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this is from another post i made in another forum i'm just gonna copy & paste.  naturally vag's Age vs. Vertical is a great inspiration for me.  :-)

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subject: any age 30+ guy here significantly improved your vertical?!
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I'm 36 and will be turning 37 in November. In beginning of 2009 I was at my heaviest ever (~87 kg/190 lbs) after being a lazy ass for about 1.5 years and hardly exercised. I'm at 180 cm exactly or 5'11". Then started in Feb. 2009 I got back into basketball and yoga and started playing ball just about every day ever since... slowly but surely I shed the weights week after week in the beginning of 2010 I weighted about 72.5 kg (160 lbs). Lately I've been at 70 kg or slightly below so about 153 lbs ish and this is pretty much back to my weight in high school.

Between 2009 and now I've only hit the weights sparsely. Less than 20 sessions total. I weight myself at the local hospital with a digital scale that can measure body fat, water weight, muscle/bone weight ... etc. All I've lost are fat. Muscle change has been less than 0.5 kg. If anything, I should have gain a little muscle (or at least it should've become denser/heavier) through the exercises.

As far as vertical is concerned, at my best (probably around age 25) I remember I can jump and try to grab the rim and it would be at the middle of my palm. I have fairly small hands. So that's at most 5" above the rim. At my worst in early 2009 the tip of my finger was about 6" below the rim. Boy did I feel fat, clumsy and just straight NASTY when I was out of shape. Right now I'm only able to barely touch the rim. But I am happy just to be able to touch the rim again. :-) At least the lateral speed and endurance (I average ~3 hours a day 6 days a week in the past year) are back. I hold my own in scoring against anyone just fine thanks to my wide array of weapons and basketball IQ.

Skills wise I got back all that I lost (due to poor conditioning mainly) and the shooting touch is back as well. My biggest skill improvement would be my left fade away and it has been pretty much un-stoppable in 3-3. Another one has been steals I can read the dribble better and time my hands jabs more accurately.

Anyway, back to the subject of vertical. Since I was never a gym rat and I never trained for vertical specifically, I always thought that I should be able to dunk if I trained to improve my vertical specifically. Since I can put the middle of my palm at the right at my best, in theory if I just gained 6" vertical my entire palm should be 2-3" over the rim and I ought to be able to just "stuff" the ball in...

So, anyone here past age 30 improved their vertical by 8" or more?

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first off, props on getting back into shape over the last year! dropping that fat & getting back into basketball shape was the first step towards really improving your vert, you got gains off that alone, now it's time to implement a progressively overloaded strengthening program to achieve the rest of your goals. You didn't mention if currently you have started to implement that, so i'm assuming you are thinking about incorporating soon?

If you don't know where to start with weight training, you could check out this SUPPLEMENTARY simple program:
- http://www.adarq.org/forum/performance-training-blog/an-introductory-block/

If you wanted to do something like VJB or the JackM split, or something along those lines, that'd be fine too, as they are solid programs.

The keyword here is "supplementary" though. Whatever program/training method you decide on at the time, it can't come at the cost of becoming less fit, less conditioned, and more fat, which can often happen when people start getting addicted to the iron. For performance gains, there of course needs to be a balance, conditioning/basketball can't be in such an excess that your weight training suffers. So just supplement in a nice routine (that has squat + unilaterals), work on getting those weights up at least every week or every two weeks, jump, play ball, eat good, and you'll get those gains.

peace man!

That submax buttkick thing in the exercise index looks exhausting.

ya it definitely is.. it's more exhausting if you try and achieve more hip flexion imo, but it still is very tiring.. feels good though.

peace man

Hey everyone, my name is mike or on youtube and Facebook as "Trainer Mike" (feel free to add me just tell me who you are) I'm a trainer and an aspiring S&C Coach, my goals for training have always been vert and athleticism cuz I want to dunk even though right now I'm doing more rehab and prehab trying to come back from an ankle sprain that just won't get better.  Also to fully reach my goals I understand that I have a lot of weight to lose, and BF to cut so I'm trying to get better with those, its just sometimes hard to stay motivated.
Anyways I post to a handful of forums and now I'm finally here, so as I get questions I'll post and I'll try and help others out with anything I have info on.

yo mike! welcome!

sucks about the ankle.. how much weight do you want to lose? i don't remember you looking like you needed to drop alot of fat or anything from your pics but if you do, then that can really fuel the motivation for quite some time, just getting that bodyfat off will make you alot less susceptible to things like ankle sprains etc, while at the same time improving vert/speed.

peace man

weird shit, something i ate in those damn philly cheese steaks tonight made me incredibly tired......

going to sleep

Getting up dude 

thanks man!

Crazy jumps man. Great job. Looks extremely cool.

thanks man, appreciate it!

my last term of school is gonna start pretty soon, that will be mon, tues, fri.

with the weekly league games on sat, that pretty much leaves me only weds and thurs for the next phase of my training.

the last week of GPP was abit short, but all in all, i felt it went pretty well. i mean, i was maxing at 80 odd for triples on the bench before i began, now i can do 80 for reps.

ya.. you made some good progress man, it'll carry over to strength focus 2x/week very well.

peace