Growth Mindset and Jumping

Trialing a jump session through the lens of the growth mindset

To dunk a basketball, one must be able to jump. The sky is blue, of course, dear reader, but for all of my training and general obsession with dunking a basketball, there has been an admitted lack of real jumping. While there has been plenty of plyometric work, involving all kinds of various jumps to train my lower body in preparation for a dunk, nothing I’ve done so far has actually looked like a dedicated session of jumping as high as I can to try and dunk. And according to my sources, this is where some of the most significant skill-building happens (my sources are YouTube and the internet).

And so, armed with the armed with my equipment and blessed with an all-too-warm February day (climate change has led to a real nice winter that I try not to think too hard about right now), I hit a local park to see what I could do. The defining trait of the hoop setup at this park is that each rim is a different height. Terrible for running 5s, great for a scalable approach to dunking! Here’s the equipment I brought along:

• Beater hoop shoes - currently rocking the Dame 6s (definitely grabbed on sale when he dropped 61 in the NBA bubble, and Adidas discounted them to $61).

• Basketball - no explanation needed

• Phone and tripod - my work involves creators and we, to use a sophisticated business term, drink our own champagne. This means I got a free tripod and an incredible sense of social anxiety to use said tripod and phone in public. The things I do for Dunk Day!

• Growth mindset - this might be the most important one. I’m still close to touching the rim on 10’, meaning I’m definitely not dunking on 10’. But with these different sized rims, I could see what I could dunk on. 8’10” should be easy. Could I do a 9’4” double rim? How is my current approach? Growth mindset allowed me to approach this with a “let’s see how this goes, give me some game film to assess and work on deficiencies” mentality. Even my YouTube sources refer to jumping as a skill that you improve on with hundreds or thousands of reps. It was time to take my first ones! TL;DR: I’m gonna suck at this but I can get better at it.

Allow me if you will, dear reader, to sing the praises of the growth mindset. A shoutout to Carol Dweck, a Stanford professor of Psychology, for her research into the subject is essential when discussing the growth mindset. Dweck’s book, aptly titled Mindset, is a great read if you’re curious about diving deep into the subject, but if you’re too busy reading things like Dunk Day (the frequent posting has got to be overwhelming, I know) I’m happy to summarize, along with my own spin on it.

It comes down to being in a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, when approaching something. As described in my bullet point above, a growth mindset allows for changes and development, while a fixed mindset looks at the current state, shrugs, and says “it is what it is.” To give a tangible example from my own life, we can topically point back to my experience with basketball. I didn’t really start playing until 8th grade, and even then it was in a YMCA league. So by the time I got to high school and decided that was going to be my sport, I was far behind the other kids that had played seriously growing up. To the point where I averaged probably a couple minutes of playing time in freshman year summer league, which is all about giving reps and minutes for development. If I had taken a fixed mindset in, I would’ve looked at that situation, seen how bad I was, and spent my time elsewhere because I was sure I wasn’t going to develop my game. Spoiler alert: I brought a growth mindset, worked my butt off, and can hold my own in a rec league or pickup run.

I bring this up because I find accomplishment in the journey of growth and enjoy working towards a tangible goal. This mindset is also essential with the videos you’re about to see and how much it will continue to take to dunk a basketball. Of course, there’s a time and a place for the growth mindset, and it’s not applicable for everything in my life. My handwriting has been borderline illegible since the second or third grade, and much to the chagrin of my teachers (or anyone that’s ever tried to read it) I haven’t had any desire to improve on that. Could I? I could. Do I want to? I don’t.

The growth mindset is fluid and dynamic, but I think of it as such a strength when put towards the right things. Like dunking a basketball!

So now that you’re up to speed, let’s check out my first jumping session. I followed some suggestions from kneesovertoes guy (check out my other posts if you’re not immediately familiar with the work and my affinity) on an approach to jump sessions. He emphasizes working on every approach possible (two foot with a left-right approach, two foot with a right-left approach, single leg left, and single leg right) and right off the bat, I learned how imbalanced I am jumping off my right leg. You’re trained to jump off your opposite leg, meaning for a right hander you’re going off your left. I’ve gotten somewhat ambidextrous in being able to finish layups with both hands, but the angles to get to a spot for a layup vs jumping for height, two very different stories. Similarly, my left-right approach was toughhhh. And I need to work on my jump sequencing, meaning the step cadence I take before jumping. That, apparently, is a very real thing to figure out.

At this point, all of this feels very silly to discuss, but screw it let’s get into some bad jumping on the internet!

Here’s an overview of the four approaches you can take to jump to dunk a basketball.

Here’s how those same approaches look on a 9’4” hoop

And finally, here’s me putting it all together to dunk on a hoop the iPhone measure app has at 8’10”. With only two of the approaches cause currently anything ending with my right foot sucks!

Okay, what are the takeaways? This is actually short and sweet (brevity, not my strong suit, who would’ve guessed?)

• As we knew going in: I still suck at this. I need to have a lot more of these sucky jump sessions and then maybe I won’t suck at them! Growth!

• The approach is something I need to work on. You’ve watched a lot of videos to get to this point so I won’t post another, but here’s a link to the theory behind the approach if you want extra credit (you nerd)

• Tripod is dope, being a creator is crazy. How do you just get used to filming yourself in public? Perhaps another for me to grow in ;)

• I need to jump more!

As always, thank you for following my journey. It’s a busy world with a lot of stuff out there and you’ve decided to spend your precious time watching me struggle to try and jump, with the silly idea of dunking a ball on a 10’ hoop. I appreciate you.

As a bonus, here’s a ridiculous AI edit of me dunking. Nothing I’ve done to this point deserves this level of production, but at least a human didn’t have to put this together. What a time to be alive. Enjoy.