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What do you suggest people should do to improve their recovery, so that squats + jumps begins to work effectively for everyone?

I think we don't keep enough of an eye on fatigue accumulation during the workout and during a phase (or cycle). We also have this tendency/obsession to go to failure when lifting.

IMO, if more emphasis would be put on bar speed instead of actual failure, we'd have better recovery (due to stopping before failure (stopping when the bar speed slows down)), better specificity (faster movements in say the squat) and more time to perform jumps at a higher intensity (and therefore adapting to that kind of strong neural signals when jumping).

So there's a bunch of stuff that could be improved if our focus would be on bar speed and recovery vs. going on a ton of volume and training to failure overall when lifting, and then being so tired when jumping. It doesn't make any sense. Lifting should be suplimentary to jumping and not the other way around.

Anyone would benefit from creatine. There's no reason not to be taking it.

What about water retention?

It's weird because right now I'm focusing completely on the upperbody as far as strength goes, and for the legs I just play ball and dunk, and do the occassional swing and pistol. I never thought I'd be doing this.

So yeah, I believe upperbody is important because it gives you a certain "rhythm" when you jump and arm swing, and having powerful upperbody muscles potentiate the leg muscles through irradiation. So don't ignore that!

Yeah, if you can "read what's written on your chest" then you're good as far as chest/back position IMO. Obviously not the only thing, but you get the idea.

Good form?

Haha... you do that. Why aren't you actively doing something to correct it? For one, you could use a bit of a slower approach and try to be stiff at the knee but without overdoing it. When you overdo it and really really contract the quad to keep the knee from buckling then you usually overload the quad because it's already contracted hard and when it receives the shock it goes into overload mode and just fails...

Then it's the body position and the glutes absorbing some of the shock (when you put your foot dorsiflexed and at the correct angle on the floor, some of the shock gets distributed in the hip vs overloading the knee joint - something that didn't happen to me in that 1st video).

And then it's doing more hip dominated exercises just to make your body aware that it can use the hips to absorb the shock/become the prime movers (god forbid the use of "protagonists") in the jump.

But obviously if you're traditionally not a one-leg jumper... it's going to take some time

Haha yeah I know. It's funny because I went from a running shoe to that shoe I used in that video immediately, and the difference between the foam sole (of the running shoe) and the rubber sole of that shoe in the video is so big as far as how the leg loads. And if you wear running shoes now and then switch to those rubber outsole shoes, then you're bound to happen stuff like this ^^^

But the truth is I was really tired yesterday and that's that. I put this up only for people to see, in their own experiences when they have a "flat tire", what's actually going on. Obviously you can collapse at different joints etc, but you get the idea.

You can even see the plant-"attack" wasn't proper either, it's like my body said "hey the glutes/hams are tired, I don't want to load them too much, why don't you load the quad a ton instead?"

I don't get this % thing.

Let's say I have a guy jumping 10 inches and a guy jumping 35 inches naturally. Are you telling me the guy jumping 35 inches has a chance of increasing his jump by 11 inches while the 10 inches guy has a chance of increasing by 3 inches? It doesn't make any sense. A % of a higher number will be a higher number, and it doesn't make sense that a guy that already has a high jump has more of a potential than a guy that doesn't have a high jump.

Now I know there are a ton of factors involved, but still.