Improving quickness and leaping ability is one of the best things you can do to up your game for sports like, basketball, football, volleyball and soccer. This tutorial provides a safe and effective guide to improving explosiveness that will pay dividends in any sport.

First Things First: Get Aligned

A number of fitness books, magazines, and other web sites are full of training programs designed to help you jump higher and move faster.  Most of these programs focus on “plyometric” exercises – simple explosive movements like a vertical leap or a forward bound. Plyometrics are great, and can do wonders for both quickness and leaping ability, but for most people they’re not the best place to start.

Strange as it may sound, the first thing you should do if you’re looking to improve your leaping, quickness, or any other athletic ability is to correct any problems with your alignment and posture. Poor alignment places increased stress on joints and reduces the efficiency of muscles. Both effects undermine the performance of your body. Check out our Improving Posture and Alignment Tutorial for more on why. A well-aligned body not only performs better; it’s also far less prone to injury. Any sports training program should begin with exercises to correct poor alignment and postural imbalances.

Improved Leaping Ability Starts with Better Balance

After addressing alignment the next most important thing to focus on is balance.

Here’s why:

Stand on your right foot with your arms at your side.

How stable are you just standing there? Is your ankle wobbling back and forth, or are you steady? Now leap a foot or two to the side and land on your left foot without letting your right foot touch the ground.

Did you stick the landing, or did you have to catch yourself with your right foot? If you were able to land without touching your right foot down, were you perfectly balanced the minute you landed? If so, try this agian, but jump further to the side - as big a leap as you can make. Were you perfectly balanced on landing this time? If you weren’t then your balance on the field or court is invariably undermining your performance.

In order to change directions or execute a leap, your body first has to stabilize your plant foot. If your balance is less than perfect this takes a little longer. More critically, the less centered and balanced you are when you start a leap or a cut the less power you can directly transfer into the motion. You can have the most powerful leg muscles in the world, but if your balance isn’t great you’ll hemorrhage power every time you move and you won’t be any where near as quick or be able to jump as high.

Balance improves fast with training. The best way to train balance is to simply execute the motions you use in your favorite sports, but stop after each movement and focus on stability. For instance; pretty much all sports require lateral movement. To train balance in lateral movement, execute the type of jumps you just did back to back, right foot to left foot, then left foot to right foot.

Jump off one foot and land on the other trying to stick the landing on your plant foot. After a second or two, leap back the other way, again trying to stick the landing. Bounce back and forth from foot to foot, training yourself to balance on each foot. Work up to the point where you can jump as far as you can in each direction, and land with no wobble or instability.

To add a degree of difficulty start jumping in different planes. Mix forward leaps with leaps to the side. Once you’ve mastered sticking landings on lateral and forward jumps, try a spinning jump where you jump backwards and turn 180 degrees before landing.

In every case try to land on one foot and balance without touching the other foot down. To increase the level of difficulty jump further. Start leaping in all different directions, spinning in the air and landing on one foot. As you grow more skilled, try landing with one foot on curbs, park benches and other surfaces. The more creative and dynamic your workout the more you’ll increase your balance and agility. Develop a routine and practice it for 10 to 15 minutes 3 or 4 times per week and you’ll have near perfect balance in no time.

 Great Leaping Ability and Quickness Require Strong Legs and a Strong Core

Strength is critical to both quickness and leaping ability, but you can’t simply focus on the legs and forget about the rest of the body. The muscles of the core are, if anything, more important since strong legs and a weak core is a recipe for injury. By core muscles we mean the abdominal muscles and the muscles of the lower back – see our Core Training Tutorial for more on how to condition these muscles.

When it comes to training your legs to improve explosive power, the key is to do exercises that challenge your body in multiple plains of motion and work your muscles in the same pattern that you use them in during sports. A lot of athletes train on leg press machines. This isn’t a very good idea. A leg press machine places the weight you lift on a track. This track keeps the weight balanced for you, and all you have to do is push the weight up and down. Our bodies adapt very quickly and very specifically to the exercises we do. Leg presses will cause your legs to get stronger, but they won’t teach your body to balance and stabilize weight as you lift it. As a result, you muscles can actually lose their capacity to balance and stabilize weight even as they grow stronger. Since everything you do on the field requires balance and stability, this can actually undermine your performance.

In addition, on most leg press machines your body stays still and you move your legs to push a platform connected to the resistance. This is not a motion you use in sports. In sports the ground provides the platform and you push off of the ground to move your body. Even though pushing a platform away from your body with your legs and pushing your body off of a platform with your legs use many of the same muscles, these two motions use those muscles in very different ways. A lot of the benefits of any exercise to athletic performance come from adaptation of the nervous system to specific motions. The movement program your brain has to execute to move a loaded platform away from you with your legs is completely different from the program needed to propel your body away from a platform. As a result, typical leg press machines don’t do much for quickness and leaping, whereas free weight squats do a great deal. This has been confirmed in several scientific studies.

Leg press machines in which the weights are mounted on your shoulders and you press against a fixed platform moving your body are better but still not ideal. The best exercise to build a foundation of leg strength for sports is the free weight squat. No matter what your sport, if it requires fast cuts, sprinting, or leaping ability squats should be the foundation of your strength training program.

Start squatting 12-16 weeks before the season. Look to do squats once or twice per week. Do 5 or 6 sets of squats each workout, starting out very light and finishing heavy. For your first set, choose a weight you can easily squat 15 times. Progressively raise the weight and lower the number of reps, finishing at a weight you can only lift 4 or 5 times. Form is critical for squats. Our Weight Lifting Form Tutorial covers the basics of good squat form, but if you can, learn from a coach or a fitness professional. Always squat with a spotter.

After six to eight weeks of squatting at a normal pace start squatting more explosively. Rather than slowly lowering and raising the barbell on your back, move down into the squat quickly, and then explode up as fast as you can. Don’t actually leave the ground, as landing with a bar on your back is tough on your spine and joints. During the late pre-season and the season proper do the first two or three sets of squats in your workout (not counting the warm up set) slowly to maintain strength. Then make the rest of your sets explosive. Once you start doing explosive squats you’ll be beginning plyometric exercises as well. At this point, its best to limit squats to once per week to avoid overtraining.

Squats train the quads, glutes, and hamstrings to extend the legs, creating forward or upward thrust. The muscles of the calf work synergistically with the quads, glutes, in most motions we use in sports. To train your calves for performance, follow the same pattern you do with squats. In the early preseason train calves with heavy weight two or three times per week (calf muscles contain a different fiber composition than quads and glutes and can be worked more frequently). Find an elevated platform, and stand on the edge so that your heels can dip below the surface. Hold heavy dumbbells and perform full range of motion calf raises. If you’re working with a spotter and want more weight, perform calf raises with a bar on your back. As with squats, start light and finish heavy. Look to do five sets. Take the early sets to 15 reps, and the later sets to 8-10 reps.

If you don’t have an elevated platform to work your calves on then use a calf press machine. Just try to find one where the platform is anchored so that you’re training your calves to move your body, rather than training them to move a platform. Working your calfs on a machine isn't ideal, but it isn't as problematic as machine training yoru quads and glutes . Alternatively just do one leg calf raises on the stairs, again going through a full range of motion. Hold dumbbells for weight.

You can also complement your leg training with hamstring ball rolls. Lie on your back, place your feet on a ball, and elevate your hips, making your body straight.

Roll the ball under your body, then extend your legs, rolling the ball away.

Repeat this motion through 12 to 15 reps as quickly as possible. As your balance improves, try this with only one leg on the ball. This is a great exercise that trains balance and agility as well as quickness.