Even if one is not a basketball player, volleyball player or high-jumper, the vertical jump should not be ignored in the world of sports.
Coaches look at vertical jump as an immediate indicator as to how explosive their athletes are. Jumping ability is to athletic development what the ability to accelerate from 0-60 is to street-car racing. You can put a bigger engine in a car, but what it can do with the horsepower it has is evaluated in the race. Unless it can “get it up and go” quickly, that extra horsepower is of no use. In much the same way the vertical jump assesses your “get up and go” and how well you can use the horsepower in your own body. Put in different perspective, would athletes prefer to be a Formula 1 car or a dump truck that picks up garbage once a week?
To give you an idea how effective a tool the simple vertical jump test is for assessing whole body explosiveness, the NFL routinely uses a whole host of tests when evaluating athletes at their NFL combines. They use a bench press test, a 40-yard dash test, various tests of agility, and a vertical jump test. At first glance it might appear that the ability to jump would be the LEAST specific of those tests to a football player. However, the vertical leap is in fact the most effective of those tests in predicting the success of a football player – even better than the 40-yard dash!
So where do the Olympic lifts come into play?
Olympic lifts make athletes stronger and more explosive. Weightlifters generally have above average vertical jumps.
Here is Brittany. I recently tested her vertical jump for the first time. The average vertical jump for females is 13 to 14-inches. Brittany jumped at 19-inches first time around.
HoofGripWL 