Your fitness level can only improve if you overload your body, which is pushing your body beyond what you are already doing. You should have some cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, good nutritious diet, muscle endurance, along with flexibility. After that, you can challenge your body with more advance fitness exercises to increase your vertical. When you reached an adequate fitness level, your will be ready for an intense vertical jump training program.

Training Exercises That Increase Your Fitness Level

1) Aerobic (or Cardiovascular) Exercises

Aerobic exercise (which is repetitive movement of large muscle groups over an extended period of time) will produce cardiovascular endurance. Examples of aerobic exercises include swimming, rope jumping, jogging, and playing basketball.

2) Increase Muscle Strength

By applying resistance to a muscle group, you can increase muscle strength. Lifting weights is a good way of increasing muscle strength. Squats, lunges, calf exercises, are some examples in increasing strength for jumping higher.

3) Increase Muscle Endurance

Muscle endurance is the ability of the muscle to repeat that movement over a period of time. Muscle endurance improves in conjunction with muscle strength. With regular exercise, your muscles burn energy more efficiently and endure overloading for longer time. Rope jumping, running long distance or for a long time, are some examples for building endurance.

4) Increase Joint Flexibility

Joint flexibility refers to the range of motions, the joint can undergo as limited by the joint’s structure and surrounding connective tissues. Warming up and then stretching your calves, hamstring and quad muscles are important activity in preventing injuries and increasing your fitness level. Joint flexibility can also increase your vertical jump dramatically.

5) Daily Nutritious Diet

A good healthy diet promotes faster recovery and is important for your body to repair itself. Avoid eating junk food or sugars, and make sure you diet includes protein, good carbs and fats, along with vitamins. Drinking plenty of water will also enhance your growth and ability to handle an increase load of exercises.

6) Reduce Body Fat

Concentrating on building muscle if you are overweight. You must be as lean (less than 10%) as possible to dunk. You may have to limit your daily caloric intake to 2000, 1500, or even just 1000 calories a day. It is safe as long as those are calories from healthy foods. Speak to a doctor or nutritionalist for more information on that. Running is good for losing weight, as is any vigorous aerobic activity. You lose weight and at the same time condition your lungs.

Remember, this is the start of your jumping higher program. After you have reached a good fitness level, you can begin to do exercises to increase your vertical explosion. Those exercises are called plyometrics. Plyometric training will develop quick twitch muscle fibers needed to increase your vertical. Many athletes omit these exercises, resulting in them not drastically increasing their vertical jump.