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Tangentially, Todday interesting to read about your experience with changing the dunk hand so late in the game. Ive never done a dunk with my R hand before .. but ... since i am a RL plant jumper who has never got a game time dunk .. im tempted to explore dunking with my R hand! I can't palm the ball with my R hand. But never really tried to either and today I found I could work up to it by warming up to it by trying to palm my 6kg medball, then my bigger/slippier bball before attempting a normal grippier ball. Will work on my grip and try dunking with it on friday. 

Part of my brain thinks does R hand or L hand matter when you can dunk doublehand? isn't that eliminating any advantage or disadvantage gained or lost by using one hand over the other? But when i think about it, my double hand dunks are done kinda L hand dominant anyway and it's possible i can gain by doing them R hand dominant? Maybe that's worth exploring. Will report back tmr if you're interesting in reading about my experience with it.

I'll be honest I never really gave it such earnest tries until I watched LBSS jump. But to me it's a godsend.  You maybe eliminate some of the help when you double hand dunk but for me not all... There are days when I'm not jumping high and I can double hand dunk (jump up and dunk it cleanly w no tomahawk) but can't cleanly dunk w one hand...  Which is weird.

For me at least jumping with the left hand back makes a huge difference.  I just trained on vertec and easily PRed over 40" (touched 11'2") with my left hand.  Didn't even feel great.  In fact using the left has me doing a much more real sideways shoulders turned plant...

One thing I've always been told is I seem to need to jump higher than others to dunk.  I will be able to hit my head on the backboard while someone else of the same height as me can't but can dunk easier than me... I think using the left hand levels the playing field for me.  When I jump and touch w left I feel like I'm jumping maximally high and then reaching vs having my hand inside my body and worrying about timing...

Well there is a reason I told you to drill standing jumps before multiple but wth.  Ok your not looking quad dominant. 

Standing jumps ... as in SVJs? Broad jump singles? :S Went back through the posts in the last few pages and all i found was this:

The broad jump itself is helpful because "slow" athletes don't know how to use their hips and gluteus. It's why you travel in the weird diagonal up on your dunks, no hip pop at extension.  Learning how to use your hips to jump vertically is hard.  So we start you going forward.  It's much easier to use your hips in the horizontal plane than vertical... Broad jumps will allow you to get used of this and then you can translate it to jumping up.  Don't worry about what the standing broad jump will do for your athleticism, your thinking too far ahead... Learn the skill.  Become proficient. Then use it as a base to do exercises that will make you a much better athlete like jump, jump, dunk and many multi jump variations. 

So master the broad jump. Then improve the multibroad jump. Also, jump, jump, dunk .. sounds intriguing.. !

Btw lately my lower body musculature has grown appreciably. Glutes and hams in particular are bigger and fleshier. I haven't got the big lifts to show for it though which is kinda disappointing .. but .. hopefully will get that too once i've got on a rhythm with training.

But oh my god.... Do you ever have a neutral back?  Vid quality isn't excellent but it looks like you somehow avoid ever getting neutral for everything you do... This can literally add a foot to your vertical if you fix it.   

Sorry about the quality. Will try take better video over the coming sessions.. still working out how .. with angle and lighting and so on. Will improve. And about my neutral back or lack of .. yeah :/ Idk .. i awlays wondered how that would help my dunk .. cause i dont have it there either.. hmm, a foot would be amazing though. Fk! How should I fix this?

^^^ I think it's better to withhold judgement on your bounds without better quality video.  But I am 95% sure I see something off that is fixable and will help you a lot.

As far as dunking, I never appreciated how complicated it was until I met actual dunkers...  Maybe a KF style dunker doesn't have problems because he truly dunks two handed...  But for the rest of us I think it really matters even with two hands.  Here's an example - I can dunk from the left baseline with one hand or two hands in games.  Driving from the right baseline I cannnot come close in practice.  I can however go past the hoop and do a "semi" 360.  That's because I plant LR and am right handed.  Now that i dunk left handed I can do this dunk so easily and fast.  There are lots of ways you get around this.  One is to have your final foot plant behind your first foot, another is to do dunks where it's sensible for your last foot to plant away from the rim (say left baseline back turned opponent taking away baseline - spin and land left right going toward the free throw line and dunk.   But these situations are rare.   Usually, taking that final step away from the goal will make you look slow in games.   It's why russell westbrook looks sooooo fast... He plants his right foot then his left taking large strides toward the goal and past the opponent and then rises up and dunks.  For most of his dunks if I was in the same situation I would need another step with the right foot that didn't serve a role as far as helping me get by my man...  (although now that I use left hand this isn't true).

This is the truth in most sports that involve skill/athleticism.  I'm not claiming that russell westbrook isn't fast.  But his otherwordly speed is a combination of his objective speed and his skill (movement style) that allows him to look like this.  Are you as objectively fast?  Probably not.  But you look stupid slow compared to him and objectively you are not that much slower but you don't set your dunk up as effectively because you waste movement getting steps right... Fixing this AND becoming a better athlete with bounding and strength and band work need to happen in tandem for you to make a splash at next years tournament but no amount of just straight athletic improvement will make enough difference...  Just watch Usain bolt in celebrity games when he dunks and tip toes his steps to do so...  He looks slow.  Because he doesn't know how to make dunking happen efficiently.  But he is the fastest man on the planet...  Clearly upping his power and speed isn't an option.

*** just want to add to my comment about why I can dunk from left baseline with two hands and not right... It is also because most of us DL jumpers use our blocking leg with some degree of hip torsion to allow us to get out glutes and quads involved in the blocking... It's slight but does effect our trajectory... So if I plant LR on left baseline this sends me turning slightly toward the center of the rim where I can put it down with two hands...  On the right baseline this sends me into the backboard and I have to bring the ball up and avoid this which is impossible...  Of course if you can jump as high as Kobe you can jump put the ball in your right hand, twist in the air and dunk the ball...  But he is basically doing a complicated aerial move just to do a regular 1 handed dunk...   

 
****** Also, I want to add that while the left handed dunking has really helped me - I am not super ambidextrous.  Maybe more than you but certainly not totally.  I can palm it with my left slightly but nothing like I can with the right...  Control is an issue for me too but in my case the positive outweighs the negative.  Certainly it would be better if I just planted right left but I can't seem to erase years and years of a movement pattern...  My coordination is ok for some dunks but I'm sure I would have trouble if I tried an advanced dunk like BTL with the left hand and then I would have to either do like Jonathan Clark (do BTL off 1 foot or under the hoop with a 180/360 with my right hand) OR try to learn a RL plant so I could do it straight on with my dominant hand...  Im hoping I can get windmills down with my left hand but that's pushing the limits of am ambidextrousness so it will take practice..

******* Finally if you want to see some extreme examples at the pro level check out john wall and jr smith.  Both are right handed and jump off the right foot... This is a hindrance to JR smith who throws down some great two handed dunks but can't dunk as consistently as he should be able to while John Wall just adapted and dunks exclusively with his left hand...  I personally think thats the way to go.

BS 6x122.5(LPR), 6x122.5B, 3x2x127.5(LPR)
RDL 8x150(warmup PR), 4x192.5(PR), 10x180(PR)
BHT 8x200(PR), 2x220(PR)
OHP 3x4x60

BW: 179.9 (yikes)

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lmao .. i ran out of chalk and this guy gave me some satchels of stuff .. used it and then realised it's actually anti-chalk .. it's supposed to make for a frictionless surface :/ oops.

Quote from: maxent on April 18, 2016, 04:06:11 am

THat last workout (week?) was hard to recover from. I skipped training yesterday (!!) and i'm still pretty beat up today but will force a workout. Also ate a lot of food and slept a lot .. but to no avail .. broad jumps are hard on the body huh. Using the TENS unit on my calves and hips may have made them worse .. lol.. interesting..

Anything new seems especially hard on the body.  For the  noninitiated bounding will be really hard on tibials and all of lower leg...  For me a squat day will leave me w days of soreness but bounding is hardly noticeable if volume is moderate.  It's part of a warmup.  You will adapt. Your not going high or far on your broad jumps and will quickly adapt.  The single leg bounds are where you always need to be aware of volume constraints to recover.  You will get there though.

Fair enough. I'll let my body adjust. I'm sitting here eating 300g of chicken breast in the meantime. Kill me now! I must admit some of the soreness i got was  so weird .. like just under the ribs?! I didnt even know there was muscles there haha. And in general, my abdominals too: which was surprising, including obliques .. always wondered how sprinters end up with that weird muscle buildup there .. i guess i found a way to try myself! cool

BS 6x125(LPR)
JS 8x110, 8x150, 8x180, 8x70
DJ 2x6x21"
BRoad jumps ~ 10 (before i got kicked off by soccer practice)

PP 6x64.5, 4x67(PR?), 6x65

DUNKS 3x6 (fuck off)
Med ball 3x6x10kg (PR @ 8.5m on landing)

 BW: 178.5

Notes:
Proud of myself, did a set of 5 on BS and had the self discipline to leave it at that. Nothing was to be gained by forcing some meaningless PRs on squats. Saving it for track & dunking 

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On depth jumps i'm kinda meh about this exercise. I will try to increase frequency and do them twice weekly. The first one will be "intense" 2x6  off 21" and the 2nd one can be "volume" 3x8 off 12-16". That will help me separate depth jumps into strength and speed days respectively. Hopefully that gives better bang for buck.

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Broad jumps .. hit a PR then had to leave immediately after. Got it on vid. Later realised i had left it on 720p and forgot to change to 1080p to get better quality. Oh well. Next time.. haha. Video below anyways.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjfCaZQIvSE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjfCaZQIvSE</a>
^whaddya reckon guys .. am i improving or nah?

I think you are. For one, you look less downwards, and your back seems to be straighter. The thing that bothers me is that you don't finish the extension in the air, you don't "pull" yourself in the air completely, or extend, like a cat, extend that spine and hips, you just "jerk" it a bit and that's it.

k .. will work on those things. Thanks.