With Week 5 coming to a close now, and the presentations rolling around, my plyometrics training is coming to an end. This week was another success, as I reached 31 inches to my vertical leap. This means that I gained a grand total of 3 inches over four weeks (excluding the first week where I gained zero inches). This was a huge moment for me, in the sense that my project had actually made a great impact on my goal.
From Week 2 to Week 5, you can see a crazy difference in my dunking ability, and I can't help but watch the videos from this week over and over again! It's really exciting stuff. In addition, the weather has been getting warmer and warmer out, making it a lot easier to get my legs warmed and staying loose.
As for the plyometrics side of things, I didn't exactly change anything from what it was last week. kept the sets and reps constant, but I picked up on something interesting. The whole purpose of the training is to reduce the time it takes to get from the load to the explosion. I realized that I wasn't making explosive movements throughout my workout, which could've been hindering the results. So this week, especially with the horizontal leg bounds, I decided to go for quicker speeds, rather than doing it the right way. By now, I had most of the workouts muscle memorized, so I was to worried about injuring myself.
Below are a couple of videos from Week 5, and I hope you enjoy as much as I did!
As you can see in the video, I have officially reached the point where a one footed jump is almost automatic, which is way farther than I could've ever imagined. This leads me to the next step in the process. Of course the project is ending and the presentations are this week, however I will continue my training long after I get on stage for my TED Talk.
The reason why? I want more. That's basically it. I'm to the point where I am satisfied, but it's sure not going to make me a dynamic basketball player in any way shape or form. What I want to do is to be able to catch ally-oops, throw a self-oop of the backboard, I want to be able to dunk like I'm in the NBA.
Now I know that's certainly a stretch, but hey, you can't find your limit until you've given it all, and then some. As you can see in the video below, I've got quite a way to go until I'm successfully dunking off the backboard, but I'm sure by increasing sets and reps, and by making quicker movements during the training, I can gain another 3 or 4 inches to my vertical.
Lastly, I had to have a little fun while doing my training. I lowered my hoop down to seven feet, and I felt like doing a dunk contest for the fun of it. Since you guys have been a great audience for my blog, I felt the need to share my Hoopsmixtape. Enjoy!
At first I thought 3 inches wasn't that much, but then I thought it over again and I was like wow that's a lot. I mean, we see what three inches of height of one person compared to another is, so there's that. I really like the fact that I can see a progression, where now you can dunk consistently. I thought that was pretty interesting. I'm looking forward to see how you progress after the project is over.
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