Volleyball

Volleyball

Improve Vertical Jump Height

To enhance your vertical jump, focusing on two key muscles is crucial:

  1. Tibialis Anterior

  2. Quadriceps

While overall conditioning matters, these two muscles play a significant role in boosting your jump height. Let's delve into why they matter and how to effectively train them.

The Tibialis Anterior, situated along the front of your shin bone, acts as a potent decelerator when you plant your foot before executing a powerful jump. Unfortunately, despite its importance, this muscle is often overlooked in training routines. The prevalence of weak muscles like this can be attributed to modern footwear, but that's a topic beyond this article's scope.

To address this issue, consider incorporating Tibialis Raises into your workouts.

The video by KneesOverToesGuy provides an excellent explanation of the exercise.

Alternatively, my personal favorite is using the TibBar. Aim for 15-20 reps, gradually building up to 20% of your body weight to initiate progress. By targeting the Tibialis Anterior, you'll optimize your vertical jump potential and excel in sports like volleyball.

At our clinic, we adopt a comprehensive approach to address ankle problems, carefully evaluating ankle, knee, and hip movement and power. One common issue we encounter is stiff and weak ankles, which we effectively treat using Shockwave Therapy. Our targeted therapy concentrates on the following areas:

  1. Deep Ankle Ligaments under the Achilles Tendon

  2. Tibialis Anterior

  3. Deep posterior shin muscles

  4. The Plantar Foot (the sole)

  5. Great Toe Structures

If you find minimal improvement from the exercises mentioned earlier, a personalized assessment by our experts could be warranted.

The Quadriceps muscles, because of their location, are often already trained sufficiently. In fact, in my professional experience, they are trained too much. Much of my training advice for players focusses on strengthening their antagonist muscle, the hamstrings. Training the hamstring provides strength and balance to the knee and hip.

The quadriceps is often tight and not powerful through the FULL RANGE of motion. To remedy this, we need to lengthen it and return it to a more pliable state. In my experience the best at-home way to do this is with the couch stretch.

You can watch a Video About It Here. Kelly Starett is a established name in CrossFit Circles and is big on range of motion and mobility.

For a lot of my patients starting with this exercise is too painful or their range of motion is so poor that they cannot even get into the starting position. For those patients we begin care often addressing movement issues with passive therapy to alleviate pain and improve range of motion around the hip and knee.

For example, we use Shockwave Therapy directed to the Quadriceps muscles and the interface on the outside of the leg between the quadriceps and hamstrings to reduce pain that blocks players from effectively stretching this muscle.

Give the Couch Stretch a try for a week, one minute per leg daily, and you'll likely experience significant improvements. If you encounter challenges, don't hesitate to call our office for assistance. I'm here to help you achieve better strength and flexibility, just like I've seen with many of my patients.

Improve Hitting Power

Two ways to start improving your hitting power and increase your range of motion in your shoulders are:

  1. Increase Strength in your Exernal Rotators

  2. Increase Length (Flexibility) in your Lats (Latissimus Dorsi)

The second one, if done the way I am going to prescribe, can also help with movements where you need to reach down suddenly and help to do it with control.

The External Rotators (ERs) of the shoulder is a group of 4 muscles that can all be trained together.

  1. Supraspinatus

  2. Infraspinatus

  3. Teres Minor

  4. Subscapularis

One key role for this group of muscles in volleyball is the safe deceleration of the shoulder after hitting the ball. When this group of muscles lacks sufficient power to slow your arm down safely, you lose power output.

Strengthening them is easy but requires consistent effort over the career of a player. To make strength gains you should aim to do work these muscles 6 times per week. To maintain strength, youll only need to do them 1 or 2 times a week.

Your goal should be to do 10% of body weight for 15 strict reps.

The Latissimus Dorsi is a powerful internal rotator of the shoulder. It connects your upper arm to (almost) the whole back. When this muscle is tight, adhered or weak it will limit shoulder movement. If you can’t:

  1. Get your arm comfortably over head

  2. It takes a long time to warm your shoulder up before games.

You need to work on this muscle.

On our videos page you’ll find my favourite lat stretch. It is a short watch, about 1 minute long. Click the button below to be taken straight to the page!

Also on our videos page you’ll find right down the bottom my beginner shoulder rehabilitation video showing you how to do the external rotators exercise. It’s about two minutes long.

In our Bicton Chiro Clinic we can treat both of these muscles with Shockwave Therapy or with Chiropractic Soft Tissue Techniques. In some cases your neck may be involved!

A typical examination looks at, in depth:

  1. Shoulder Range of Motion

  2. Cervical Spine Range of Motion

  3. Thoracic Spine Range of Motion

These three regions will capture the majority of shoulder problems, however in some cases further investigations are required.