I can Windmill in a session but barely dunk in a game.
That sounds backwards until you understand why, and it was one of the best questions I got for this weekly Q&A. The day before, I’d hit three new dunks on 9 feet, and the day I filmed this I had a quick leg day before heading to a Timberwolves game, plus a teaser: I was about to dunk with one of the most legendary dunkers of all time. Here are the questions I answered.
What I Was Hoping to Test at Dunk Camp
Dunk Camp tests both standing and approach vertical accurately, which is rare. I honestly don’t care much about my standing vert, so I won’t guess past maybe 32. My approach vertical is what matters to me. The year before I’d tested 37.5 inches on a day my knees were killing me, and since then I’d had jumps around 40 or a little over. My goal was 42 or 43, but I’d have been happy with anything over 40. I wrote more about how my camp went the year before, knee pain and all.
Why Game Dunks Are Harder Than Session Dunks
If you watch my videos, you see Windmills, reverse pumps, and Eastbays, so you’d assume I’m dunking on people in games. I’m not. I’ve got maybe seven or eight game dunks ever, only one of them on somebody, and they’re all just one or two-handers.
The difference is lob versus off the dribble, and it comes down to arm swing. Off the dribble, your arm is tied up bringing the ball with you, so you lose your swing and the ball slightly weighs you down. On a lob, you get a full approach, you swing both arms while you build speed, and you carry that speed up into the jump. That’s why I can do bigger dunks in sessions than in games, on top of being way more fatigued from running during an actual game.
The Only Plyo I Really Do
People expect a long list of plyometrics. I barely do any. The only real one is max-effort approach jumps, plus some light hops to warm up my legs. In my opinion, max-effort jumps are the only plyo you truly need to jump higher. If you’re not giving 100 percent, you’re not getting 100 percent back.
I’d been doing max-effort jump sessions since I was 11 or 12, and that alone got me to around a 35-inch vertical with very little lifting. Muscles only adapt when you push them. Jumping at 70 percent over and over gives them nothing to respond to. Jumping all out forces them to recover and come back higher. That ties straight into the simplest fix that actually helped me jump higher.
How I Handle Periodization
I’ll be upfront that periodization is the area I know least about, because Tom Barnes and Austen Young at Jump X handle mine. They have degrees, I don’t, so I won’t pretend to teach what I haven’t learned yet. What I can tell you is how it plays out for me. My big events are the Dunk Camps, Utah in June and Wisconsin in August, so I train hard in the months before, then back off as they approach. Right now I’m loading up and I’m so fatigued my sessions aren’t even my best, but once June nears I freshen up and the adaptation comes through. I run roughly four-week cycles. One day I want to understand this well enough to write my own training, and for anyone who wants to go deeper, Isaiah Rivera has a ton of free periodization videos on his channel.
This was a shorter week since I didn’t get many questions, but they were good ones. I do this every week, and in other editions I covered my real vertical and how I train and why dunking is a full-body workout. If you’re into jump training, drop your questions and I’ll work through them.
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