https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jacked-athlete-podcast/id1462537296?i=1000777258255
The Record
Ethan (00:09) “I actually turned twenty-three on the day that I broke my record, June twenty-second.”
Ethan (01:04) “A year ago was the first time I ever entered the scene. Not a single soul heard about me before then.”
Ethan (13:08) “I feel like I’m superhuman if there’s hundreds of people watching me. It’s gonna be hard to break that realistically in an empty gym.”
Ethan (15:49) “I went from forty-eight to fifty-two and a half. That’s less than a year. That’s really unheard of. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Ethan (1:08:34) “After the forty-eight inch jump my right knee was already hurting. From there I went to fifty, fifty-two, and I missed the world record five times. I hit it on my sixth attempt.”
Ethan (1:01:42) “My knee was hurting so bad. It felt like I was going ninety percent, just a subconscious thing where it feels like you’re gonna tear it. That’s how bad it felt during those jumps.”
The Controversy
Jordan (05:52) “If you’re completely shameless, you could probably add half a foot to your standing reach.”
Ethan (06:00) “Could it have been point two five inches lower, point five inches lower? I have no clue. You also don’t just scrape the bell at the bottom, you hit over the bell.”
Ethan (12:19) “If I see someone go test fifty-three inches, I’m super skeptical. I’m zooming in, asking, is this set up right? So I get why people are. But luckily I have proof of everything.”
Ethan (15:00) “Before, when I got forty-seven and a half inches, not a single comment questioned it. It’s just gonna happen when you’re breaking the record.”
Ethan (15:27) “For the future, when I’m testing, I’m gonna film everything non-stop, continuous, no cutting. In the moment I wasn’t thinking people are gonna question this.”
The Origin Story
Jordan (02:01) “I have videos of myself jumping over people, chairs, trash cans, tables where I’d stack pillows. I was eight, nine, ten years old doing this. I’ve always been obsessed with jumping.”
Jordan (03:20) “He came and almost matched me. And I begged him, I begged him, I begged him, let me train you, and he wouldn’t do it. He just wanted to be huge. Bodybuilder. Jacked.”
Jordan (03:49) “He had crippling knee pain, horrible jumper’s knee. He wasn’t even able to go up and down the stairs. Rehabbing his knees took honestly six months. They were really bad.”
Ethan (24:00) “I hit puberty super, super late. As a freshman I was five foot four, so I sat on the bench every game. I got put in for free throws strictly. I was the white kid in the corner, just there to shoot.”
Ethan (25:00) “From freshman year to senior year of high school I was literally just gaming. Sitting in my room ten hours a day doing absolutely nothing. I thought my sports journey was done.”
Ethan (25:30) “I used to live on the trampoline. I’m talking three hours a day, every single day, all of growing up.”
Ethan (36:20) “I always regret stopping sports, but how would I ever have known that at twenty years old, randomly, I’d be able to jump out of the gym? I came back a full different human. My teachers from high school wouldn’t recognize me now.”
Ethan (30:30) “I would just push through the pain at LA Fitness. I would have swore one more jump, I would have torn my patellar tendon. I would just push and push and push, which is pretty dumb in hindsight. But it was just so fun to me.”
Jumper’s Knee
Jordan (31:02) “I missed my freshman year of high school basketball because of jumper’s knee and Osgood-Schlatter’s. I got told I just had to wait till I was done growing. There was nothing to do. Looking back, that’s unfortunate.”
Jordan (31:48) “My left knee is a little more cranky, but when the right knee explodes, it explodes. I’m done for like four months.”
Ethan (32:25) “There are dunkers like Dylan McCarthy who jump six hundred times a day and never feel anything in their knees. The fact that we both have it worse than most dunkers, I wonder if there’s some genetic component.”
Ethan (40:26) “I was in Gold’s Gym, jumped with no warm-up, five max effort jumps, then the next day played pickleball. My knees absolutely exploded. That set me back literally three months.”
Ethan (40:50) “I’ve had to learn I have to stick to a hundred percent of the program. I don’t play pickleball or soccer or football with my friends in any circumstance. I’m super strict now. And that’s been super beneficial.”
The Training Philosophy
Jordan (22:40) “It’s crazy because he’s never done anything fancy. It’s just basic good training. And I don’t plan on implementing anything fancy in the near future either, or maybe ever.”
Jordan (39:07) “I would rather Ethan be healthy for ninety percent of the year with a little less volume than give him more volume for fifty percent of the year but have him hurt the other half.”
Jordan (43:00) “He’s clearly just a fast twitch monster. He’s never gonna get a muscle biopsy because he’d be too scared, but if you tested his fiber type, dude is a freak. He’s neurally wired.”
Ethan (44:03) “My weight room numbers are so bad relative to all the other fifty-plus inch jumpers. I squat maybe two forty-five for five on a good day at over a hundred and ninety pounds. Everything in the weight room is pretty bad. But all these fast twitch movements, the sprints and jumps, have helped me overcome my deficits.”
Jordan (45:04) “I don’t care at all about his weight room numbers. You can’t jump fifty-two and a half inches without being able to produce a ton of force. I’m not concerned with how it presents in the weight room.”
Jordan (48:12) “His world record jump was a 270 millisecond ground contact time. His forty-seven and a half was only 230. For reference, I’m three hundred to three seventeen.”
Jordan (1:15:01) “We’re trying to feed his superpower and see what happens. I don’t want to get too far away from what makes him him. Clearly it’s worked.”
Ethan (1:14:10) “This is the first proper plyo cycle I’ve ever done. Depth jumps, drop jumps, we started less than a month before dunk camp. There’s been one week of a real hundred percent elastic cycle. That’s literally it. That’s all I’ve ever done.”
Dropping the Bodybuilder Mass
Ethan (50:36) “I was training upper body like a madman. Four days a week, hour and a half sessions, to failure every single set. I was trying to be huge upper body and train lower body like an athlete.”
Jordan (51:51) “He’s gonna be a scrawny guy for a while, but he needs to. Landing from fifty-two and a half inches in the air with ten pounds less on your body is going to help the knees a lot. His knees will like him more.”
Jordan (54:18) “More mass toward the forearms is almost like adding calf mass to a sprinter. There’s no reason for you to have seventeen inch arms.”
Ethan (55:10) “Regarding steroids, I guarantee I would rupture my knee if I did all that and got too big too quick. Your muscles develop quicker than your tendons can handle.”
The Double Heel Strike
Jordan (59:47) “I had made a post saying you want a heel contact on the plant leg and a ball of the foot contact on the block leg. Ethan has always jumped like that, except when he broke the world record, he had a double heel contact. It was the weirdest thing.”
Jordan (1:00:40) “Usually with a double heel strike people spend four to five hundred milliseconds on the ground. He still got off in 270.”
Ethan (1:01:42) “I think my body was compensating. My knee was hurting so bad, I think I was protecting it without deciding to.”
The Session
Jordan (1:10:07) “Every jumping athlete I have starts with basketball free play, five to ten minutes building to seventy-five or eighty percent. Then if you’ve had jumper’s knee, a couple sets of isos, like a single leg wall sit. Then three jumps at ten percent effort, three at twenty, ramping up in increments of ten.”
Jordan (39:07) “He dunks on Saturdays, then two full days of complete rest. I think those two days let the tendon settle, even when it feels a little off after jumping.”
Jordan (1:12:12) “His plyos are super simple. Sprints, max jumps, drop jumps, depth jumps. A normal gym goer probably wouldn’t even call those plyos.”
Ethan (1:16:48) “I’ll wake up at seven AM, get some carbs, fluids, caffeine, and go. I’m an early morning person.”
Ethan (1:17:10) “I hate lifting weights, so it’s by myself, completely locked in, don’t talk to me. But dunk sessions and sprint sessions, I like as big of a group as possible.”
Lessons and Mistakes
Ethan (1:18:00) “Online you see all these gimmicky lifts that look cool on camera. All I’ve done is sprint, jump, and basic lifts, and that’s what’s gotten me to this point. Just do the basic stuff that works.”
Jordan (1:18:47) “The vertical jump community is so cool. Everybody roots for each other. That was the first thing I noticed.”
Jordan (1:19:10) “There’s not one right way to do things in training. There are plenty of great trainers who completely disagree and they both get results.”
Ethan (1:19:51) “My biggest mistake was pushing through pain and not sticking to the program. Now if I feel something in my knees, I go submax or cut the volume. Listen to your body.”
Jordan (1:20:33) “My biggest mistake as a dunker was not doing low rim sessions enough. I don’t have the skill to match my jump height. There are people who jump a lot lower than me who can do dunks I cannot do.”
The Extra Muscle
Ethan (1:24:27) “I saw this bump by my right ankle. Got an MRI. I happen to have two extra muscles in my right lower leg. An accessory soleus and an accessory flexor digitorum. Two in my right leg, zero in my left.”
Ethan (1:26:10) “What are the odds I happen to have the world record and have two extra muscles in my right leg and it doesn’t help?”
Jordan (1:25:36) “If it’s a muscle that feeds into the Achilles tendon, it probably could help. And it’s visually apparent. It’s not a small muscle. It’s definitely a lump on his lower leg.”
Goals
Ethan (1:22:18) “My goal for the next year is fifty-four inches. I want the world record, whether I break my own or I have to break someone else’s.”
Jordan (1:23:10) “It took me eighteen months to go from forty-five to forty-five and a half. And I don’t miss sessions. That was eighteen months of almost perfect training. We’ll see if I can get to forty-six.”
Ethan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ethanpimstone1/
Ethan on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ethanpimstone1
Ethan on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Ethan_Pimstone
Jordan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jp.apexperformance/
Pimstone Performance: https://www.pimstoneperformance.com
Apex Human Performance: https://www.apexhumanperformance.org