To give you a sense of where I stand today, below are my key stats:
- Height: 6 feet 2 inches
- Weight: 184.5 pounds
Based on my makeshift vertical leap test conducted at home with double sided scotch tape around my middle finger, below is the summary of what I’m up against:
- Reach span: 95 inches (7 ft 11 inches)
- Vertical Leap: 12 inches
Given that you need additional 6 inches above the official rim height of 10 feet (120 inches) to dunk the basketball over the rim, I’m currently short of 19 inches which means I need to increase my vertical leap from current 12 inches to 31 inches. In short, I need to increase my current vertical leap by 160%(!) and have approximately 360 days to make it happen. Good news: I got a lot of room for improvement. Bad news: I got a lot of room for improvement. I might have better chance at making a full court shot twice in a row…
*For those who don’t want to be bothered with the math, here’s a simple online calculation tool – http://www.dunkcalculator.com/
[Insert video taken by Jayden under the phone]
So what’s my game plan for making this happen? I’ve found the following two resources:
Tim S. Grover’s Jump Attack –A sports trainer guru who’s been a trusted trainer for the basketball greats in the likes of MJ, Kobe and Dwayne. I found it as part of Amazon recommended book when I was looking up Year of the Dunk. The book offers a twelve-week program that combines plyometrics, weightlifting and stretching. You are allowed to repeat the program twice or three time. The author makes it clear that although the book will help you with jumping ability as a by-product, its ultimately goal isn’t to help you exclusively dunk a basketball in a single leap but to help your overall athletic ability. Not exactly what I wanted to hear given my singled minded goal but think it will set up a solid foundation to try out other ‘jump focused’ training guide
Air Alert – This is a free 15–week training guide available online. I googled it after coming across as one of the key resources utilized by the author of “Year of the Dunk”. Based on a brief glance, looks like a series of intense plyometric based exercises solely focused on improving jumping ability.
My plan is to periodically test my improvement my taking my vertical leap test at home as well as on the court under the rim (similar to the video shown initially) every 90 days so four times over the course of this entire year: 90 days (end of Mar), 180 days (end of Jun), 270 days (end of Sep), 360 days (end of December). I will officially try out my first dunk at the 180 days test mark and get two more tries at the 270 and 360 day marks.
Overall, below is my self-decided training plan:
Jan – March ’16: 12 weeks of Jump Attack (1st time)
Apr – Jun ’16: 12 week of Jump Attack (2nd time – per book’s guidance, with increased weight and longer timed exercises)
Jul – Sep’16: 15 weeks of Air Alert
Oct – Dec’16: TBD (either Jump Attack for the 3rd time or Air Alert for the second time depending on what’s giving me the better results)
[Short montage videos of each exercise and each phase’]
yellowmancanjump 