The components that go into the vertical leap and increasing power can be broken down into its simplest form, as Reactive power & Strength Power.

Strength Power is a rating of how much energy our muscles can expel. The stronger your legs muscles air, the higher you'll be able to jump. However a thin line is walked when increasing leg strength. Firstly, we don't want to build too much muscle mass in which will add to our overall weight and in turn decrease vertical leap. And secondly if we train for it in the wrong way, we can actually make ourselfs slower, which also results in undesirable decreases.

Reactive Power, on the other hand is a rating of how fast your muscles can contract and put this strength power into use. This type of power does not relate to muscle mass, but rather the central nervous system. Working out this system is alot different than building strength. Our aim is to reduce the Strength Shortening Cycle of our muscles, which means we'll succesffuly be manipulating the acceleration component of the power equation.

To get a better understanding of these two powers work, we can directly compare our muscles to rubberbands. The Strength component we talked about previously would refer to the thickness of the rubberband, where the Reactive component refers to the how much and how fast of a stretch we can apply to the rubberband. Both aspects are just as important as each other, and we must train both accordingly.

So what type of muscle do we want to build?

Our aim is to build what is kown as Type II B Fast Twitch Fibers. Sprinters generally have a high percentage of fast twitch fibers and thus normally have a great deal of reactive power. On the other hand long distance runners have alot of slow twitch fibers and lack reactive power. It may suprise you that the people with the most fast twitch fibers have been said to be couch potatoes!

To determine what types of muscles you mainly have you can normally get it measured by your local institute of sport. A simple test however to get a rough estimate is see how many reps you can perform with 75% of your one rep maximum for any given exercise. If you can only do five or six reps, you're a "fast twitcher." If you can get twelve or more reps, you're probably a "slow twitcher."