How I Trained a 50 Inch Vertical Without Grinding

I have a 50 inch vertical. Around seven people have ever tested that. I did not get there by living in the gym.

I got to a 50 inch vertical on about six hours a week in the weight room, while I was a full-time college student, in my school’s band, and doing an internship. My jump day sat on top of that, once a week.

That is the part people do not believe, so let me say the uncomfortable version. My busy schedule is part of why it worked. It forced me to stop overtraining. I actually got better when I was forced to train less.

This is my whole vertical jump training approach, the real version, including the exact lifts and plyos I ran to get there.

The short version of my vertical jump training

If you only read this far, my whole approach to vertical jump training is this: get strong, stay lean, jump with real intent, and stop doing so much. That is most of it. Everything below is the detail.

Why doing less made me jump higher

There are serious diminishing returns in vertical jump training. If you are grinding 20 hours a week, there is a good chance you are getting worse, not better.

Jumping is not a sport where more hours always buys more skill. Every max-effort jump is a heavy rep on your tendons. Stack enough of them on top of heavy lifting and plyos and you are not training anymore, you are just accumulating damage. When I was young I got away with it. Now I deal with knee pain and shin splints, and those came from exactly that.

You do not need to be in the gym 40 hours a week like it is a full-time job. You need a few focused hours and real intent in every rep.

One clarification, because people read the six hours as a hard cap and it is not. Six hours is a good starting target, especially if you do not have much time. It is not a ceiling. And it is weight-room time. Jump days sit on top of it, not inside it.

The mistake almost everyone makes in vertical jump training

Number one is doing too much at once. Three hours of dunking, plus plyos, plus heavy lifting, all in one session.

When you are young you can survive that for a while. As you get older it is exactly how you end up with knee pain and shin splints. Trust me on both.

The second mistake is not knowing your own body. Everybody responds differently. I have friends who lift way heavier than me and do not jump as high, because they respond better to plyos and I respond big to heavy weight. There is no way to know which one you are except to test it.

The third is draining yourself so hard you quit. Do not do that. Pivot the goal instead. Lower the rim, switch to one foot, whatever keeps you going. Consistency over months beats any perfect program you cannot stick to.

What a week of vertical jump training looks like

Do not overcomplicate vertical jump training. Anchor the week with one hard jump session and build the rest around lifting.

• Two or three weight-room days. One big lower lift each, squats or power cleans, plus calf and hinge work.
• One jump day where you actually go dunk with intent.
• The rest is recovery.

You do not need special machines or a fancy split. Give me a squat rack and I can run a whole variation of workouts.

On the jump day, do not pin it to a number of minutes. That is the most individual thing in the whole program. I can go three hours. I know people who top out around an hour and a half, and 90 minutes is probably average. Count the max-effort jumps, not the clock. Run the technique and volume work as long as the quality holds, and stop when it drops or your knee starts talking.

If you are under 18

Jump more. You have specificity and growth on your side. Through about 18 I was jumping three hours a day, five days a week.

That is what I did. It is not exactly what I would prescribe to everyone, because most people do not have that kind of time and not every body handles it. But the premise holds: when you are young you can jump a lot more and still keep adding inches.

If you are older

Build the strength base and jump less, but smarter. Lean into the weight room.

At 21, most of my week is the weight room, not the court. I jump about once a week, because of the knee pain and shin splints. When I do jump it is a long session, three or four hours, a jump about every minute and a half. Those are volume and technique reps, not true maxes.

I want to be honest that the three to four hour jump session is a me thing. My body handles it with no pain. I do not recommend that volume for most people. If you can get through a long jump session without hurting yourself, great, because that is real specific training. If you cannot, do not force it.

If you are 30 or older, keeping muscle on is part of keeping your jump, since you lose muscle and power with age. A little more volume there is protective, not bulk chasing.

The lifts that actually built my vertical jump

Here is the honest truth on lifting. Getting your weight-room numbers up makes it statistically more likely your vertical goes up. It is not a 100 percent guarantee. There are people who can barely lift anything and still have a very high vertical. For most people the probability is on your side, and for me it was the whole thing.

The three non-negotiables

My list of big rocks is short: deep back squat, power clean, and calf work. Those hit everything a jump needs, so I am not chasing one magic lift.

A hinge belongs in there as an accessory rather than a main lift. RDLs, once a week or once every couple of weeks. Deadlifts I mostly stay away from.

If you are only going to run part of my program, run the squat, the clean, and the calves. The rest is specificity I earned.

How strong is strong enough

Here is a real baseline. My body weight is 190 pounds and I deep back squat 425. So a good rule of thumb is to squat over twice your body weight.

If you can deep squat 2x your bodyweight, that is already a very good baseline, and at that point strength probably is not your main limiter anymore. The number that actually matters is relative strength, strength for your bodyweight, so keep that climbing.

The power clean, and when to skip it

The triple extension you get from power cleans is extremely effective for two-foot jumpers. It trains the exact explosive extension of my takeoff under heavy load.

But the technique matters enormously and you have to get it right early. You cannot push the weight up until your technique is dialed. This lift is dangerous. There are a lot of ways to get hurt flinging that much weight onto your chest.

Learn the movement first, before you add real weight. For some people that takes a month or two just to get right, and that is fine. If after that you still cannot figure it out, power cleans might not be for you, and that is also fine. Loaded trap-bar jumps or jump squats give you basically the same jump gains with far less technique risk. Swap them in and keep moving.

Squat depth, and the 115 percent rule

Deep, full squats are the best for general strength development. That is your foundation, so most of your squatting should be deep. Deep raises everything. Your deep squat pulls up your quarter squat, but a quarter squat will not pull up your deep.

Quarter squats come in when you want to get specific and build strength at the exact angle you jump from. I am a two-foot jumper and I use them, loaded at about 115 percent of my full squat max, because you can handle more through that short range.

Two things I want nailed down because people get them wrong. 115 percent is a quarter-squat load and quarter-squat only. Never put that on a full squat. And quarter squats run at most once a week. They are a specificity tool, not a staple you hammer.

If you have mobility limits or knee and hip issues, do not force depth. Load a real squat in a pain-free range and drive the knees forward at the bottom.

The plyos I actually run

People think I spam plyos. I do them about twice a week and I do not overdo them.

The one that matters most

Number one, hands down, is max-effort max-approach jumping. It is the most specific thing you can do because it is the jump. If you want to get good at something, the closer you train to the actual technique, the better. You only get good at what you actually practice.

Low volume, max intent, mixed with heavy lifts. That is exactly why I lift heavy through the week but only jump once, and when I jump I am using every ounce of effort I have.

Sprinting

If I could only do one exercise with no weights at all, it would be sprinting.

I sprint before almost every heavy leg day to warm up: three 40 meter sprints at max effort. It gets my body firing and makes sure I am not just building muscle to get big, I am refining it and making it specific to jumping.

Keep sprints in year round, not just before a peak. Volume is not the point with sprints. Intent is.

Isometrics for tendon stiffness

I build stiffer tendons with isometrics, and my favorite is simple. Set the safety pins in a squat rack, get under the bar, and drive up into the pins at about 85 percent effort. The bar cannot move, so you are producing max tension against something immovable.

I hold 20 to 30 seconds on a training day, then switch my stance and go again. When a tendon is actually flaring up I drop to about 15 seconds. Same tool, two jobs, do not mix them up.

A stiffer tendon returns energy faster with less stretch. A jump only lasts about a quarter second, so saving that time is everything.

Depth drops

Depth drops build reactivity off the ground because they give you a very short contact time.

Here is the bonus most people miss. If you do a depth drop and just land, instead of jumping back up, it actually helps with knee pain. I use landing-only reps to build my tendons up so they are ready to absorb force when I land off a real jump. That has prevented a lot of injuries for me.

I do not buy the idea that a higher box is always better. I do move my box height up gradually, but the reason is to get used to absorbing bigger landing forces, not because higher equals more vert.

And do not spam them. Three sets of three is plenty for the high-intensity stuff. Piling on more will actually start to decrease your vertical. Lower-intensity bounces like pogo jumps are different and can carry more volume, something like three sets of ten.

What is overrated

Regular box jumps, the tall-box tuck jumps people spam for Instagram, where you pull your knees up and land on a box and call it explosive. That does not earn its place.

A seated box jump is a different exercise. You start dead stop from a seat with no countermovement, so there is no stretch reflex to hide behind and you are training pure force from a standstill. That one I keep.

The plateau nobody warns you about

I hit a wall around a 46 inch vert with almost no weight training, and I could not get past it. Not until I started lifting heavy. Then my vert took off, because I am a high reactor to heavy weight.

For a lot of people the plateau is not a technique problem or a program problem. It is untapped strength. That is the first question to ask: are you actually lifting?

After that, the fix is usually planned variety, not random variety. If a lift has gone stale, swap in a familiar-but-new heavy stimulus and it tends to spike things back up.

The other big lever is getting leaner. A mentor told me a line I still repeat: “fat doesn’t fly.” If you are just getting started, cut the extra weight first. You will have to work a lot harder to get those extra pounds in the air when you could just take them off and jump higher almost automatically.

The 3.5 minute rule, and how I actually tested 50

This is the most specific piece of advice in this article and almost nobody does it.

On max jump days, when you are going for a new dunk or a vertical PR, give yourself at least three and a half minutes of rest between max-effort jumps.

When I tested my 50 inch vertical, I did 10 max-effort jumps before the test. I literally set a 3.5 minute timer and would not let myself jump again until it went off. That reset is what lets your body deliver maximum performance on the next attempt.

Most people take three deep breaths and go again, then wonder why attempt eight is worse than attempt two.

Deloads, and being okay feeling like you did not do enough

A deload is not full rest. It is dropping fatigue so your fitness shows through. Lower the volume, keep the intensity. Drop off too hard and you just detrain.

The signs I watch for: I feel flat, my numbers stall, my knees and shins start barking. That is fatigue piling up, not weakness.

Here is the mental part, and it is the hardest thing in this whole article. On a deload you will leave the weight room feeling like you did not do enough.

That is good. That is exactly how you are supposed to feel. Athletes always want to keep working and you have to fight that urge.

Also, do not panic about being a little sore on a max jump day. Adrenaline covers a lot. You do not want to go in out of shape, but a little soreness is fine.

Vertical jump training gear you should not buy

Save your money on the toys. Weighted insoles. Jump soles. Carbon fiber insoles. Ankle weights. Weighted vests used wrong. Most of it just rides the excitement of a new toy, or adds mass to your feet, which actually slows you down.

Same with the myths. A thousand calf raises a day does nothing. Any program promising 12 to 15 inches in three months is the biggest gimmick of all. And “sleep when you’re dead” is backwards, skipping sleep just kills your recovery and your power.

Be careful any time somebody claims one exercise will make you jump higher. A lot of the time they are just trying to sell you a program.

Two more traps. Do not copy elite genetic freaks, because what works for a freak usually does not apply to you at your level. And do not change every exercise every week. It takes a few weeks to adapt to a lift before the gains show up.

Run the scientific method on yourself

I do not hand people one rigid vertical jump training plan, because everybody trains differently.

I do not have a coach and I do not run a rigid plan on myself either. I run the scientific method on myself. Try it, write down the result, keep what works for me.

That is the whole method. Try it, log it, keep what moves your number. Yours will not be identical to mine.

And the last myth worth killing: jumping high is not pure genetics. Jumping is a skill. Anyone can improve their vertical by changing the small things.

The biggest myth of all is that you need a perfect, fully planned program before you can start. You do not. People overcomplicate it so hard they never do anything. Sometimes it is as simple as starting with “I want to jump higher.”

Just start.

I built this into an app

Everything above is what I do. The problem with writing about vertical jump training is that an article cannot look at your numbers.

That is why I built Vertly. It is an AI jump coach trained on how I actually train, and it builds you a plan around your own testing instead of handing you my week. It is free to start.

Get Vertly on the App Store

More from me

• I Won Group A: The Full Story of My First Dunk Contest Ever
• Stuck on a Tarmac Three Days Before the Biggest Night of My Life
• Three of the Eight: The Night the Vertical World Record Fell at Fanatics Fest
• The 360 Under Both on a Regulation Hoop
• World Record at Dunkademics: The Head Touch
• More about me

The 50 inch vertical and the DUNKMAN Group A win have been covered independently by the Dallas Morning News and The Atlanta Voice. My athlete profiles are listed with DUNKMAN and the World Dunk Association.