Exercise Hard But Take Time To Recover

When you are working out hard you need to let your body recover from the stress and the tearing down of the muscle fibers. As your body recovers it gets used to the stresses and grows, only to be stressed again and again. You rest and your body recovers.

This holds true for all sports including Basketball, Volleyball and vertical jumping. Depending on how much stress you have put on yourself and what your fitness level is will dictate how fast you can recover. Each person also responds different to the workout loads they put on their self.

Newer athletes who have only been working out for a short time up to maybe three years can actually put a heavier demand on themselves with less recovery and make progress because their body will adapt and get stronger as time goes by. But at some point that no longer works the same and you can no longer just workout recover and workout again.

As you become a more experienced athlete you may actually have less recovery time because you have to workout harder to get past some sticking point in your progress. You may have to add another day a week to your workout or maybe more sets or exercises. This will create more stress to your body and progress may actually slow down more.

What may work is to go through a short phase of these extra hard workouts for a few weeks when you would be getting less recovery time, then go through an easier period of workouts where you could recover some and see yourself making an improvement in strength or performance. This cycling style would help push someone to a new level and should work for those trying to jump higher just as well as other sports.