When I was a kid, I already knew I couldn't jump.
I am not gifted with the jumping genes.
When It was time to pick a sport in college, I subconsciously avoided the jumping sports
and chose rock climbing and swimming instead.
I know what you are wondering now.
Yes, I was the kid who studied and played the piano all day long.
I didn't realize the importance of playing sports until my third year in college.
Anyways, I've been told by numerous people that my lack of jumping abilities, aka power,
prevents me from making progress in climbing.
I acknowledged it, but never took action to try to improve it because I didn't believe
it was possible.
On top of that, most of the climbs in the gym I encountered rarely involved jumping.
However, recently I have started to train on the MoonBoard, and I found the number of
climbs that involve jumping is incredibly large.
My lack of power severely affected my progress.
I decided to reach out to my good friend, John, who is a strength coach, for help.
He assured me that it was absolutely possible to increase my power for jumping.
He said that since I never really trained my legs before, I should be able to start
with a simple training plan and see results in a month.
The training plan he recommended for me sounds incredibly easy to execute.
Warm up with 2 minutes of jump rope.
Climb as usual.
Finish up with 3 sets of 5 reps of box jumps.
Do this 2~3 times a week.
That's it.
Not going to lie, I was a bit skeptical at first, but I still decided to execute it and
document the whole process.
Before I started, I first measured my max jumping vertical.
I jumped 5 times and the numbers were 14 inches, 13.5 inches, 15.5 inches, 17 inches, 16.5
inches.16.5吋
I think the first three jumps were lower because I wasn't used to jumping yet, so I will
pick the max, which is 17 inches, and call it my max starting jumping vertical.
On my first day, I was actually scared to directly jump onto the 36-inch box, and in
order to do it, I had to put a 35-lb plate underneath myself.
For the next few sessions, I trained in another gym, which had only a 30-inch box, and I was
able to jump onto it directly without any plates underneath me.
Eventually I returned to the gym that has the 36-inch box.
While I was about to train, I noticed that someone took all the 35-lb plates, so I decided to
challenge myself with a thinner 10-lb plate instead.
To my surprise, I was able to do it.
I trained with the 10-lb plate for one more session, and I decided to train without any
plates for the next session.
I did it!
I was incredibly surprised at how easy it was to make progress.
30 days flew by really fast, and it's time to measure my max jumping vertical again.
I jumped 5 times again and this happened.
Yo.
The numbers were 19.5 inches, 19 inches, 18.5 inches, 18.75 inches, 18.75 inches.
The fluctuation was a lot lower this time.
It was most likely because I was used to jumping.
Again, I will pick the max, which is 19.5 inches, as my max jumping vertical.
That is 14.7% of improvement in a month, which is a lot to me!
John told me that if I wanted to see this kind of improvement again, he would have to
come up with a new plan with exercises with higher intensity for me, and if I continued,
I would have to train even harder for smaller gains.
This makes a lot of sense to me because I remember I was able to progress to climbing
V3s fairly fast, but then I got stuck at climbing V5s for 10 years.
Similarly, when I first got into calisthenics, I was able to learn the muscle-up pretty fast,
but then I seem to get stuck forever in learning the front lever.
The biggest takeaway of this experience for me is that if you are a beginner at something,
all you need to do is put in some work consistently and you will be able to see good progress.
Therefore, there is really no reason for you to doubt yourself and simply give up without
trying anything.
I made the mistake of totally giving up on training for jumping just because I am not
genetically gifted at jumping, and it hindered my progress on climbing.
Fortunately, compared to sports like basketball, jumping is not the main element for sports
like climbing, and with this new-found improvement, I have already been able to overcome a lot
of the climbs on the MoonBoard that require jumping.
It felt amazing to break a mini plateau, and you will know I have been on a roll lately
on the MoonBoard if you follow me on Instagram.
There are still a few MoonBoard climbs that I can't do probably because I still don't
have enough power, so I am continuing working with John to improve my power.
I am in the middle of documenting the process, and I will update everyone in another video
in the future.
Thanks for watching.
I just want to say that this has been a difficult year as a Youtuber.
Gyms open and close randomly, which makes producing videos extra difficult.
My progression on the front lever is slow and steady like everyone else because my rock
climbing background doesn't help.
As you can see, here's the world's best climber's attempt at the front lever.
With all that being said, I appreciate everyone who sticks around with me, and I've been
thinking extra hard lately about how to create interesting videos under this kind of unusual
circumstances, so definitely stay tuned.
As always, make sure to like, subscribe and check out my website geekclimber.com.
See you in the next video.