So your kid has an excellent vertical jump.

Beyond being a proud parent, why else should you care?

If you are a basketball or volleyball parent the benefits are fairly obvious, but the vertical is actually a great marker for athletic success in just about every sport.

Here's why.

Being able to jump high means you are excellent at rapidly pushing into the ground with high amounts of force, relative to your bodyweight, using a coordinated total-body movement.

That's a lot to unpack, so let's take it one step at a time.

Rapidly driving into the ground is how you produce elite speed and overall quickness.

Bigger people push into the ground with more overall force, but those who do so at a high rate compared to their size show more explosiveness in athletics.

And to put it all together you must jump while timing your reach, requiring coordination from head to toe.

Those three skills touch on everything that makes a person athletic, which the vertical jump can measure as well as any test around.

Now, sometimes a kid will see improvement and sometimes they don't.

Last week's testing at our gym showed that out of 70 athletes who had previously done at least one vertical with us before, just over 70% of them scored an all-time best.

In general terms, here are the reasons someone would see a higher VJ score:

• Natural growth from childhood towards adulthood

• Increased strength & power relative to bodyweight through training

• Improved body composition (higher percentage of lean mass)

• Developing coordination

• They tested without fatigue or overuse compared to before

About 25-30% of our kids either tied or didn't beat their all-time best.

What happened to them?

Every case is a little different, but here's some common reasons they didn't reach new heights (pun intended):

• They were training more intensely in the past than they have recently.

• They're in the middle of a growth spurt and their coordination is a bit off.

• They're worn down from a big increase in activity, something quite common at the start of a new sports season.

Since we only test on one day, other factors could've interfered.

The score could be capturing a moment when they hadn't been sleeping well, ate a little more that day, or were negatively affected by some other source of stress.

The vertical also serves as an indicator of whether you are maintaining a healthy body composition through your growing years.

Highly active kids may struggle to develop power while less active ones may be held back by excess weight gain.

Walking the line between both is not always easy to do.

When you come in to our gym and look at our all-time best vertical jumps, you'll see both the male and female lists overflowing with athletes who went on to play in college.

Which is no surprise, because more athletic people in every sport can jump higher.

So congratulations to all of our kids who improved your scores since December, because you're another step closer to greatness.

For those that didn't, with smart adjustments and continued effort you're likely to see that same progress when summer testing rolls around.