Do Basketball Shoes Make You Jump Higher?

Perhaps you’re wondering if that new pair of kicks is going to help you jump higher or not…

Are basketball shoes actually designed to help us jump higher?

But aren’t there some basketball shoes that are slightly better for your vertical jump?

What shoes should you be wearing in order to jump your highest?

Let’s take a deeper look at what impact basketball shoes are going to have on your vertical jump.

Do Basketball Shoes Help You Jump Higher?

The short answer is no.

Unfortunately, basketball shoes just simply weren’t designed with your vertical jump in mind.

In fact some basketball shoes may even have a negative impact on your vertical, which we’ll get into later.

The reality is that most basketballers aren’t all that interested in increasing their vertical jump.

It’s something I’m personally fanatical about and likely something you’re very interested in too since you’re reading this article, but it’s not something top design execs at Nike or Adidas seem to be thinking too much about.

Otherwise we’d have plenty of shoes marketed to help us jump higher.

What Basketball Shoes Actually Do

The real purpose of a good basketball shoe is to protect your feet, ankles, and knees and to boost performance on court.

Basketball is a brutally physical game which involves sprinting (fast breaks), max jumps (layups/dunks), toe jumps (rebounding), landing impacts, and dramatic changes of direction (turnovers/steals).

Most basketball shoes are designed with these things in mind, not with maximizing springiness.

Ankle Support

One of the biggest issues I had as a basketballer was weak ankles.

I’d constantly be going up for rebounds and coming down landing awkwardly on other peoples feet, twisting my ankle and being out for weeks.

While shoes aren’t going to make a massive impact on ankle health, they can certainly add some protection and could be the difference between a sprain you’re able to walk off and a season ending injury.

Ankle injuries can be best prevented by strengthening the connective tissue surrounding the ankles, calves, Achilles, and shins, however a decent pair of kicks is going to help as well.

Impact Protection

Imagine playing an entire basketball game barefoot…

And you’re a big who averages 20 boards a game.

How do you think your joints would feel after going up for that many rebounds while landing barefoot?

Your feet would likely start hurting because of the unforgiving ground and you’d definitely not be able to jump as high because you’re bracing for the impact before you even jump!

Eventually your knees would turn to dust after so many unprotected landings.

A decent pair of basketball shoes should help soften your landings.

Grip & Traction

Traction on the court is of vital importance.

Ever played on a court that hasn’t been cleaned in a while?

You’re slipping and sliding all over the place.

It becomes impossible to dig your foot into the ground to generate force when jumping or sprinting.

There are some shoes, general purpose sneakers, which simply aren’t designed with the court in mind.

They have such poor traction that it feels almost the same as when you’re playing on a dusty court.

I used to wear an old pair of sneakers to training because they fit better than my new pair of basketball shoes and were really comfortable…

But the tread on the bottom had completely worn out and I was constantly sliding all over the court!

Shoes That Make You Jump Higher Banned From NBA?

Years ago the Athletic Propulsion Labs shoe was actually banned by the NBA.

This shoe famously claimed to add inches to your vertical jump through their spring-loaded design.

It’s hard to say whether the NBA banning these shoes was anything more than a publicity stunt because there is absolutely no proof that these shoes increase your vertical jump.

Countless people have tried the shoe and the results are simply not there, or at least aren’t repeatable.

Some people experience slight increases.

Some people see no difference whatsoever.

At best it seems as though the APL shoes produce a nice placebo effect.

Those who claim they were able to jump higher can’t say it’s the APL shoe specifically and not just any brand new pair of kicks with fresh tread that’s helping them jump higher.

You can cherry pick plenty of videos on YouTube where people have claimed they jumped higher with these shoes, but you can find at least as many reviews saying the exact opposite.

If this were a scientific paper, we’d conclude with the following, “no statistically significant differences were found between the test and control groups”.

Cool looking shoes though, but won’t help you jump higher!

What Basketball Shoes Will Help You Jump Higher?

By now we’ve established that no basketball shoe is going to increase your vertical jump in any meaningful way.

But I’m a firm believer that the weight of your shoe contributes to how high you’re going to jump.

In the past I’ve worn some really heavy, clunky high tops that, while providing excellent ankle support, felt as though they were weighing me down somewhat.

To confirm, I don’t have any evidence to suggest that wearing lighter shoes is going to make much of a difference to your vertical jump, but mathematically it should help ever so slightly.

And if you’re serious about jumping as high as possible, then you should be happy to take any tiny edge!

The below chart compares the weights of various basketball shoes and, as you can see, the heaviest shoe weighs almost twice as much as the lightest!

My recommendation would be to pick a shoe towards the left of the chart and avoid the ones furthest to the right.

What’s The Verdict?

At the end of the day, what shoes you wear is going to have very little impact on how high you’re able to jump.

You should be way more concerned with support, comfort, and traction than weight, as really lightweight shoes are only going to get you a tiny fraction of an inch higher at best.

So no, basketball shoes aren’t designed to help you jump higher, but rather to support you while you are jumping and performing all of the other necessary movements on court.