Sand Volleyball Plyometrics

Lets review some exercises you can do to prepare you for this summer of beach volleyball. The first thing that you need to improve is your jumping. No matter how high you can jump it is always better if you can jump higher. Beach volleyball is getting harder to play for shorter people or for people who can't jump high. So if you want to be a great beach volleyball player you will need to be able to jump. Not all of us are going to be able to get our armpits over the net to block, but you are the blocker on your team you need to be getting about that high. Touching 10 feet on a hard court means you are touching about 9 feet when jumping out of sand. So when training for beach volleyball it is always best to do your jump training in the sand. But, for people that live where it gets cold in the winter there are still plenty of exercises to do indoors that will increase your vertical leap. One of the best weighted exercises for jumping are squats. Don't think you can just do tons of squats and that you will be blocking balls with your armpits. Squats alone will really only get your legs stronger but not faster. When you jump you want all of your muscles to fire at the exact same time and to fire with more fibers. So to train them to do that you have to jump. Pick a spot on a wall and jump to touch that spot about 6 to 10 times. Get plenty of rest in between sets and then do it again. Then move on to a different jumping exercise. You could jump up on high boxes. You want them so high that you wont be able to get 11 reps because you would get too tired. If you're using a box height where you can do 20 reps without a problem in one set then it's too low. We don't want to train our legs to jump for longer periods of time, we want them to jump higher so we have to train them like that. Another good exercise is to get a box (not very tall) and step off of it and as soon as our feet touch the ground jump up as high as you can. The point is to have your feet in contact with the ground for as little of time as possible. This is training your muscles to react quickly.