What does this mean? The more you train your vertical in a certain way, the less it translates in other types of vertical jumps?
kind of. the more you groove a certain pattern for any skill, the farther the gap between your proficiency using that pattern and using any other pattern. t0ddday talked about watching jesse williams, who is a world-champion high jumper, jump around on a basketball court. off two legs or off a normal run up of any kind he could dunk weakly at best. but if he takes his normal high jump approach and then does a rim jump he can pretty much hit his head on the rim. that pattern is just sooooo much more efficient for him than anything else.
it's not that getting better at something one way translates less to other ways, it just means the gap grows. another example: imagine you're a chef and you get really good at chopping vegetables with your right hand. you can do that emeril shit where he's just going nuts and looks like a machine. but your left hand is only as good at chopping as it ever was, or maybe it's a little bit better but it hasn't kept pace with your right. similar idea here.
LBSS is completely correct but I think while the chef chopping example is true; I don't know how much a chef would expect his left hand chopping to improve as a function of his right handed chopping improving. Right and left sides are innervated pretty separately so in this case I don't think they carryover would ever be that strong, even for a novice chopper. What's important here to realize is that even when movements are functional similar; or one seems almost in fact to be a more difficult version of another movement that the carryover still goes away.
Something to consider might be the standing vertical vs running (two footed vertical). The standing vertical seems basically to be a more difficult version of the running vertical... Thus, whatever you can standing vertical you can running vertical that + x. For most people that's totally true. A poor leaping but coordinated high-school basketball player might have a standing and running vertical jump of 23 and 29 inches while a better leaping teammate may be able to jump 29 inches standing and be able to jump 35 inches with an approach. If the poor leaping teammate trains and improves his standing vertical to 29 inches he will likely also achieve a running vertical jump at least near his teammates 35 inch jump. HOWEVER... say he really focuses getting in the weight-room and focuses really hard on getting that standing vertical jump higher and one day achieves a 35 inch standing vertical. At this point his running vertical jump may be hardly higher than his standing vertical jump. Some evidence may be visible (he might now perform his jump from much deeper squat which looks drastically different from his running vertical jump) but in reality the movement he is now performing is less similar to the running vertical jump both mechanically and on a neural level.
That is the failing of specialization. It's an important to recognize this because you don't want to fall into the trap of being that athlete who get's the standing vertical jump to 35 inches and then compares himself to NBA players who also have listed 35'' verticals and then comes up with an incorrect reason for why he can't dunk like those players (no offense to entropy here) which derails his training.
Their are countless head-shaking examples where people become so good at something that it pretty much boggles your mind how it does not carryover better to a similar activity. One example for which there are hard numbers if the 400m hurdles. The rule of thumb is that your time should be 400m time + 5 seconds unless your not coordinated at hurdling. This makes sense because the 400m hurdles is pretty much a harder version of an open 4... It's 400m PLUS 10 3 foot barriers in the way. What's shocking is that for the very best 400m hurdlers they can only run a bit more than a second faster in the 400m open race than when jumping over 10 hurdles. If you talk to some of the athletes they will tell you that the 400m hurdles feels easier because the rhythm and step count allows them to relax and get into a zone which allows them to perform while the 400m open is chaotic and never "feels" right.
These examples serve to help us as trainers or athletes to enforce two principles into our training:
1) Calculators and Tables are not predictive for an individuals performance but rather a useful tool to suggest how to focus training. For example if some table says that if you can squat X then you can jump Y inches.... This is not useful at predicting how high you will jump when you squat X (and you should not count those chickens before they hatch!). What it is useful for is to help you design your training --- The table should be looked at for your current ability! If you can already squat X but have a vertical jump greater than Y.... Then squatting might be a helpful tool at this point. If you can squat X and jump much less than Y, then you are probably pretty decent at squatting and thus you are practicing a movement that is pretty different than your vertical jump. The question that short sprinters ask is "how fast does my 60m need to be to be sub 10?" and of course there is no good answer... However, if your running in the range of 6.5 and don't run sub 10.... you should probably focus work on your lactic anaerobic system...
2) When we program our strength training and axillary work we should focus on generally similar movements rather than movements which we think mirror the movement but have resistance. We must remember that having even moderate*** resistance means the movement no longer is the same. This seems counter intuitive at first.... shouldn't we at least try to get our movements similar??? The reason we shouldn't is two-fold. Consider a high jumper who can either perform squats or heavy single leg bosu ball quarter squats. The single leg quarter squat looks a lot more like his movement.... However, it's a lot slower. Mechanically he now he has to train the complicated and similar movements of the high jump AND the strange squat which will slow down how fast he can get better at the only movement that matters (the high jump). Additionally, while the single leg squat may currently seem similar as he increases his skill in the high jump he may now alter his form to increase hamstring recruitment.... Had he been squatting those larger hamstring muscles which now have a lot of motor units to innervate would have come in handy... Only he doesn't have them because he concentrated on sports specific movement. Weight training should not be movement specific but muscle specific. High jumping involves the legs so it makes sense to use exercises which best target the legs.
***Exceptions here... While we don't want to try to emulate sports specific movements with large or moderate resistance... This is not the case if added resistance is minor. A high jumper may improve by performing jumps with a diving belt ( a 5-7 pound resistance ) for example as it will provide an greater load while not altering the movement to any degree.
For me, if I jump off one leg WITH the ball in hand I get much higher than doing anything else. That includes jumping off one leg WITHOUT the ball and jumping off one leg with the ball in both hands... there's a BIG difference.
Why? Because I have always tried to dunk off one with one hand, thousands of times. And I'm the best at doing that.
As always thanks to Raptor for providing a pathological example which illustrates the point better than any of the examples I posted!
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. From the dunk videos posted you are not incapable of windmills. I quite good at missing windmills and the answer to the question really depends if it's off a lob or a dribble. As bad as our plant for where it puts our shoulders it can be useful for more advanced dunks. Despite only having about 2'' inches of two-handed dunk reserve (ie on my best day I estimate I could maybe do two handed dunk on 10'2'') I have been able to pull off really easy turn around drop step dunks ( back toward hoop, turn body toward right, bring left around for powerful plant, then tap with right as I power-dribble and rise up with right hand ) because my plant actually helps me with the turn. Additionally, I have landed a few fake 360's be approaching turned and finishing the last 150 degrees of the spin in the air to dunk. I forget the mechanics but I was at one time working on a strange windmill windup that helped me straighten up from my plant. Essentially the goofy plant the both you and I use requires you to contort your body in the air to get your hips open and dunking shoulder back if you take off for maximum height.... This contortion can be used to do a semi-360 or some cool wrinkle on a dunk that will make people think dunking is a lot easier for you than it is... It will take a lot of practice.....