"I'm assuming you're following some sort of strength regiment??"

The people want to know how I'm going to get to my dunk...so let's break it down

As this ridiculous idea of trying to dunk a basketball, a feat typically reserved for the blessed in athleticism, blessed in height, or often both, has firmly planted itself in my head, I decided to start writing about it. And in writing about it, I then shared this blog with my friends. A big shoutout to all of you that are following this journey! Pat yourself on the back, you’ve earned it. If you’re new to my journey, catch up on why I’m doing this in my first post below, and then pat yourself on the back.

But the funny thing about sharing this idea that I have with other people means that I have to then talk about it with other people. I’ve never been one to put myself out there, so this is new territory. Of course, the responses have all been overwhelmingly positive. A couple of my favorites:

“I’m here for it my guy! You’re a ******* legend”

or

“Bro, if you manage to dunk you’ll be my hero forever”

Gas me up! I have good friends and family. But also curious friends and family. Or maybe, realistic friends and family. This isn’t going to be easy, and I got some questions around how, exactly, I was going to be able to dunk a basketball. For reference, here’s a serendipitous video of George Blaha, the play by play voice of the Detroit Pistons, calling me shooting around (peak pandemic times led to some wild stuff!)

Nothing in that short clip, despite George’s salesmanship, jumps off the screen in terms of height or athleticism. There’s some work to be done to dunk!

Which brings us to the point. The same PT brother who put this stupid idea in my head has been a great resource in terms of sending me exercises to do to help with the jumping. The name of the game so far has been…

Plyometrics

The idea with these are body weight workouts involving jumping and/or an emphasis on the lower body. The goal isn’t necessarily to jump as high as you can in these, but rather as quickly as you can with them. There’s an emphasis on quality over quantity. (Please note that this summary is brought to you by me and I am not, in fact, as licensed PT. If this summary is insufficient, respond in the comments and we’ll see about getting PT brother on for a more educated breakdown).

So how did I decide what exercises to do? It’s 2023, so I used a combination of Instagram (checkout plyomorph) and YouTube (plyomorph but on a different platform lol) and…ChatGPT. AI and social media helping me try and dunk a basketball before I turn 30. What a time to be alive! (Fun incentive for reading to the end of the post, I’ve had AI build out an image of an AI dunk coach! So meta, so topical!)

Rather than try and explain, I’ll show you a couple examples of some plyos.

Quickly becoming one of my favorites, this one involves jumping over some roughly 12” objects before a box jump. This is a 36” box I’m ending up on. I’m doing 5 reps per leg and anywhere from 3-5 sets.

This is a similar concept but with a side to side jump before ending up on a box. This is a 24” box at the end. Same number of reps per side.

Last one!

This is a variation of “pogos” with quick jumps before going into the 36” box jump. Bonus on this one: I had never tried this with the 36” box, and got it on the first try. Check out my small self-satisfied head nod at the end. Little wins!

Last but not least, my employer is big into AI. And I’m cheap and would love to do all this without the help of a paid coach. So I plugged my goal of dunking into ChatGPT to build me out a loose framework to work towards dunk day. Here are the results.

My biggest takeaway from the AI dunk coach is that I need to get back to truly lifting and have a better focus on my core. Both of those were disappointing takeaways, I haven’t focused on my core since the pandemic. You mean I don’t just get to jump enough and then I can dunk?

But I’ve been incorporating the squatting and the core workouts, and I’m doing some combination of lifting and plyos or basketball and plyos at least twice a week. It’s mid-August so I figure I need to really ramp this up to 3-4 days a week in September, and see where things are at. Sorry future Tim!

So, this is how I plan on dunking a basketball. I’ve seen decent progress at this point with this routine, I’m still an inch or two away from consistently touching the rim but I’m feeling the bounciest I ever have! Let’s end this update here, let me know in the comments if you have any more questions about the training routine. Onward to dunk day!

As promised, here’s my AI dunk coach. What should we name him?