How To Jump Higher For Ultimate Frisbee Players

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Hey, what's up? Rowan here. This 10-minute video will help you jump correctly and win in the air. It comes from the Excel Ultimate Archives. Hey, what's up? Rowan McDonald here with AJ Merriman, the block leader for the DC Breeze. And today, we're going to show you how to jump off one foot, increase your vertical, and also teach you some tips so you can start [music] to win in the air and improve your sky game. Let's begin. The first thing we're going to talk about is the ankle, heel, and toe.

[00:00:27]The thing about jumping is we have to translate our linear speed into the vertical jump. So, normally when we're sprinting, we're landing kind of on the forefoot every time.

[00:00:39]However, to slow down and go straight up, we're going to have to slam our heel into the ground to hit the brake and then pop off our foot going up. We also want to lead with our jumping leg in front of our body, so this acts like a braking force, slowing us down forward so we can go straight up. Let's take a look at some of these and we're going to go through about 50%, but we're going to focus on reaching our leg in front of us, hitting with our heel, and popping up off the ground.

[00:01:18]Yeah, here we're just really working on kind of leading, slowing down with the heel. The faster you're going, the more important that's going to be. So, we're going to speed up a little bit here.

[00:01:29]We don't want to take too many brake steps when we jump cuz we want to use our momentum from all that speed into the jump. So, we don't want to slow down and then jump. We want to really at the last minute one hard brake step, jump here. But now that we have the brake step down with the heel strike, we're going to work on generating all the power. We want to go from our heel, forefoot, and toes and pop everything.

[00:01:56]The second part of the chain that want to work on is the knees.

[00:02:00]We don't want to swoop down too much here or we don't want to just barely bend the knee. We kind of want to be in the 70 to 110° range. That's where I found is optimal.

[00:02:13]But if we over bend here, we don't get any plyos.

[00:02:17]And if we under bend this knee, then we can't really access all the muscles and get the power.

[00:02:24]So, 70 to 100°. Here we're going to work on attacking the jump spot and then really bending the knee here and popping up.

[00:02:35]The other knee has a really important role as well.

[00:02:39]As this foot's landing, slowing down and getting ready to jump, we need to bring the opposite knee forward and then up almost as a swoop.

[00:02:49]This is going to create that momentum forward vertically.

[00:02:53]So, this set we're going to bring our knee forward and up and we're almost jumping without using this leg here. It's all momentum.

[00:03:10]Now that we've kind of worked through our foot and our knees, now we're going to talk about bringing some upper body momentum into it.

[00:03:18]With this knee swoop here, we can really use that same arm to kind of drive up and add to that momentum in vertical.

[00:03:27]Normally in a sprint, you want to keep your arm kind of 90 to 90, but in a jump, since our plant and jump step is a little bigger, we can use a little more arm to drive all the way back. And as this knee's coming forward, we're ripping this arm through, going up to catch the disc and also adding momentum.

[00:03:55]>> All right, now that we've kind of talked about the whole chain, we're going to put it all together for some jumps. One word we're going to hear a lot is triple extension. That's where you want your ankle fully extended, the knee fully extended, and the hip fully extended, so we're getting the whole power.

[00:04:10]So, now we're going to kind of run through these at about 70 75%.

[00:04:26]If you enjoy these videos and want to support the channel, then please consider ordering your team jerseys through Evergreen. They're in the description here. Just answer a couple questions and you'll get a free custom mock-up. Now, back to the action. Okay, now that we have the mechanics of the single leg jump down, we're going to talk about three ways to improve your skiing and jumping in games. The first one is we want to use as much as our speed to go vertical as possible.

[00:04:53]You will end up going a little bit forward when you jump, but you want to practice almost landing where you take off. That means you got 100% of your power going up and not any of your power wasted going forward. So, for these two reps here, we're going to work on landing where we take off.

[00:05:11]You know you do this correctly when you look down and boom, that's where you land. When it's incorrect, you'll notice that you're landing way too far in [music] front of where you took off.

[00:05:31]A second really important part of ultimate [music] is that you're not always going at a consistent speed before you make the jump. Sometimes the disc gets there too early, so what you have to do is slow down before the jump, so you can accelerate into it. We don't want to get to the spot, get trapped, and then have to jump weakly off two feet. What you do is you wait for the disc to kind of get to your range, you slow down two or three steps before, and then you take two or three hard steps so you can accelerate into the jump and get that knee swing up. So we're going to go now from a standstill about four or five yards away from our jumping spot and work on accelerating into the jump.

[00:06:28]I have a quarter, half, and full step.

[00:06:31]So no matter how many steps or how many yards I need to get into my jump, I can just go to a little shuffle, half step, and then I jump with my right foot every time because I can jump four to five inches higher.

[00:06:50]If you'll notice on that last one, it kind of came back too far, so AJ was able to wait patiently and then accelerate in only one step. Again, you want to be able to get your maximum jump off one, one and a half, two steps at most.

[00:07:06]The third tip to jumping and sky in games is what I call the J step.

[00:07:13]A lot of times, there's defense and the defense is always trying to box you out.

[00:07:18]So this time we're going to be shoulder to shoulder, AJ and myself, and what I do at the last second is get away from the contact so I can get a clean jump. I take one step to the side and then bring my jumping foot really close but not touching the defender so I can get a free unabated jump in in air. This is what it looks like in slow motion.

[00:07:50]So, I was able to release just for one step. If I release too early and make my J too big, then AJ can take all that space and box me out more.

[00:07:59]But, it's just the last second, the last step where you're getting into your jump, that's when you come off and then you go up and get it. Now, we're going to switch the force. We're going to say um I'm on the open side here and AJ's going to work on the J-step on the other side.

[00:08:21]All right. Before we leave here, I want to share two drills that I used almost exclusively to help not only increase my vertical and my jumping, but reading [music] the disc. What we're going to start with is kind of finding where the wind's coming from and going against it, throwing some mini MTAs.

[00:08:39]The two reps we're going to do is one, we're going to alternate jumping off our right, then our left, then our right the entire 100 yards.

[00:08:48]And then, we're going to try another rep. This time, no rules. You're just trying to get it as high as possible.

[00:08:54]Again, I encourage going up early, strong. This is great not only working on your jumping, but also reading the disc and catching it at its highest