Jumping high is an important skill for a lot of sports,

and in certain circles of the Internet,

it's even become its own niche competition.

The standing vertical leap is one of the critical tests

at the NFL Combine

and has long been a gold standard

for assessing human leaping ability.

So who jumps the highest?

You might think a dunk legend like Michael Jordan

would own the vertical leap record.

But the highest jumpers actually aren't basketball players.

Football players actually have the highest vertical jump.

Even better than basketball players?

Yeah, most people would think,

well, basketball guys jump more,

so they have the highest.

But football players are used

to starting from a static position,

which is what a vertical jump is.

The NFL Combine's top leaper, Gerald Sensabaugh,

once hit 46 inches.

And then there's the extra inch higher

that USC football player Josh Imatorbhebhe

was once measured jumping.

So what's the limit?

Today, we're gonna look at why jumping from a standstill

to higher than 50 inches is almost impossible.

The box jump, which has been made popular in part

by CrossFit workouts,

has gone viral on the Internet,

and it's easy to see why.

(people cheering)

This is Evan Ungar, who set the Guinness World Record

for a standing box jump at 63 and a half inches.

He set the record for a single leg jump too.

To find out what it takes, I trained with Ungar,

learned how to cheat the analog vertical jump test.

Perfect, there's another inch.

[Robbie] And talked with a scientist about why some people

like Evan Ungar can jump so much higher than the rest of us.

His muscles are capable of doing bigger forces than yours.

We flew him out to San Francisco

to show us how he jumps so high.

So this is ridiculous.

This is up to almost my chin.

I can rest my head on this pretty easily.

We're at 60 inches, right?

So this is five feet, 60 inches, yeah.

That's insane.

And that's three and a half inches shy

of the world record, which you set.

That's correct.

Right, okay.

So how, how,

I can't even think about how to do this.

What do you do mentally and physically

to prepare for and then actually execute a jump like this?

I will train jump sporadically but not very often.

But a lot of weight training

and usually just focused on the lower body,

so I'll be squatting three times a week.

And as I get closer, the squats change

in variation, in reps, in sets.

They get heavier and less reps,

making you a lot stronger for a one-time explosive movement.

Mentally, I think the mental game is just as hard

as the physical game,

but the problem is, mentally you can't really prepare

too, too much for it.

But I find when I'm coming up to the box,

I try not to think of anything.

[Robbie] Ungar trained for a year

before he set his record.

I didn't have that kind of time.

But with his coaching, I got to 34 inches.

Damn. Easy.

And then 38 inches.

Nice. And that's a mic.

And then 42 inches.

Alright, this is a 30 inch box, three four inch plates.

We're at 42 inches high.

Before I began to really worry about cracking a shin,

Ungar had me jumping to 46 inches.

Yeah, come on. (bleep)

Almost.

You had the full hang time on that one.

The thing is, I'm not technically jumping that high

because remember, the NFL Combine record is also 46 inches

and I'm nowhere near as athletic as a pro football player.

Now, there are lots of different kinds of jumps.

There's running jumps,

high jumps,

triple jumps.

But the standing vertical jump

is used in the NFL Combine and by sports scientists

because it's a good measure of explosive power.

The box jump looks amazing,

but it's not just pure vertical jumping.

It's actually a complex move

that builds on top of a vertical jump

by pulling your feet up towards your hips.

Interestingly, about a century ago,

there was an Olympic event called the standing high jump,

and it was pretty similar to box jumping.

This guy, American Ray Ewry, was the reigning champion.

He once cleared a bar at 65 inches.

If he were alive today,

he'd probably give Ungar a run for the box jump title.

But we wanted to know how Ungar might stack up

against today's NFL Combine jumpers.

So he and I both jumped in front of a measuring tape.

Oh god, I came really close

to hitting you there. That was ridiculous.

I just watched him rise past me.

As you can see, he out-jumped me by a lot.

It was hardly scientific,

but it looks like he's cruising to nearly three feet.

That's almost 90 centimeters.

Here's the thing.

Exactly how high he jumped depends on how you measure it.

You start from a standstill

with his feet flat on the ground?

Or the moment before takeoff

when he's on his tiptoes?

Depending on your form and how big your feet are,

the difference could be 10 or more inches.

Either way, it's a very impressive jump.

I look at this guy doing the standing vertical jump,

and I go, by god, what a monster, right?

[Robbie] That's biomechanist Jesus DaPena.

And my specialty is trying to understand the mechanics

of how athletes jump.

[Robbie] Those mechanics are actually pretty intuitive.

[Jesus] The way to get the biggest possible height

is to have a big vertical velocity

at the end of the takeoff.

[Robbie] So how do you do that?

DaPena says it's all about moving up

as powerfully as you can

for as long as you can before leaving the ground.

Okay, so you would think that you would go

and you would crouch yourself, bend your legs a fair amount,

and be down there and then wait and say, okay, let's go.

And then you use your muscles to extend your legs

as powerfully as you can to get off from the ground.

The problem with that is that

when you're down there waiting to start your jump,

you're making a force that is submaximal.

You're just needing to make the force that you need

to hold that downward position.

But to be able to go upward,

you need to make a force that is bigger than that.

[Robbie] He says there's an even better way.

So what you do is instead of starting at the bottom,

you start standing up.

So you're standing up.

And then you relax your muscles completely,

so your legs turn basically into wet noodles.

And your gravity is pulling downwards so you go down.

As you're using your muscles to slow down

this downward motion, you're activating your muscles,

you're pre-tensing the muscles.

So at the very bottom point,

you have all of your vertical range of motion

for the upward motion available to you still,

and your muscles are already pre-tensed.

[Robbie] It's called the counter-movement jump.

Ungar and I both tried it,

and not surprisingly, he jumped way higher than me.

I asked Dr. DaPena why.

He has better muscles.

His muscles are capable of doing bigger forces than yours.

Basically it just means that

he has a bigger cross-sectional area of muscle

in the main movers.

Really, we're talking quads and gluts.

[Robbie] If anyone knows how lucrative a solid jump is,

it's Joel Smith.

He's a coach who runs an online jumping academy

for athletes who want to improve their leaping abilities.

He watched me jump

and offered some suggestions for how to improve.

Like we all know, squats, dead lifts, front squat,

we think strong legs.

It'll help.

I view it as a way to create tension,

so right now, if we can create more tension in your legs

by getting stronger, you will have the capability

to jump higher.

[Robbie] So it is possible

that I could get better at jumping,

but I'll probably never get to Ungar's level.

That doesn't mean I couldn't have a higher vertical jump.

I went to Sparta bet365体育赛事 to talk with founder Phil Wagner.

From a research standpoint,

vertical jump has been associated

with performance in a variety of sports.

[Robbie] He works with pro athletes,

including NFL hopefuls,

to post their best vertical leap

on an analog measuring device called a Vertec.

Using it is simple.

Just subtract the highest you can reach while standing

from the highest you can reach while jumping.

The difference is the height of your jump, kind of.

Because for as easy as the Vertec is to use,

it's also really easy to cheat.

Just make your standing reach as low as possible.

You can't bend your arm that much

because you've had a lot of elbow damage, right?

Can't do it.

Right, so now.

[Robbie] Wagner showed me how I could add a few inches

with a fake injury.

[Phil] Wow, you can't even get close.

Let me walk through this thing

actually with my shoulder tipped up,

my fingers extended,

my arm all the way straight. And your body tilted.

[Robbie] Then I walked through again, no fake injury,

fully stretched out.

Look at the difference.

That 45 seems a lot closer.

Yeah, it's a lot closer now.

Then, I jumped.

Great.

[Robbie] And jumped again.

This time, using another trick, some toe bounce,

which amplifies the counter-movement's lift.

[Phil] There it is, yep.

[Robbie] Okay, so how did I do?

So what's considered probably average,

quote unquote average, for an NFL vert

would be in the mid-30s, about 35.

So you did about a 33-inch vert just there.

Look at that.

No warmup.

A little cheating, no warmup, just casual.

But here's the other thing.

Scientists can't even agree

on the best way to measure vertical jumps.

There's the analog Vertec,

there's video analysis,

and then there's force plates,

which measure an athlete's force on the ground

to calculate the height of their jump.

They're harder to cheat.

They're also what Wagner's company uses.

And thanks to the proprietary equipment,

he says they're also far more accurate

at measuring a vertical leap.

So 14.1 inches.

That's half. Was your first jump.

That's half.

After three average jumps,

the force plate brought me back down to Earth

and more than halved my vertical leap to, wait for it.

15 inches is actually not a bad score.

It's real.

[Robbie] Now that might sound like a big difference,

but remember, the Vertec isn't very precise.

You can cheat it with the arm extension trick,

and it's measuring your jump from a flat-footed start

even though your body is fully extended

at the peak of your jump.

The force plate just uses the speed you leave the ground

to determine your jump height.

Wagner says the highest any athlete has achieved

on the Sparta plate,

and that includes pros he can't talk about,

is about 30 inches.

But he doesn't think we're at the limit just yet.

I believe that we're capable of getting up on this

to a 40-inch vertical jump.

Really?

Yes.

And I believe that strongly. And the highest we're seeing

right now, as a reminder,

is about 29, 30. Is 30.

That's correct.

It's a fight between gravity and muscle.

Drop some weight and you might float a bit higher.

If I lose 10 pounds, am I gonna jump higher?

Yes.

As long as you don't lose the capability of making force

with the same proportion.

So it counts as the ratio.

Force you can make on the ground

or muscle tension that you can make

divided by body weight and body mass.

So the ratio is what counts.

So if you can make your body mass be one half,

which is impossible,

or imagine if you can make it be one half,

that would be amazing.

The problem is that if your capability for force

is also one half what it was before,

you'd jump the same.

[Robbie] Wagner says better nutrition, careful training,

and injury prevention could see athletes cruising

even higher.

I think the true limiting factor

is how well can we allow individuals to recover,

and that's why monitoring is so important,

and what we can do to add capacity on each individual

without having a setback.

So it's possible we'll see somebody

with a greater vertical leap someday.

But for now, bear in mind

that what some of these athletes are doing

is already almost impossible.