@KakeFitStudios

SCIENTISTS CHECKED, IT WORKS!

Memorizing basketball plays, learning football routes, and showing up to every practice are imperative, but not enough to make a superior athlete. More than ever, supreme physical fitness is not just an advantage but a necessity to be successful on a competitive level and to minimize risk of injury. Many diverse training approaches have been developed to enhance training efficiency and maximize power output. However, up until now, most of these (e.g. explosive lifting) have been deemed unsafe and inefficient.

Instead, low load/high-speed training has recently become much more prevalent, which brings us to jump training.  Jump high, jump fast, get sweaty, and in turn get stronger. For one, jumping is easy. We’ve all been jumping since we’ve been little and it turns out that perfect execution isn’t super important for how well it works. And second, jump training increases sprint acceleration, promotes rate of force development, overall athletic ability and power, and development of muscle deceleration which is vital for injury prevention, and some perfectly toned behinds that I’m guessing most people won’t object to (no, this part was not in original the article). So jump training works and that’s great but turns out jumping alone not enough as many athletic movement patterns require explosive contractions. So jump training must be combined with resistance training to be most efficient, the combination is synergistic.

With continuous training comes a need for progression. Training must become harder; muscles must continue to be overloaded. And although many products have promised to provide jump training, with resistance training, and with the ability to progressively challenge the athlete, only few have been proven to deliver. One of these very few is the VertiMax.

In a study by Matthew R. Rhea et al., 40 Division I college athletes of various sports were split up into 2 groups: a VertiMax group and a training control group which had very similar workouts minus a set of resistance jumps administered to the VertiMax group only. The athletes trained 2-3 days per week, for 12 weeks total. The control group’s power increased by ~16 watts (i.e. not very much considering they started at an average of 986 watts). Conversely, the power of the VertiMax group had an average increase of 109 watts (i.e. much more). A way to compare how well something works with statistics is a measure termed effect size. I’ll spare you the “mathy” details but to simplify, effect size is always a number between 0 and 1. Zero means the treatment doesn’t work, while the higher the number, the more effective in our case the workout. So, the effect size of the control group was 0.09, small. The effect size of the VertimMax group, 0.54. In other words, like stated above in bold, it really really works, and in just 12 weeks.

Anna Parievsky, PhD

This article is a summary of:

Rhea MR, Peterson MD, Oliverson JO, Ayllon FN, Potenzian BJ (2008) An examination of training on the VertiMax resisted jumping device for improvements in lower body power in highly trained college athletes. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 22(3): 735-740.

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In a Southern Utah State study, 60 athletes gained 1.8 inches on their vertical jump in 6 weeks from plyometrics alone, while Vertimax subjects gained 4.5 inches using the same regiment! (Matthew Rheat, PhD)

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