Are you involved in sports, whether professional or armature? Is your sport physically demanding and of the physical characteristics you must have is the ability to jump higher? Plyometric exercises can help you make a difference in your sporting activity by improving your vertical jump capability. I should mention that the ability to jump higher is primarily a combination of your leg strength, proper body coordination and speed. Today, most athletes are judged to be good or bad depending on how high they can jump because this is one of the most important physical capabilities in the field today.
The ability to jump is shaped by your physical abilities, especially the strength and speed of your calf muscles and the coordination of the load and explosion phase. In order to increase your vertical leap, you need to understand that it will be imperative to exert a lot of stress on the tissues so as to make them grow stronger and be faster. Plyometric exercises are workouts designed to increase your vertical jump ability by working different muscles and tendons in the body especially those found in the legs, on the thighs, arms, lower back and the core muscles. Note that this is a very intensive form of training that aims at exhausting the muscles to arm with the speed and strength required when they are recovering.
Plyometrics exercises are nothing like ordinary workouts, they are a total body training for jump which incorporates speed, strength and coordination workouts in the same exercises. Your ability to jump high will largely be determined by the exercises you do and how you do them, there is a particular way you have to work out to make your muscles fit and suited to thrust the body with a lot of power against gravity. Contrary to what most people believe, plyometric exercises or vertical jump training for that matter, is not all about jumping to exhaustion; most plyometric exercises are not about jumping but using a variety of different exercises and variation to target specific muscles that are involved in the jump process.
As you prepare to learn to jump higher, you need to know that although jumping is an instinctive movement, jumping high is nothing simple because it involves coordination and timing. As you do the full extension plyometrics, you will realize that jumping has three stages: the first is the loading phase where the muscles in the calves, thighs and the core fold or retract. The second stage is amortization, a stage where the muscles switch from loading to the third stage, which is explosion. The amortization stage is very tricky because it has to be very short and precise. Plyometric training covers shortening the amortization stage, increasing the power of the loading stage and boosting the strength and the speed of the explosion stage.
Do not think that jumping high is an ability that some people are born with, they learn and train right to be high jumpers and you can too, within a very short time.