It's even become its own niche competition.

The standing vertical leap is one of the critical tests at the NFL combine and has long been a gold standard for assessing human leaping ability.

So who jumps the highest?

You might think a dunk legend like Michael Jordan would own the vertical leap record.

But the highest jumpers actually aren't basketball players and football players actually have the highest vertical jump.

Even better than basketball.

Yeah, most people would think, well basketball guys jump more so they have the highest.

But you know, football players are used to starting from a static position, which is what a vertical jump is.

The NFL combines top leaper, Gerald Sensabaugh once hit 46 and then there's the extra inch higher that USC football player, josh, immature, baby was once measured jumping.

So what's the limit today?

We're going to look at why jumping from a standstill to higher than 50 inches is almost impossible.

The box jump, which has been made popular in part by Crossfit workouts, has gone viral on the Internet, and it's easy to see why This is Evan Engle, who set the Guinness world record for a standing box jump at 63 a half inches.

He set the record for single leg jump to to find out what it takes.

I trained with Hunger learned how to cheat the analog vertical jump test perfect.

There's another inch and talk with the scientist about why some people like Evan hunger can jump so much higher than the rest of us.

His muscles are capable of doing bigger forces in new york.

We flew him out to san Francisco to show us how he jumps so high, so this is ridiculous.

This is up to almost my chin, like I can rest my head on this pretty easily were 60 inches, right?

So this is five ft 60 inches yet?

That's insane.

And that's 3.5 inches shy of the world record, which you set.

That's correct.

Right, Okay.

So like how how I can't even think about how to do this, what do you do mentally and physically to prepare for and then actually execute a jump like this?

I will train jumps sporadically but not very often.

Um But a lot of weight training and uh usually just focused on the lower body.

So I'll be squatting three times a week.

Uh And I said I get closer the squatch change uh in variation in reps and sets, they get heavier and less reps.

Uh like making it a lot stronger for A one time explosive movement.

Right mentally, I think the mental game is just as hard as the physical game.

The problem is like mentally you can't really prepare to too much for it.

Um, but I find when I'm coming up to the box, I try not to think of anything hunger trained for a year before he set his record.

I didn't have that kind of time, but with his coaching I got to 34 then 38 hi, and that's a mic and then 42 inches.

All right, this is 30 inch box 34 inch plates were at 42 inches high.

Okay, Before I began to really worry about cracking a shin hunger had me jumping to 46".

Yeah, you have a full hang time on.

Thing is I'm not technically jumping that higher because remember the NFL combine record is also 46" and I'm nowhere near as athletic as a pro football player.

Now there are lots of different kinds of jumps.

There's running jumps, high jumps, triple jumps, but the standing vertical jump is used in the NFL combine and by sports scientists because it's a good measure of explosive power.

The box jump looks amazing, but it's not just pure vertical jumping, it's actually a complex move that builds on top of a vertical jump by pulling your feet up towards your hips, interestingly, about a century ago, there was an olympic event called the standing high jump and it was pretty similar to box jumping.

This guy, American ray Phiri was the reigning champion.

He once cleared a bar at 65 in.

If he were alive today, he'd probably give hunger a run for the box jump title, but we wanted to know how longer might stack up against today's NFL combine jumpers.

So he and I both jumped in front of a measuring tape.

It's really just like watched him rise past me as you can see he out jumped me by a lot.

It was hardly scientific, but it looks like he's cruising to nearly three ft, that's almost 90 cm.

Here's the thing exactly how high he jumped, depends on how you measure it.

You start from a standstill with his feet flat on the ground or the moment before takeoff when he's on his tiptoes, Depending on your form and how big your feet are.

The difference could be 10 or more inches.

Either way, it's a very impressive jump.

Like I look at this guy doing the standing vertical jump and I go, oh my God, what a monster.

Right, that's bio mechanistic, jesus, to pena, and my specialty is trying to understand the mechanics of athletes jump.

Those mechanics are actually pretty intuitive.

The way to get the biggest possible height is to have a big vertical velocity at the end of the take off.

So how do you do that?

De Pena says it's all about moving up as powerfully as you can for as long as you can before leaving the ground, Okay, So you would think that you would go and you would crouch yourself, bend your legs, grandma and be down there and then wait and say, okay, let's go, and then you use your muscles to extend your legs as powerfully as you can to get out from the ground.

The problem with that is that when you're down there waiting to start your jump, you're making a force that is sub maximum, you're just needing to make the force that you need to hold that downward position and to be able to go upward, you need to make a force that is bigger than that.

He says, there's an even better way.

So what you do is instead of starting at the bottom you start standing up so you're standing up and then you relax your muscles completely mm So your your legs turned basically into wet noodles, right?

And your gravity is pulling downwards so you go down as you're using your muscles to slow down this downward motion.

You're activating those muscles, your pre tensing the muscles.

So at the very bottom point you have all of your vertical range of motion for the upper motion available to you.

Still in, your muscles are already pretense, it's called the counter movement.

Jump under and I both tried it and not surprisingly he jumped way higher than me.

I asked dr depina why he has better muscles.

His muscles are capable of doing bigger forces in new york, basically Just means that he has a bigger cross sectional area of muscle in the main movers really.

We're talking quads and glutes.

If anyone knows how lucrative a solid jump is.

It's Joel smith.

He's a coach who runs an online jumping academy for athletes who want to improve their leaping abilities.

He watched me jump and offered some suggestions for how to improve.

We all know squads, headless, front squat, we think strong legs.

Um it'll help uh view it as a way to create tensions.

So right now, if we can create more tension in your legs by getting stronger, you will have the capability to jump higher.

So it is possible that I could get better at jumping, but I'll probably never get to angers level, that doesn't mean I couldn't have a higher vertical jump.

I went to Sparta science to talk with Founder Phil Wagner from a research standpoint vertical jump has been associated with performance and a variety of sports.

He works with pro athletes, including NFL hopefuls to post their best vertical leap on an analog measuring device called a vertex using it is simple.

Just subtract the highest you can reach while standing from the highest you can reach while jumping.

The difference is the height of your jump kind of because for as easy as the vertex is to use, it's also really easy to cheat.

Just make your standing reach as low as possible that much because you had a lot of elbow damage.

Right, right, Wagner showed me how I could add a few inches with a fake injury, wow, you can't even get close.

Let me walk through this thing actually, with my short of my shoulder tipped up, my fingers extended my arm all the way straight and they walk through again, no fake injury fully stretched out.

Look at the difference That 45 seems a lot closer now, then I jumped right and jumped again, this time using another trick.

Some toe bounce, which amplifies the counter movements.

Later it is, yep.

Okay, so how did I do?

So what's considered probably average quote unquote average for an NFL Burt would be in the mid thirties.

About 35.

So you did about a 33" for just there.

No warm up.

A little cheating, no warm up the schedule.

But here's the other thing.

Scientists can't even agree on the best way to measure vertical jumps.

There's the analog Ever Tech, there's video analysis and then there's force plates which measuring athletes force on the ground to calculate the height of their jump.

They're harder to cheat.

They're also at Wagner's company uses.

And thanks to their proprietary equipment, he says they're also far more accurate at measuring a vertical leap.

So 14.1.

in jump, that's half after three average jumps, the force plate brought me back down to earth and more than have my vertical leap to wait for it.

15 inches is actually not a bad score.

It's real now.

That might sound like a big difference.

But remember, the vertex isn't very precise.

You can cheat it with the arm extension trick, and it's measuring your jump from a flat footed start, even though your body is fully extended at the peak of your jump, The Forest plate just uses the speed you leave the ground to determine your jump height, Wagner says, the highest any athlete has achieved on the Sparta plate that includes pros he can't talk about is about 30 inches, but he doesn't think we're the limit just yet.

I believe that we're capable of getting up on this, you know, to a 40 in vertical jump.

Really?

Yes, I believe that strong right now is about 29.30.

That's correct.

It's a fight between gravity and muscle drop some weight and you might float a bit higher if I lose £10 by going to jump higher.

Yes, as long as you don't lose the capability of making force with the same proportion.

So it counts as the ratio force you can make on the ground or muscle tension, that you can make divided by body weight, body mass.

So the ratio accounts.

So if you can make your body mass the one half, which is impossible to imagine if you make it one half, that would be amazing.

The problem is that the capabilities, of course, it's also one half what it was before, but just the same, Wagner says better nutrition, careful training and injury prevention could see athletes cruising even higher.

I think the true limiting factor is how well can we allow individuals to recover?

And that's why monitoring is so important.

But how do we continue to add capacity on each individual without having a setback?

So it's possible we'll see somebody with a greater vertical leap someday.

But for now, bear in mind that what some of these athletes are doing is already almost impossible.

Yeah.