If you like basketball, you probably want to learn how to dunk. Of course, unless you’re seven feet tall, diving requires great jumping skill. The question is what to do if you don’t have good vertical jumping ability? What training techniques are available to get you to the hoop?
It would be hard to find someone who doesn’t want to learn to nail. If you are a regular viewer of NBA games, it is definitely hard to imagine yourself flying through the air like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan, immersing yourself in another star player. Not all basketball players possess this physical ability to jump and dive. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably one of the many who don’t dunk. So the question is: why are some players able to jump through the ceiling while others can’t get their feet off the ground? If you really want to learn how to slam dunk like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, it’s very important to be able to answer that question.
The hard truth is that the ability to jump and spike depends on many genetic components. The muscles in our body are made up of thousands of muscle fibers that vary according to factors such as resistance, speed, and length. If you really want to learn how to nail perfectly, you need to focus more on building your slow-twitch muscles rather than your fast-twitch ones.
Slow twitch muscle fibers are those you use to stand or walk a long distance. They are not as sensitive as the fast type (hence the name), but they do have incredible stamina. Fast twitch muscle fibers are extremely powerful and can give you explosive movement, but they tire easily. For example, when you throw a baseball, you use primarily fast-twitch muscles to perform this movement. Fast twitch muscle fibers are important in learning to spike, but they are not the key players.
An easy way to illustrate how the different muscle fibers work is to look at the muscular structure of a chicken. Chicken breast muscle has efficiently fast twitch fibers, as flapping a wing is a fast movement. Meat is “white” because it contains high amounts of glycogen, a compound necessary for rapid, explosive movement. Glycogen also makes meat taste sweeter when cooked. Chicken feet are composed of slow-twitch “dark meat” muscle fibers that enable the chicken to perform endurance activities such as walking or running.
So if you really want to learn how to spike, but you can’t jump or jump very high right now because your leg muscles have efficient, slow twitch muscle fibers, what do you do? That’s easy: you train! You need to condition your legs so that they take on some of the important characteristics of fast twitch muscle fibers. You can do this very easily through plyometric exercises. This type of exercise is derived from German techniques that allow athletes to dramatically improve specific explosive movement events like sprinting.
Long story short, the way to learn to dunk like the pros is to simply learn to jump higher. Even if you don’t have the same salary as Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan to finance your training program, you can still learn to dunk through vertical training techniques like plyometrics. You’ll have to walk the path and push yourself to get there, but you’ll definitely be able to talk for the talk when you’re in the air.
