Adarq.org

Whats up everybody,

My name is Max Devin and I'm hoping to dunk a basketball. I guess this is where I tell you my story and what not....

I'm from Milton, MA which is a suburb of Boston. Ever since probably like 5th grade I've wanted to dunk a basketball after I saw an advertisement for Air Alert in a Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine. It was always something that stuck in the back of my mind and I thought would be cool, but didn't really do anything about and kind of lived with the fact that a 5'6" white kid with bad genetics (my dad ran track/cross country at UConn) probably isn't going to dunk a basketball.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school (jan 2010). I'm watching a UConn vs Georgetown basketball game, and I witness Stanley Robinson throw down at what I thought to be, and still think to be, one of the sickest dunks/put backs ever off of one of Gavin Edwards' many misses of his UConn career. He creeps up the left side, jumps, catches off of his left hip, throws it down, flings himself off the rim, then jogs down the court like nothing happened. It was then my dream was revitalized.

I immediately looked up "vertical jump form" and the first thing that came up was a video from the jump manual. Jacobs principles made sense, real sense. Air Alert made sense to me before this, and then once I heard Jacob talk about vertical jump theory, it all started to sink in. So I bought it, since it was "only available at $67 dollars for a minimum time only".

My plan was to finish high school, and begin training for my vert once I hit college. I ran/captained both cross country and indoor track (1 mile and 1000m) in the fall/winter and played baseball in the spring and summer (i am/was a catcher), so obviously I would never be able to recover and would be mixing two completely different training styles together. I told myself in the meantime to get as much information as possible on vertical jump training and theory so when I do my training, I will actually know what I am doing, not just doing exercises some guy gives me.

Flash forward to late March of my senior year, and the fourth day of baseball try outs. I had just finished catching a bullpen and my knee had been hurting more than usual. It had always hurt pretty bad, I thought it was just because of the combination of catching and the thousands of miles that I have ran in my lifetime, mostly on pavement. We're told to do 40 yard sprints to see how fast we are. I run the first one fairly well, I don't know the time b/c they never told us but I beat two other kids that were pretty quick football players. My knee felt different. Much different.

Second time around, I go and about 10 yards in I hear the loudest noise to ever come from a human being. It was the sound of my knee, and what I later found out to be a chunk of bone the size of a marble between my femur and kneecap rip right off and begin to float around my right leg. I couldn't bend my right knee more than a centimeter. One knee surgery, a missed senior year of baseball, and probably the worse senior spring you could ask for later I was finally able to walk without crutches again. That long ass summer before college I kept telling myself that knee surgery and lost year of baseball is the sacrifice you must make for being able to dunk a basketball. If that happened during training, I would have completely lost confidence.

By thanksgiving the bone was fully healed, and I could resume normal activity. Instead of jumping right in, I decided to slowly build my strength up to where it was before. My freshman year of college I really dedicated myself to learning the ins and outs of training, so I read everything I could get my hands on, from Kelly Baggett to Zatkiorsky to Verkhoshansky. I then began to squat for the first time in my life and my knees had never felt better.

Here I am now, a sophomore at UMass Amherst and ~12 weeks of training which I wrote under my belt. I didn't get the best results, about 2-3 inches or so to bump my SVJ to 30", but I know where I went wrong and I'm sure if I recover more I could add another 2. Im confident I will get it done sooner or later, and be patient with the whole process.

Sorry that was so long, sad part is I left some stuff out haha. Thanks for reading, and best of luck with all of your training.

wow, thanks for the quick response.

i don't know how to quote, so bear with me haha.

it was something called an "osteochondral lesion" basically my bone was deteriorating since my freshman year of high school to the point that a piece of bone from my kneecap/femur was actually chipping off. freshman year until after the surgery whenever i did a standing quad stretch my leg would basically lock up and i would have to do a ham stretch to make it feel normal again, i guess that was the chip sticking into to something. senior year it finally snapped off clean. its common in baseball players (especially catchers) and soccer players because of all the twisting they do.

there were a couple of things i did wrong. for one, i never got to my power peak phase bc an intramural basketball tourney started when my friend told me it'd be after thanksgiving/after my 12 weeks. i tried to do too many things/use everything i knew, and i never really focused on my target. on top of that i didn't really practice jumping. power went up, strength went up, jumps not so much bc of coordination. diet was good, sleep was ehh (7-8 hours, id wake up in the middle of the night though)

setup was basically 4 weeks strength mon wed fri setup (3 hard weeks 1 de-load) 5 weeks RFD training mon wed fri setup (4 weeks hard 1 de-load/off) 3 weeks power/peak mon thurs setup, but i only did 1 until the tourney started, then a week off on the week of thanksgiving which i was actually sick for. set up was good, exercises were good, i was just combining too many things at once. I'm probably in an overreached state at the moment, which is what i meant when i said it could probably go up another 2 if i rested more. probably shouldn't be doing concentrated loading if thats the case then? haha

like i said earlier, my RVJ didn't really go up bc my coordination is off, but my power went up. its probably an inch or two higher than my standing. hard to measure at my gym bc i have to touch a wall so the run up is kinda awkward. so standing went from ~27- ~30. running ~30- ~31.

I like what you're doing adarq. Posting my stuff is so much better than jotting it down in a notebook, much more motivation in it. ill try my best to keep the online journal and I'm going to start posting stuff on my youtube channel. thanks again, i'm looking forward to the extra support/help behind me.

thanks in advance

so what's the training plan?

I'm trying to keep it simple at the moment. after 5 more weeks of concentrated loading (not too simple, but in terms of exercises it is) I'm gonna get back to a mon wed fri scheme and drive my squat up to double BW for 3 reps and focus on just jumping. I'm currently doing a max of ~310 (i hit 315 before) at 160 so it'll look like

mon
standing jumps x5
running jumps for height x10
tuck jumps 3-4x8
hang snatch 3x2
squat 6x3x90%, try to bump the weight up each week or do one additional set each week, both if I'm feeling ballsy
glute ham 3x6

wed
standing jumps x5
running jumps for height x10
tuck jumps or barrier hops 3-4x8 (8e if barrier)
hang snatch 4x2
one legged squat w dumbbells 3x6e (easy)

fri
standing jumps x5
running jump for height x10
jump squat 5x5x30%
speed squat 6x2x50, 1x90% week 1 55 week 2 60 week 3----use 3 second pause at the bottom bc i hate box squats
reverse hyper 3x10

do that for three week waves, test/de-load the fourth until i hit my goal. once that happens, part 2 of the JackM split. probably back to concentrated loading or high frequency squatting after a desirable increase since I'm liking the feeling of it

thoughts?