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- You were obsessed with it,
I was obsessed with it.
You know how to increase your vertical,
become quicker and faster.
- [Ben] Yep.
- So how would, you know,
what's the typical exercise and progression
for a young, healthy adult
who may or may not have knee injuries,
but wants to jump higher, and wants to be quicker?
- Well, I can even go.
I can even start, you know,
straight from exercise science itself,
and give it its credit.
A study was done just last year,
and it analyzed different squat depths
on athleticism and knee pain.
And it found that full range of motion squats
led to more athleticism, more vertical increase,
and less knee pain.
So I guess the way I would liken it is,
okay to jump higher,
your body has to be lighter for you to lift into the air.
So you have to change your strengths pound for pound,
meaning if your body gets lighter
for your legs, essentially,
vertical is going to be about 85% legs and core,
and maybe about 15% the shoulder swing.
- Sure.
- So if we can increase that strength,
theoretically, we can jump higher, right?
Now when it comes to real sporting activity,
most people are trying to do that
just through squat and deadlift
and olympic lift type movements.
So they're not really loading the ankle,
but when you try to go with a running start,
now the ankle gets loaded tremendously.
So, I even seen people increase like a stand still vertical,
and lose inches on their running start vertical.
- Sure, yep.
- So if we think about jumping up,
but then in sport, there's this out characteristic,
so the ankle, things like a nordic hamstring curl,
probably relates very little to jumping straight up,
but relates so much to jumping horizontally,
I would call the nordic the bench press of long jump!
- Gotcha.
- So, just one example there that I love
is Jonathan Edwards.
His world record still stands in the triple jump.
Now he finally won the gold medal at 34 years old,
the guy had gray hair.
He did nordics for 20 years.
He did them once a week.
He could do them like pushups.
And when I've trained triple jumpers, and long jumpers,
and these kinds of people,
compared to a regular human,
they can do nordics like freaking pushups.
I even trained the fastest guy in major league baseball,
$365 million contract.
From day one, he could do nordics
like other people can do pushups.
So in terms of going horizontal,
that nordic becomes really hugely important.
And I mentioned Jonathan Edwards,
the orthopedic specialist in England
told him that he couldn't even be a triple jumper.
They said that, genetically,
it was impossible for him to be a triple jumper.
He wound up having a fastest entrance speed
in triple jump history.
And his world record still stands from the '90s.
And you're not supposed to win a gold medal at 34 years old
in your fourth try at the Olympics!
You're supposed to be going downhill,
especially in a sport like triple jump,
which is elastic as can be.
And his trainer,
now keep in mind,
we still can't see life through a straw.
His whole sport means you go as fast as you can,
and you jump as far as you can.
He never has to stop.
So even his training, you would probably screw up
if you tried to only do his training,
and apply it to basketball.
Because basketball, you're then stopping,
stopping, stopping, stopping, stopping!
- Gotcha.
- So there definitely were some things missed out
in terms of going up,
but he did it right in terms of going out,
and his trainer kept improving his pound for pound strength.
- So those are, yeah.
- Ben, can they go to your channel
and type in nordics, and type in what is it?
- I mean, if you go on YouTube
and you search how to do a nordic hamstring curl,
my video comes up first.
- Gotcha.
- I go all the way back,
that exercise was first published in 1880.
So I'm not perfect,
but I make a lot of efforts to put out, you know,
the history on different exercises,
and some of these outlier exercises.
And what's amazing about the nordic
is that a nordic bench itself
is actually quite a key piece of equipment.
I mean, you can get 10 nordic benches
for the price of like a brand new hamstring curl machine.
And they work in different ways.
So, the hamstring curl is awesome.
I use that monkey foot device for the hamstring curl,
because it allows the fullest range of motion.
There's no pad to cut off your range of motion.
- [Bob] Right.
- Plus it's like 60 bucks, and it turns any dumbbell.
And if you know machines, they vary from brand to brand.
So, it's very hard to measure your strength on a machine
and then to compare to anyone else.
So anyways, that monkey foot allows leg curls.
But if you look at the nordic, and you look at a leg curl,
the very position where a leg curl gets hardest,
there's actually no load in the nordic,
when you're resting on your knees about to start.
There's no load.
So, this is called "the long range exercise."
Meaning when you do the nordic,
it gets harder as you approach that extended position.
And if you look at when we run and jump,
that's really where the knee is being loaded.
So I know I kind of went off topic
in terms of vertical jump,
but if we're talking jumping,
it's really about the marriage
of changing your relative strength
with bulletproofing your body,
and so a lot of people lose sight.
Last thing I'll say, you know,
on that jumping concept is like,
we think of training the muscles.
Okay, which muscles are involved in jumping?
Well, no matter what muscles we name,
our muscles, pound for pound, are weaker than our tendons.
Michael Jordan, winning his slam dunk championships,
was not made in the weight room.
He was winning those slam dunk championships
before he even met Tim Grover!
No offense to Tim Grover,
but we get confused
because the number one selling vertical jump book
of all time, with Michael Jordan's cover on the picture,
but Michael Jordan jumped his highest
before he ever started lifting weights.
- [Bob] Sure.
- It's right there on the tape.
He was back to back slam dunk champion.
His head was getting higher in relation to the rim
than any other point of his career
before he ever lifted weights.
So, my philosophy is to lift weights
in a tendon dominant fashion.
So you see me doing these knees over toes exercises,
right before we hopped on it today,
I had a six inch box, I had a slant board.
I'm standing with my heel elevated on the slant board,
and I'm doing a reverse step up,
and I'm getting a strong as I can.
So I'm taking two concepts
that come from physiotherapy research papers,
reverse step-ups, and slant boards.
And I'm turning that into my, you know,
"deadlift," or whatever you want to call it.
I'm turning a tendon dominant,
a knee bulletproofing exercise,
into my strength exercise.
That's not for everyone.
That's the same concept.
If I lowered, lowered, lowered that box and used assistance,
anyone who can walk can get a more stable,
and stronger, and more protected knee.
So the same concept that I would use
to give someone the ability to go down steps,
is the exact same concept
that's allowing me to just keep jumping higher.
I have this outlier,
I have this outlier genetic jump change,
but no one's ever tried to get as strong
on physiotherapy exercises as I've tried to do.
So it's an outlier approach,
and I've had, you know, outlier results.
So --
- Wait a minute.
I wonder, again, if you'd give your website,
I know I keep asking this,
but we're splitting this into different videos.
- No, that's great. Yeah, it's great.
- If you give it,
because I think it gets to be a lot clearer to people
when they can watch some of your videos.
- Absolutely. Yeah.
The knees over toes guy, the knees over toes guy on YouTube,
the very video I was just talking about,
it's being edited by my guy as we speak.
So --
- And your website?
- atgonlinecoaching.com
That's where I lay out all this stuff.
So I'm just mentioning a reverse step up,
with my heel elevated by a slant board, on a six inch box,
loading, you know, over a hundred pounds on my back.
Well, with that exercise,
we're really driving up the maximum strength of the knee
in the jumping angle, but that's not where I start.
That's the second phase that I do,
because the first phase starts by addressing the ankle.
You don't want to jack up your knee strength
on top of a weak or stiff ankle.
So the slant board stuff doesn't change your ankle mobility,
it bypasses the mobility, and maximally trains the knee.
So if you build that, not on the ankle foundation,
well, you could then be asking for shin splints,
or something like that,
you wouldn't get as much result.
Because when you jump,
you then have to combine that knee strength
with the ankle mobility,
with the achilles tendon elasticity.
So yes, all this stuff is on videos
on the knees over toes guy, YouTube.
- The point, Ben, is making it,
you're not going to jump right in
to that exercise right away,
you're gonna start off in your beginning exercises.
- [Ben] Exactly.
- And don't go, "no pain, no gain."
- Never work through pain!
- [Bob] Never work through pain, right.
- Yeah, but again,
if I had to summarize down into 10 seconds,
you know, if it was my last 10 seconds
to ever speak about vertical jump,
I would shout,
"Go look up the most proven physiotherapy exercises
for knee and achilles bulletproofing,
and then try to get the strongest in the world at those!"
'Cause not that many people
have really changed their genetic jumping.
I have, I know what it's like to change my genetic jumping.
And no other traditional methods in plyometrics
worked for me like taking these bulletproofing exercises,
that most people would stop
if they could do it with their own body,
and then just trying to continue that strength progression.
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