How To Slam Dunk

Who DOESN'T want to know how to slam dunk? If you've ever watched an NBA game, it's hard not to imagine yourself like you're Kobe Bryant flying through the air and dunking on someone. However, not every player possess this physical ability. If you're reading this, you most likely don't either. So, the question is, why can some people jump through the roof, whereas others can't get off the ground? If you want to learn how to slam dunk like Kobe, it's an important question to answer.

The hard truth, however, is that jumping ability has a large genetic component. Every muscle in your body is actually made up of thousands of individual muscle fibers. These muscle fibers vary by factors such as length, endurance, and quickness. If you want to learn how t o slam dunk however, the factor that should interest you the most is Fast Twitch muscle fibers vs Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers.

Fast twitch muscle fibers are extremely explosive and powerful, but they tire easily. When you through a baseball, for example, you are utilizing fast twitch fibers to perform this motion. On the other hand the muscle fibers you use to walk a great distance or just to stand up right are slow twitch. Slow twitch fibers are not fast (duh) but they possess tremendous endurance.

An easy way to think about this is to look at the muscles in a chicken. The breast meat is typically predominantly fast twitch fibers as beating a wing (even if you can't fly) is a fast motion. The muscle and meat is white as it is filled with glycogen, which is required for fast, explosive movements. It also makes the meat sweeter. The legs though are made up of much darker, slow twitch fibers. This allows the chicken to perform endurance activities like walking.

So, if you want to learn how to slam dunk but you can't jump very high because your leg muscles have more slow twitch than fast twitch muscles, what do you do? Well, one of the things you need to do is to train your slow twitch muscles to take on the characteristics of fast twitch muscles. This is done through a training technique called Plyometrics. It is an East German technique (when East Germany was still around, of course) that allowed their athletes to dramatically improve in events like sprinting.

One of the most popular plyometric training techniques is called depth jumping. To do it you jump off a box onto the ground and then immediately jump again. This action overloads the muscles and forces the subsequent contraction to be that much more explosive. It literally trains your slow twitch muscle fibers to react more explosively.

I know there are a variety of plyometric training techniques out there, but this is the one I'm most familiar with. When I initially started playing basketball I could barely jump over over the foul line. The box jumping technique allowed me to add some serious inches to my vertical leap (I never quite learned how to slam dunk, however. I came close, but it wasn't a real dunk).

Another factor that you can control is your weight. All the great leapers have extremely low body fat percentages. Typically under 5%, and never above 10. Obviously fat adds nothing to jumping ability, it only weighs you down. The less fat you have, the better.

In conclusion, if you want to learn how to slam dunk (and you're not 7 feet tall) you need to learn to jump. Even if you haven't won the genetic lottery like Michael Jordan or Kobe, you can still increase your jumping ability through vertical training techniques like plyometrics. It will take some effort but you can get there. Good Luck!