extension lift of the day. I like to alternate between half back squats, full range of motion front squats, full range of motion belt squats, or a single leg lift like a high box step-up or a barbell lunge.

[5:57]From there, I go into my accessory work. Usually, I hit the hips next with something like a hip thrust or a posterior chain exercise like a Nordic hamstring curl, regular machine hamstring curls, RDLs, banded hip abduction, cable abduction.

[6:14]And then finally, we hit the lower leg with a calf exercise. My favorite are seated calf raise or standing calf raises with either a Smith machine, an actual standing calf raise machine, or one of these bad boys, a safety bar.

[6:26]Then on Tuesday or Thursday, I do a general day. The purpose of a general day is to increase work capacity.

[6:33]It serves as active recovery, your body composition, basically you get less fat because you're doing more work, and improves your hormone profile.

[6:41]Basically you release more testosterone, which you benefit from in the high-intensity days. And those days are pretty simple.

[6:46]I start the day with a shoulder rehab circuit. If you sign up for THPstrength.com, I actually have a document that breaks down a shoulder rehab month of training.

[6:57]But it's things like internal rotation isometrics with a straight bar, external rotation isometrics with a straight bar, banded internal and external rotation, shoulder flexibility things, and things of that nature.

[7:09]Then I do a pushing lift, then a pulling lift, and a shoulder exercise. Next comes the fun day, and that is Saturday, and that is my jump day.

[7:17]Again, I do isometrics as a warm-up, my dynamic flexibility circuits, then I actually add sprint development drills,

[7:23]which are things like high knees, butt kicks, A-skips, B-skips, and then I start low-effort jumps.

[7:29]I work my way from 10% effort all the way up to 100% effort. How quickly I do this depends on how healthy I feel.

[7:34]The more banged up I feel, the slower I'm going to warm up my jumps, and the healthier I feel, the more quickly I'm going to progress from 10 to 100% effort.

[7:44]And then I do a bunch of 100% full approach jumps. This can be as short as 30 minutes, and it can be as long as three hours.

[7:53]I recommend stopping as soon as you see a pretty big decrease in the quality of your jumps. Then on Saturday is what I call a feel-good lift day.

[8:01]I go in, I do my ISOs, I don't do an explosive lift that day, and instead, I do heavy slow resistance training.

[8:07]My favorite way of doing this is with this bad boy. I warm up to about 70% of my max and I do two to three sets of six to eight reps going very slow on squats.

[8:18]So three to five seconds on the descent, and then three to five seconds on the way up.

[8:22]Then I finish with two sets of 10 of a posterior chain lift and two sets of 10 of a lower leg lift.

[8:27]And I keep it very light. The whole point is to get some blood flow in your legs and help with recovery and make your tendons feel really good.

[8:34]Sunday, I take completely off except I do three to five sets of knee extension isometrics. Again, 30 to 45 seconds each at 70% effort.

[8:42]And I do this three times for a total of 10 to 15 sets during the whole day. And I do each grouping of ISOs six hours apart.

[8:50]So that's what my week looks like. But you're probably wondering what about exercises, what about sets and reps, how do I progress them?

[8:57]Let me explain. To understand what sets and reps to do, you have to understand two terms, they are intensity and volume.

[9:02]I'm going to give you a very basic way of looking at it. Look at intensity as how heavy you're going on a lift, and think of volume as sets times reps.

[9:10]Over the course of a training month, they should be inverted, meaning you should never have both high intensity or high volume or you're going to get hurt.

[9:17]What you want to do is, in the beginning of the month, you should have high volume. Then the volume should decrease over the training month, and the intensity should go up.

[9:27]Here's a very basic set and rep scheme with inverse intensity and volume that you can use.

[9:32]I want you to follow this set and rep scheme for every single exercise. For the month of training that we're going to do, let's choose the power clean as our power exercise.

[9:40]Let's choose the back squat as our knee extension exercise, the hip thrust as our posterior chain exercise, and a standing calf raise as your lower leg exercise.

[9:50]And you're going to start by doing five sets of six reps for every single exercise in week one.

[9:57]As far as your upper body days, choose bench press, weighted pull-ups, and lateral shoulder raises as your exercises.

[10:04]And again, start with five sets of six reps in week one. Your last two sets should be done at 75% of your max.

[10:13]If you don't know what your max is, I want you to just guess. Or go to a one rep max calculator website, here are a few options that you can use.

[10:20]And type in how many reps you could do at a given weight for each exercise and it'll give you an estimate of what your one rep max is.

[10:27]So again, for every exercise, do five sets of six, the last two sets should be done at 75% of your max.

[10:32]The first four sets just build up to that 75%. So you might start at 40%, then 50, then 60, then 70, and then 75% on your fifth set.

[10:44]Now, what I want you to do is each week, I want you to add a set, take away a rep. This is going to decrease the total volume,

[10:53]but now you're going to go heavier. So in week two, I want you to do seven sets of five reps with the last two sets being at 80% of your max.

[11:03]And then same thing, in week three, you're going to add a set, take away reps, you're going to do seven sets of four reps with your last two sets at 85%.

[11:13]So now we have successfully increased the intensity week to week to week and decreased the volume week to week to week.

[11:20]At this point, your vertical is going to go down. You're going to be feeling horrible.

[11:24]This is because your fatigue is going to be building. When fatigue builds, your performance drops.

[11:30]However, that doesn't mean you're getting worse. You're actually getting better. You're becoming a more fit athlete, your fitness is increasing, but fatigue is masking that fitness.

[11:40]This is shown in the fitness fatigue model, which looks like this.

[11:44]As you can see here, as you train, your fitness goes up. You're becoming physiologically a better organism that is better suited to its environment, which for us is training with the adaptation being jumping higher.

[11:54]However, you can see that performance is going down, and that's because fatigue is building. So how do we take away the fatigue and keep fitness high, which will create a higher performance?

[12:04]It's by something called a D-load. In week four, what we're going to do is we're going to cut the sets and reps in half while keeping intensity high.

[12:10]Keeping intensity high is going to maintain your fitness levels, and keeping the volume low is going to dissipate the fatigue, which is going to lead to an all-time PR jump on the last day.

[12:21]Also, in that fourth week, I want you to completely skip your general days, skip the upper body days on Tuesday and Thursday.

[12:27]If you follow this and you stay consistent and you don't miss a single workout, and if your training age is low, meaning you've been training for less than a couple of years, you will jump higher by doing this.

[12:39]You're welcome. Like the video if you found this useful.