This is episode 54 of the Dunk Talk Podcast (Hunter’s out; we both just got back from Florida). I’m Dylan Haugen, and Travis Reynolds is back with two major updates since his last appearance: he earned the WDA Black Band, and then a freak finger injury took his right hand away for seven weeks, which he converted into the most productive forced experiment of his career. The result is the topic in the title: why your off-hand deserves real training time, argued by a pro who just spent two months living with only his weak one.

The Black Band grind

Travis’s Black Band (the five-dunk gauntlet: 360 Eastbay, Eastbay off the backboard, 360 behind-the-back, Scorpion, Underboth, all in one session) took week after week of attempts, each session stalling on a different dunk, each miss triggering a technique review and an adjustment for the next attempt. The hardest, by his ranking: the 360 behind-the-back, technically brutal for a left-right jumper finishing right-handed, the dunk that left him “home free” multiple sessions and refused to drop. Second hardest: the off-the-backboard Eastbay, purely because he never does backboard passes. (We commiserated about the 360 behind-the-back specifically: both of us find it natural on 8’ and laughable at height. Something about that dunk eats your jump.)

His takeaway is the reason the band system matters beyond the merch: the chase engraved five elite dunks into permanent consistency and taught him a repeatable method for improving any dunk: film, find the specific fault, adjust one variable, retest. The band was the trophy; the process was the prize.

Kilganon in residence, and Ben’s two-hand reverse behind-the-back

Jordan Kilganon came down and stayed with the North Carolina crew before the injury, and the biggest beneficiary was Ben Hopkins, who improved dramatically with Kilganon watching every rep. The best coaching story of the episode, though, belongs to Travis: watching Ben struggle with the straight-on two-hand behind-the-back at the YMCA, Travis diagnosed the geometry (Ben’s Kilganon-style push gets under the ball, which fights a face-up finish) and suggested the reverse two-hand behind-the-back instead, where Ben’s natural motion only needs the second hand to join at the end. Ben made it on the second try. It’s one of the rarest dunks anyone posts, and it exists because a training partner saw the easier door. That’s the dunk-group thesis of this whole show in one anecdote.

(Production sidebar we couldn’t resist: handheld filming beats tripods for engagement, nobody knows exactly why but we both see it in the numbers, and the next best thing is keyframing your tripod footage, tutorial on my Haugen Media channel. Travis filmed Ben’s historic make while staring at the phone praying he was framing it right. The cameraman’s curse: you witness history through a six-inch screen.)

The freak finger injury (a push-off cautionary tale)

The injury is almost comedic in its irony: the no-props purist got hurt learning double-ups. Travis positioned his jumper too far from the rim, had to throw the finish hard toward the back iron, and the ball rattled out directly into his finger, bending it backward: damaged tissue and a joint slippage just short of a true dislocation. Seven weeks in a splint to let it heal straight (a reinforced version for dunking), then Amazon finger extension and flexion trainers to rebuild the tissue before return.

Travis’s relationship with push-offs is now officially cursed: his previous attempt, over Kilganon himself in Canada, went so wrong he quit them for a year, and his second attempt back broke his finger. The practical tip we extracted for everyone else: place your person closer than you think. On a push-off you travel up, not out; the instinct to give yourself room is exactly what forces the wild finishes that end in rattled-out balls and bent fingers. Don’t be like Travis. His words.

Seven weeks of left-hand bootcamp

Here’s where the episode earns its title. Rather than rest, Travis reframed: the goal is to be the best dunker possible, and if the right hand is gone, the left hand is the training surface. His starting gap was enormous, a Black Band right hand versus a left hand that struggled with one-handers from pure coordination deficit. The seven-week protocol:

• Low-rim nearly every day, exclusively left-handed, treating coordination itself as the trained quality.
• Lefty shooting form practice, on the logic that if you can’t control a basketball with the hand at all, you can’t learn dunks with it. (I’d add the civilian version: eat dinner with your left hand for a week and feel how foreign half your body is.)
• Lefty Scorpion training, deliberately chosen because controlling the ball behind your back, unseen, is the highest-coordination pattern available and unlocks whole families of dunks downstream.

The results: from inconsistent lefty Windmills to punching them, plus his first left-handed Eastbay. And the argument he made for why every aspiring pro should do this voluntarily is the one that reframed my own thinking: if you get booked for an event and your right hand breaks that week, what exactly is your plan? A professional needs a performable show in either hand. My current answer with my left is “a windmill, singular,” which is now on my list to fix. The secondary argument is creative: half of Kilganon’s famous hundred-dunk variety exists because both hands work. Your off-hand isn’t a backup; it’s an entire second bag you haven’t opened.

The takeaway

Injuries took different things from Travis over the years (his back changed how he lifts forever), and the pattern in how he responds is the actual lesson: every subtraction becomes a curriculum. The back injury taught him load management; the finger taught him ambidexterity; the Black Band grind taught him a universal improvement loop. If something takes your main tool away, train the other one. There’s always another one.

Travis is “Travis Dunks” on Instagram, now with two working hands and the hardware to prove it. Next episode is the full breakdown of the huge Florida session. Comment with the most embarrassing thing your off-hand can’t do; mine is apparently everything past a windmill.

This is episode 41 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen (no Hunter this week, and apologies for the gap between episodes; life got busy and I’m flying to Vegas in a week for reasons we’ll get to). The guest, for something like the sixth time, is Donovan Hawkins, and the premise is simple: he was the best dunker of 2024, and we went through the whole year, month by month, number by number, to document how a season like that actually gets built.

The year in numbers

Donovan started lifting with THP thirteen months before this recording, and the before-and-after table is the cleanest progression I’ve ever put on this show:

• Power clean: 205 in January, 275 now, with three near-misses at 315 that he throws too high and can’t catch.
• Back squat: 335 to 435.
• Front squat: 245 to 365.
• Bodyweight: 199 to 222, thirty pounds of mostly lean mass at 6’4”.
• Vertical: roughly 45-46 to a working 48.5-49+, capped by the famous 0.968-second flight time.

His one-word answer for the driver: consistency, paired with the harder thing, figuring out what works for his specific body, because his programming looks like nobody else’s on the THP roster.

The weirdest recovery profile in pro dunking

This is the section every training nerd should bookmark. Donovan’s nervous system is, per John Evans, unusually sensitive: if he lifts even twice in a week and then jumps, he jumps worse. The protocol they’ve converged on is four weeks of loading followed by two weeks completely off, not a deload, actually off, repeated as a cycle. The cautionary tale that taught them: last winter he lifted five months straight and his jumping collapsed to the point where Eastbays took 110 percent effort. They tapered him down and he jumped better every week as the volume disappeared.

The jumping schedule is even more extreme: on average once every other week, and the session before we recorded was his first jump in four and a half weeks (40 minutes, nothing crazy). He was careful to add the disclaimer, and I’ll repeat it: do not copy this. The textbook says jump weekly for adaptation; Donovan jumps when his body says yes. The reason his hands stay world-class anyway is six years of accumulated reps since he started low-rimming at 15, plus deliberate hand-speed drills: the same three drills, half an hour each, two to four times a week, starting about three weeks out from any big event. He pairs that with visualization that begins the moment an event is confirmed.

On the upper-body question (Donovan is the community’s leading bench-press apologist): his honest answer is that he does it because training is fun for him, John’s rule being that a program you hate is a program you quit. And the weight-gain data point matters: thirty pounds in a year with zero observed cost to his vertical. The working theory he and John share: two-foot jumpers tend to jump better heavier as long as the mass is lean; one-foot jumpers should stay as light as possible. Every two-footer they ask reports the same thing.

The events: Abu Dhabi, K54, Venice, Dunk Camp

The 2024 schedule: an NBA All-Star event in February, Final Four work in April, then the summer gauntlet of K54 in Paris, FIBA Edmonton, the Black Band Gauntlet, Dunk Camp, and the Venice Ball win (no props, which mattered to him). His favorite event of the year, and of his career: the Abu Dhabi trip, a week-plus in the Middle East, three events, NBA players judging. Second place: Dunk Camp, with admitted bias since he performs in the show; 2025 will be his first time at the Utah location.

His top three dunks of 2024, ranked live on the call:

1. Underboth Scorpion, which he hit twice this year.
2. Eastbay Whirlwind (we settled the nomenclature on air: the Whirlwind implies the 360, so no need to say 360 Eastbay Whirlwind), roughly 16 attempts before it went.
3. Tomahawk 360 Windmill at Dunk Camp, the one that caught even the pros off guard.

The In-N-Out phone call

Asked for his highest-adrenaline moment of the year, Donovan didn’t pick a contest. He picked a booth at In-N-Out. After the Vegas session with Billy and Josh where everything clicked, they’d recorded his height check properly: 240fps slow motion, phone held high and stationary past the three-point line, clean straight-leg landing. Nobody at the gym knew what the number meant. Sitting at dinner afterward, Donovan called John Evans and read him the flight time: 0.968 seconds, four thousandths longer than Isaiah Rivera’s when he first tested 50 inches in 2022. John started yelling through the phone. Donovan, genuinely, did not know what it meant until John told him: that’s 50. The biggest rush of his year arrived over the phone, after the session, holding a burger.

2025 goals

• Test 50 officially. One number, on a Vertec, then new goals get set. Nothing else matters until that.
• Weight room: 315 power clean (then 335, because I bullied him into raising it; he catches everything high anyway), 500-pound parallel back squat by December, 405 front squat.
• Dunks: characteristically, Donovan keeps no dunk checklist; he does what’s fun or what someone suggests. Under pressure he gave me three: Underboth Whirlwind, 360 Underboth off the backboard, and a new Bounce dunk record (the current mark sits around 9’9.25”). I also demanded a 540 on the record. He owes us a 540.

The Vegas mega-session

And the announcement: Donovan texted me a couple of months ago about a date in Vegas, and it has snowballed into possibly the biggest amateur-pro group session ever assembled. The confirmed list he read off: Dom Gonzales, Tre Finley, Brandon Ruffin, Alex Arzone, JaySmoove, Isaac Baker, Schunker, Travis Slayen, Kyle Cornell, Slinks, Finn Addy, Hyrum Perry, Dylan Peru, Dominic Moore, Andy Behle, Hyrum Fechser, Jacob Yun, Mason Baker, Donovan, and me. Fourteen-plus dunkers, four hours of court, Billy filming for Dunkademics. A show was floated and fell through, and honestly Donovan and I both prefer it this way: session atmosphere over performance atmosphere. Whether Donovan is fully peaked for it is an open experiment (four weeks loaded, two weeks unloading by session day), but “not fully peaked Donovan” has been the best dunker in the world all year anyway.

Donovan is “donovanhawkins_37” on Instagram. The Vegas session content drops across everyone’s pages soon. Comment with your own best-dunker-of-2024 pick if you disagree, and make your case. Next episode is on how your training environment affects your jumping.

This is episode 39 of the Dunk Talk Podcast and the nerdiest episode we’ve ever recorded, in the best way. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by Hunter Castona, and the guest is Sam Liu: 5’11”, self-described “dunk enjoyer,” Oxford engineering graduate, and a final-year biomechanics PhD candidate at Stevens Institute in New Jersey who has done something nobody else on earth has done: put 21 male and female athletes on force plates with motion-capture markers, with an adjustable hoop in the lab, to study the two-foot running dunk scientifically. Almost everything dunkers believe about jump technique comes from coaching folklore; Sam has actual data, and some of it will change how you train.

From the 2008 Olympics to a force-plate lab

Sam grew up playing basketball in China, where the 2008 Olympics (Yi Jianlian, Yao-era national frenzy) lit the dream that shrank in the usual stages: NBA, then D1, then any college ball. Schooling took him through Australia and then the UK, where high school basketball essentially doesn’t exist, so he trained alone, ran cross country, and grinded the OG Air Alert program (his review: nonstop plyos, did not help). At Oxford he studied engineering science, played basketball, and discovered biomechanics as a third-year elective during the 2016-2020 era when THP and the early jump-tech channels were first arguing about optimal technique online.

The detail that explains why dunk science doesn’t exist: when he asked about doing an Oxford PhD on jumping, his advisor told him good athletes would hit their heads on the gait lab’s ceiling. The field studies bone properties, tendon loading, walking. So he came to the US, found a professor gracious enough to allow a basketball hoop in the lab, spent four years on approvals and methodology, and built the dataset himself: two-foot running max-touch jumps and dribble dunks, force plates under each foot, full-body markers. He’s also a two-time Dunk Camp attendee; he got his first dunk at the 2021 camp, where John Evans told him he had no block foot, which, given what follows, is very funny.

Finding #1: the plant leg does almost everything

Sam’s first research question was beautifully simple: how much planting does the plant leg do, and how much blocking does the block leg do? The folklore assigns the roles cleanly. The force plates say otherwise: the plant leg does the majority of the deceleration AND the majority of the upward acceleration. It absorbs the horizontal momentum of your runup and redirects it vertical, under deeper joint angles, generating more force for longer. And this held for every single participant in the study, which almost never happens in movement analysis; when a behavior is universal, it’s a feature of the task itself, not a style choice.

The block leg’s role is different and arguably more elegant: by the time it touches the ground, your center of mass is already moving upward, which means every ounce of force the block leg produces translates directly into jump height. The plant leg is the engine and the brakes; the block leg is pure boost. Training implication: the plant leg deserves the majority of your strengthening and technical attention, and the block leg is where free inches hide.

The state of the field, for context: one peer reviewer on Sam’s paper, a former high jumper, could not envision how a person jumps off two feet. The right-left versus left-right question with different reach hands, the thing Hunter and I actually want answered, is a level of granularity the literature has never touched. Sam is essentially the entire field.

Finding #2: why you jump lower with a ball

The second study compares max-touch jumps against dribble dunks in the same athletes, and the punchline is that the difference is not one thing; it’s different for nearly every person, which is itself the finding. The mechanisms he’s documented:

• Attentional cost. Ball-in-hands sensation diverts focus from leg drive, especially in less-skilled jumpers.
• Arm-swing restriction. Everyone blames this first, and Sam thinks its effect is mostly indirect: you can’t lower your arms normally (the ball would hit your legs), so some people unconsciously cut their countermovement depth short.
• Approach contamination. The most interesting one: some athletes generated the exact same ground force with the ball but arrived at takeoff in a different body state because dribbling altered their runup, and jumped lower purely off worse initial conditions. The push didn’t change; the setup did.

His diagnostic prescription for anyone (like me) who jumps great off a lob and badly off the dribble: film two jumps as identically as possible, same start spot, same takeoff spot, camera fixed perpendicular to your plant, one with ball and one without, and compare frame by frame. If something visible differs (depth, posture, penultimate), fix that. If nothing visible differs, accept the residual: above a certain jump height there is essentially always some decrease with a ball, and that’s physics, not failure.

Finding #3: spin dunks are a block-foot trick

The 360 section is the best five minutes of the episode (Sam’s professor did her PhD on rotation in dance, so this is the lab’s home turf). The physics: whatever rotational momentum you have when you leave the ground is all you get; in the air you can only redistribute it (limbs in spins faster, limbs out slower, the figure-skater effect). So the entire 360 is decided at ground contact, and here’s the mechanism: in a normal jump, the rotation your plant foot creates is cancelled by your block foot. In a spin dunk, you deliberately don’t cancel it. Elite in-game spinners like Ja Morant and Donovan Mitchell visibly “kill the block foot” on 360 layups: instead of braking against the ground, the block foot steps over and pushes the opposite way, preserving and even boosting the rotation.

Practical takeaways for anyone grinding 360s: experiment with how your block foot meets the ground rather than just spinning harder; approach with a slight curve rather than dead straight to bring rotation in with you; and accept slowing your runup, because modifying the block foot genuinely reduces how much speed you can handle, and a spin dunk was never going to be your max-height jump anyway. (Hunter’s right-drift on fast 360 approaches, diagnosed live on the call: too much speed for a modified block foot to manage. He felt seen.)

On women’s dunking: the data says practice, not physiology

We brought Sam the women’s-vertical math from the growing-the-sport panel, and his answer carries real authority because his dataset includes female athletes: when you compare force output and generation patterns between an elite woman and a male athlete who jumps the same height, you cannot tell them apart. There’s no female-specific movement deficiency hiding in the data. Women’s dunking is nowhere near its physiological ceiling; the binding constraints are specific practice, coaching culture, and mindset, exactly the argument we’ve been making, now with force plates behind it.

What’s coming from Sam (and a spoiler about your ankles)

The pipeline: the ball-versus-no-ball paper explaining the mechanism for all 21 individuals, then a joint-loading paper quantifying what the hips, knees, and ankles of each leg actually endure, eccentric versus concentric, plant versus block. He dropped one preliminary spoiler that made Hunter and me sit up: the ankles aren’t doing nearly as much as everyone thinks. Watch for that one to upset some calf-raise evangelists.

Personally, Sam’s chasing a Windmill on his school’s 9’ hoop (front-rimming it, deload pending), enjoying jumping off every plant just for fun, and noting wryly that his jump technique improved over years in which his squat numbers went down and back up, a one-man case study in how messy the strength-to-jumping transfer actually is. His research life is the dream: write the paper, take a break, dunk in the lab.

Sam is “samlikesbiomechanics” on Instagram, with his published running-jump research linked in his bio. Go read the actual science; there is exactly one person doing it for our sport. Next episode is Daniel Castellani, one of the best dunkers in Australia. Comment with research questions you want Sam to tackle in a part two.

This is episode 18 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, recorded live on YouTube the night before Wisconsin Dunk Camp 2024 kicked off. I’m Dylan Haugen and I’m sitting in person with my co-host Hunter Castona at his place. We opened up live questions and answered as many as we could fit in. Below is the cleaned-up version of the most useful exchanges, grouped by topic, with stats and dunks updated to where Hunter and I are right now.

Our heights, weights, verticals, and reaches

• Dylan: 5’10.5” (no shoes), 160 pounds, 41.5” vertical (tested at Utah Dunk Camp 2024), 7’10.5” standing reach with shoes.
• Hunter: 6’1” (no shoes), 170 pounds, untested at Wisconsin camp (haven’t been training for max vert; on load management). Estimate around 41–42″ on average, 43–44 at peak. Standing reach in the 8’0” to 8’1” range depending on calibration.

Hunter’s skipping the official vertical test at Wisconsin camp because the schedule overlaps with dunking time, and he’s rather use his max-effort jumps in the sessions than on a Vertec. I want to test more often because I haven’t locked in an official number above 41.5 yet.

Lifting numbers (squat, power clean)

• Dylan: half squat (above parallel) PR is 365 with form I wouldn’t fully count; comfortably reps 300 for 5. Power clean PR 185 for 3.
• Hunter: full-depth squat 275. Power clean 205. Haven’t been lifting heavy because of load management. Most of the last couple months has been slow strength and slow squats while managing Achilles/knee/back stuff.

Bench numbers came up too. Dylan benches around 190 at 160 bodyweight. Hunter doesn’t really bench (135 once in high school, hasn’t since). Neither of us thinks bench correlates with vertical. We train it as upper-body general work, not as a vertical input.

Training programs (JumpX, THP, ATG)

I’m on JumpX with Tom Barnes and Austin Young as my main coaches. Hunter’s on THP. Both programs are heavily focused on strength and power. Both work. Neither is “better” in some objective sense. Pick the one that aligns with your situation and stick with it.

On ATG: I have nothing against the program and I respect Connor Barth (one of their coaches) at a high level. Some of the ATG exercises in my view aren’t the most efficient for raw vertical gains compared to a pure strength block, but the methodology has real value especially for the joint-prep / mobility side of training. Hunter ran ATG for about two months in his freshman/sophomore year and didn’t see a vertical bump from it personally, but he wasn’t complementing it with heavy strength work either.

Best shoes for dunking

Both of us run the Way of Wade lineup. I rotate between the Way of Wade All City 12 and the Way of Wade 10. The All City 12s have been my main lately (cheaper, still carbon fiber, I jump well in them). The W10 is the higher-tech option. Hunter prefers the W10 mostly out of habit. We did a full breakdown with Shankar Iyer in episode 7 if you want the deep dive on Li-Ning Gammas, the custom Kobe 8 / 361 AG midsole build, and the GT Cut line that Donovan Hawkins jumps in.

Verdict on Victory Insoles: they don’t really do what they advertise. I was a sponsored Victory athlete for about four months. The first time I wore them I jumped well and convinced myself they worked. The longer I wore them, the more I realized the boost was placebo. Not worth $150 for the insoles.

Can you dunk if you’re short?

5’7”: yes. 5’4”: yes. We’ve watched 5’4” dunkers land Eastbays and get close to Underboth. The two factors that matter are training quality and how young you start. A 5’7” kid who starts low-rim at 10 with a coach can absolutely dunk at 10’ by 16. Older starters have a steeper curve but it’s still possible. The key constraint is patience: a serious dunk journey at any height is at least a multi-year project.

Genetic ceilings

The number I’d give as a safe estimate for someone training consistently with reasonable athletic ability: 40″ vertical is achievable for almost anyone willing to grind for years. 45″ is achievable for most people who are genuinely athletic. 50″ is the territory where genetics start mattering a lot. Isaiah Rivera has tested 50.5 (and got really close to 51 last year). Dak got there. The list is short.

Hunter and I both flagged the bigger point on genetic-ceiling questions: the actual ceiling doesn’t matter as much as people think. If my ceiling is 50 and yours is 45, that’s fine. We’re both still training because we love the process. The dunkers who quit because “my genetics aren’t good enough” usually didn’t actually love it.

Are NBA dunker verticals real?

Almost universally no. Most NBA vertical numbers, especially historical ones, are made up. Wilt’s claimed 48″: not real (there was no Vertec-equivalent measurement system). Michael Jordan’s claimed 48″: not real (and Michael is one of my favorite players of all time, so this isn’t hating). Recent combine numbers are more credible (Reed Sheppard tested in the low 40s recently and that’s a real number). Even then there are reach inflation issues where standing reach gets exaggerated by a couple of inches.

Of the current NBA, the dunkers I’d actually believe are jumping high in real life: Ja Morant, Anthony Edwards, Mac McClung, Zach LaVine in his prime. Mac probably touches 45″ on a real day. The rest of the top NBA dunkers are likely high 30s to low 40s. Pros in our world (Kilganon, Isaiah, Southerland, Donovan) would beat almost everyone in the NBA in a contest.

Our current top three dunks

Dylan:

1. Eastbay (off lob, on 10’).
2. Dubble Up Eastbay (push-off but I count it).
3. 360 Pump Windmill.

Hunter:

1. Underboth.
2. Eastbay off the backboard.
3. Two-hand Reverse Eastbay.

Hunter has Windmill off the wall and Eastbay Scorpion both on his “next dunk” list. I’m close on a behind-the-back. After Wisconsin Dunk Camp this list will probably update.

Craziest dunks we’ve seen in person

• Isaiah Rivera’s 360 Underboth at Dunk Camp 2024.
• Jordan Kilganon’s 540. Just impossible movement.
• Isaiah’s Dubble-Triple-Up Eastbay (over two people stacked).
• Jonathan Clark’s Eastbay over four people at the Thursday show. Twice.
• Kilganon’s triple-up Scorpion (over two stacked people).
• Donovan Hawkins’ Underboth off the backboard.
• Donovan’s between-the-legs self-bounce into a 360 Eastbay.
• A 360 behind-the-back Eastbay on a 9’9” rim from Dunk Camp 2022 that I won’t name the dunker on but was insane.

One-foot vs. two-foot jumping

The fastest pros-and-cons read for someone deciding which to focus on:

One-foot pros: get off the ground faster, easier for in-game dunks on fast breaks, basic trick dunks like Eastbay are easier if you’re jumping high enough.

Two-foot pros: more control, higher max vertical for most people, easier spin dunks, easier dunks over people.

Most one-foot specialists max out somewhere south of 48″, since only Jordan Southerland has hit higher off one. Two-foot specialists who train heavy get to 50’+ more often. If you’re torn, do both. The decision doesn’t lock you in.

Our off-plant verticals

The gap between dominant plant and off plant is bigger than people think.

• Dylan (dominant: left-right two-foot): off-plant maybe mid-30s. About a 5-6 inch drop from my dominant 41.5.
• Hunter (dominant: right-left): off-plant probably 34-35. Same general 6 inches off.

Off-plant work isn’t a bad idea (Hunter does some left-right reps to save his right-left legs during sessions) but neither of us treats it as a primary training input.

Plyometrics, sprints, and other inputs

Plyometrics are overrated for most dunkers. The single most useful plyometric drill is max-intent jumps from a full approach, basically just jumping as hard as you can. One-foot dunkers benefit from more general plyo work (ground contact time matters more for them), but two-foot dunkers should focus their non-lifting volume on the actual jumps.

Sprints: I do them occasionally and haven’t seen a big vertical correlation, but I haven’t logged enough of them to know for sure. Hunter cut sprints because they flared up his Achilles. Worth experimenting if your body tolerates them.

Who’ll test 50 at Dunk Camp this year?

Realistic list of dunkers capable of touching 50 at a Dunk Camp (Utah or Wisconsin): Isaiah Rivera, Jordan Kilganon, and Donovan Hawkins. Southerland is close. Donovan in particular is a wild card because he’s 6’3.5” and just jumps insanely high, and even if he doesn’t hit 50, he’s touching at least 46–47.

Whether Kilganon ever “officially” tests 50 on a Vertec is another question. He’s touched it but won’t count it because the Vertec wasn’t calibrated to his standards. He’ll test on a verified Vertec at some point.

Should you switch plant direction?

Generally no, unless you have a clear reason. The plant you naturally jump higher on is your dominant plant. Switching plants when you’re “almost dunking” off your dominant side rarely pays off because the new plant takes 6–12 months of consistent reps to get to par. Hunter and I have both made the call to stay on dominant plant after experimenting with the other side.

The exception is if your dominant plant is causing a specific recurring injury that doesn’t exist on the other plant. In that case, switch.

What’s next on the podcast

Next episode is the Dom Gonzales interview on becoming a pro at 5’8”. After that, the Mason Baker interview. Plus more guests rolling out through the summer. DunkMan League starts this summer. Minnesota Dunk Squad sessions are weekly through fall. Drop questions in the YouTube comments for the next live Q&A.

This is episode 11 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona. No guest this week. We’re going to do a topic episode on rim height: how to actually measure a basketball rim, why most rims aren’t exactly 10 feet, and what the right ethics are around posting your rim height in your videos. If you take one thing from this episode: an inch and a half is the difference between dunking and not dunking. Treating every rim as 10’ on faith is leaving real information on the table.

The reality: most rims aren’t 10 feet

I didn’t start measuring rims until I was around 15 years old, and I wasn’t consistent about it until right after Dunk Camp 2023. Before that, I’d been dunking at a gym I assumed was 10′ because the rims were indoor and looked the part. Eventually I measured the rim I’d been dunking on the most, and it came in at 9’10.5”. I’m fine with that. 9’10.5” is what most of the dunk community considers a legit dunk rim. But it’s not 10’, and the gap matters.

Other rims surprised me harder. One I assumed was 9’9” or 9’9.5” came back as 9’7”. My high school gym? I’m almost positive those rims are around 10’1”. I jump significantly worse on them. The floor is clean, nothing else explains it. Across maybe 20 rims I’ve actually measured, three or four were exactly 10 feet. Everything else was off.

Hunter ran into the same thing post-Dunk-Camp-2023. He’s never measured an indoor rim that was over 10’. His typical range is 9’10” to 9’11”. His home gym has movable hoops shared with volleyball and pickleball tournaments, so the heights drift every time the rims get moved. He’s started accepting that his “max height” rims will probably keep dropping over time as the cranks get worn down from daily use.

Why an inch matters

The average person sees 9’11” vs 10’1” and reads it as “basically the same.” It is absolutely not the same. If you’re dunking on 10’1” and barely missing, you’re probably making the same dunk on 10’. If you’re dunking on 9’9” consistently, you might not be making those same dunks on 10’. That’s the gap. It’s real. The honest answer to where you’re actually at in your dunk journey requires you to know the rim height.

Stiffness matters too. A 9’10” rim that flexes with the ball is functionally lower than 9’10” on a stiff rim. I dunked in Winona on a 9’10” rim that was so floppy that anything that touched the top of the rim went in. That’s not the same dunk as a stiff 9’10”.

Adrenaline is the other variable. A 9’10.5” session by yourself on a quiet weekday is functionally a different dunk than a 10’ session with the right people in a packed gym. The adrenaline gap closes a meaningful amount of the rim-height gap. That’s part of why I train on 9’10.5” or 9’9” on weekly reps and then know I can convert at 10’ with the people I dunk with.

Why I train on 9’10.5” on purpose

I get comments on TikTok every week telling me to “just dunk on a 10’ rim.” I have access to a real 10’ rim every week. I choose 9’10.5” for most of my rep sessions, and the reason is rep quality. I’m 17, I have a long career runway, and I’d rather be making dunks at 9’10.5” than missing them at 10’. The reps on the lower rim build the technique I’ll need to convert at 10’ once the vertical catches up.

Isaiah Rivera still dunks on 9’9” or 9’10” routinely. He’s the highest-jumping human alive and he’s choosing the lower rim deliberately because the trick dunks come together cleaner that way. People comment on his stuff with “you’re not even dunking on 10’” and he doesn’t care, because he’s training, not posturing.

Hunter also lives on his home gym’s adjustable hoops. Sometimes he’s at 9’9” with Nolan (Nolan Larson, from his episode). Sometimes he’s closer to 10’. He doesn’t care which it is on a given session as long as the caption is honest.

Where rims actually are 10 feet

From the gyms I’ve been in, here’s the rough breakdown:

• College gyms: usually really close to 10’, often exact. Hunter and I have dunked at WMU with Nolan and at UCF with the THP crew (John, Isaiah, Austin, Dom) and both were true 10’.
• High school gyms: wildly variable. Some are exactly 10’. Some are 9’10”. Some, like mine, are 10’1”.
• Private / community gyms: almost always off. Almost never over.
• LA Fitness: notorious for being low. There’s a long-running rumor in the dunk community that some LA Fitness installations end up with the rim before the floor goes in, which would create a low rim by default. We can’t confirm. But the trend is real.

The actual measurement process

The tool is a tape measure, ideally one with a metal hook on the end. The two-person version is the easiest:

1. Hook the end of the tape measure on the rim itself.
2. Let the tape hang straight down to the floor. Gravity does the work.
3. Clamp / lock the tape measure at a midpoint so it doesn’t retract.
4. Press the lower end of the tape flat to the floor at the center of the rim, vertical to the rim.
5. Read the height.

If you want to be airtight on it, film the measurement from the side AND the front so anyone watching can confirm the tape is plumb. I personally don’t bother filming most of the time because the dunk community at our level isn’t adversarial about it. Jordan Kilganon has a video on his YouTube channel walking through the exact technique step-by-step. If you’re trying to be precise to the 1/20th of an inch the way he does, that’s the reference. For the rest of us, round to the nearest half inch and you’re good.

Dunk Camp also sells a tape measure with the right rim hook if you want to grab the “official” one.

The caption ethics

This is the part that matters. The dunk community does not care what rim you dunk on. Nobody is going to give you grief for dunking on 9’9” if you put 9’9” in your caption. The community cares if you dunk on 9’9” and post it as 10’. The lie is the issue. The rim height isn’t.

The honest version of “legit” is roughly 9’10.5” and up. (Some dunkers draw the line at 9’11”; both are defensible.) Posting 9’10.5” with the height in the caption is more honest than posting 10’ with no caption. Posting 9’9” with the height in the caption is more honest than posting 9’9” as 10’.

One more thing: if you have no rim height in your caption, the default assumption for a lot of dunkers is “probably a little low.” It’s worth including the number even when the number is exactly 10’.

Why measuring is worth it even if you don’t post the height

The training argument for measuring is bigger than the ethics argument. If you don’t know your rim height, you can’t tell whether a great session was your vertical catching up or a 3-inch lower rim. You’ll log a dunk as a milestone when the actual milestone was the rim. Knowing the rim is the only way to get a real read on your progress over time.

I’m one of the most-improved dunkers between Dunk Camp 2023 and 2024 (the full year of training is here) and the biggest reason is that I dunked every weekend on rims that pushed me: sometimes 9’, sometimes 9’6”, sometimes 9’10.5”, sometimes 10’. Each height has its place. I picked the right rim for the dunk I was working on. That only works if you actually know what the rim is.

The takeaway

If you’re a serious dunker and you’ve never measured the rim you dunk on, that’s the thing to fix this week. Get a tape measure, hook it on the rim, take a measurement, write the number down. Round to the half inch. Put it in your caption. The dunk community will respect you more, not less. And your training will get smarter immediately because you’ll know what you’re actually working with.

If you’re a casual reader: most of what looks like a 10’ basketball rim is not 10’. That’s it.

Next episode of the show is with Miles McDeezy, who gained over 2 million YouTube subscribers at 16 doing what looks like the cleanest blueprint for growing a basketball channel from scratch. Comment with any topic you want us to cover next. DunkMan League starts this summer; more on that coming.

This is episode 7 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Shankar Iyer, who runs Above the Rim Reviews on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Shankar is probably the smartest person I know on basketball shoes. He owns 77 pairs at last count, around 45 of them basketball shoes, with maybe 35 strictly indoor performance hoops shoes. This episode is the cleanest answer I’ve gotten to the question every dunker eventually asks me: what shoes should I actually buy if my goal is to jump higher and land more dunks?

Shankar’s top three shoes for dunking

Cutting to the recommendation, here’s Shankar’s current top three:

1. Li-Ning Gamma (Yuxin Gamma): best overall, painful price.
2. Way of Wade 10: clear second, much more accessible.
3. Kobe 8 chassis with a 361 AG midsole drop-in: custom build, his personal favorite mod.

Each one earns its slot for a different reason. The thread that runs through all three is embedded carbon fiber in the right place: a thin strip running from toe to heel that bends like a tiny springboard under load and returns to its form. That’s where the propulsion comes from. Shankar walked through the physics on the episode. Carbon fiber has a flexibility-to-rigidity ratio plus light weight that turns it into stored-energy on every step, and the foot-strike mechanics of dunking (a hard plant and a hard push) are exactly the loading pattern carbon fiber is built for.

Way of Wade 10: the daily driver

The Way of Wade 10 is the shoe I personally jump in. So does Hunter. Shankar ranks it just behind the Gamma because the carbon fiber implementation is excellent, the weight is low, and the traction (when it works) is genuinely 100 percent. The one knock he has on the W10 is that the traction can be inconsistent. When the rubber compound is fresh and the floor is clean, it’s as good as it gets. When the floor is dirty or the rubber gets rubbed off, it drops noticeably. (My personal fix: when my white W10 Lows pick up red court dust at my home gym, I clean them with a shoe cleaner and the traction comes right back. Not a permanent issue.)

For most dunkers reading this, the W10 is the right starting point. It’s also $200 retail (less on sale) instead of $400+, which matters.

Li-Ning Gamma: the best, if you can find them

The Li-Ning Yuxin Gamma is the shoe Shankar would put at number one if price weren’t a factor. Same embedded carbon fiber, same light upper, but the traction is noticeably more consistent than the W10. Shankar said straight up: “they’re off the charts on everything. The only problem is the price.”

The price is the wall. In the US, you’ll see them on Poizon, KicksCrew, or Kick Zone in the $250–$500 range depending on colorway. Some go for $600 in specific colors. The retail price in China is reportedly closer to ¥165 (about $25), which makes the US markup absurd. Shankar joked that the cheapest path is buying a plane ticket to China. That’s only true if you can do the round trip plus the shoes for under $500, which you can’t, but the underlying point stands. If you have a friend in mainland China, you can get the Gammas at retail. If you don’t, you’re paying the import markup.

The two current colorways are also some of the best-looking basketball shoes Shankar or I have seen recently. A clean blue and a purple with rainbow accents. They’re hard to dress around (Shankar’s words), but they’re iconic at the rim.

If you can’t get the Gamma, look at the Li-Ning Yushuai Big 3 as a substitute. Same embedded carbon fiber, similar build, slightly heavier, and the retail is closer to $150–$160. Shankar’s call: you get probably 90 percent of the Gamma for under half the price.

The Kobe 8 + 361 AG midsole custom build

The third recommendation isn’t a shoe you can buy off the shelf. It’s a build. Shankar takes the original Kobe 8 (the lightest, traction-best chassis Nike has made in years, with a thin carbon fiber strip in the midfoot for stability) and swaps the stock midsole for the 361 AG drop-in. The 361 AG is a midsole with serious cushion and bounce that was originally built for the Aaron Gordon line. The shoes themselves (the AG forks) are too heavy and too high for serious dunking, but the midsole on its own is special.

The result of the swap is the lightest fast-traction Kobe chassis with the bounciest cushion currently on the market sitting in the middle. Shankar’s only played in his custom build a few times and has done some of his crazier jumping in them both times. Big caveat for anyone considering the same build: a pair of Kobe 8s is itself an investment, plus the 361 midsole drop-in. The buy-in is real. If you’re going to do it, the math works out cleanest when you get the Kobe 8s at a Nike factory sale and the midsole from Serious Player Only (who sells the drop-ins as standalone products, and Shankar credits them as one of the better brands in this space right now).

The budget tier: Way of Wade All City 12

If you don’t want to spend $200 or $400, the answer Shankar and I both arrived at independently is the Way of Wade All City 12. Same parent brand as the W10. Same carbon fiber design philosophy. Roughly 90 percent of the W10 performance for $150 retail or less. I’ve been wearing them as my main daily driver alongside the W10 and have bought a second pair because of how much I’ve been jumping in them.

The All City 11s were also strong but they didn’t carry an 11.5 size for a while, which kept me out of them. The 12s do. If you’re a dunker on a budget who wants a shoe that’ll actually let you jump and not give up the carbon fiber benefit, the All City 12 is the pick.

On Victory Insoles (and why Shankar doesn’t recommend them)

The Victory Insole conversation comes up constantly in the dunk world. Shankar’s take is harsh but accurate. The physics works: carbon fiber compresses and pushes back under load. The problem is that putting carbon fiber in an insole rather than in the shoe itself adds weight, takes weeks to break in, reduces the cushion above it, reduces the contact-to-floor feel, and costs more than the shoes you’d be putting them in. The benefit you do feel is mostly placebo. I’ve had a Victory ambassador deal before. The first session I wore them in I hit my first Windmill in five months. Every session after that the “effect” was gone. They’re fine. They’re not worth what they cost. If you want the carbon fiber benefit, buy a shoe that has it built in.

GT Cuts: what Donovan jumps in, and whether you should

Donovan Hawkins jumps in the GT Cut line (the 1s, 2s, and now the 3s). That on its own makes the GT Cuts worth discussing. (The full Donovan Hawkins episode covers his training in detail.)

Shankar’s honest read: the GT Cut 1 was revolutionary at the time. Heavy but it had a proper implementation of Nike React plus a Zoom Air unit underneath. Every step had real energy return. The GT Cut 2 is widely considered bad. The GT Cut 3 is significantly lighter and built more like a Kobe with ZoomX foam, which makes it more interesting if you can find a colorway you like. The biggest knock on the line overall is that they take two weeks to two months to break in. For a $180 retail price with that kind of break-in window and average looks, Shankar can’t justify them. Donovan can because Donovan jumps 50 inches. The rest of us should look elsewhere unless we’re willing to put in the time.

The Way of Wade 11 leak: probably skip it

Way of Wade 11s are coming. From the leaks and pre-release images, they look bulky. Shankar’s comparison: “like a W10 that was overbuilt for a football player.” The lead designer of the W10 line left Way of Wade to design Kyrie shoes for Anta in the middle of the W11 development cycle, which is part of why the W11 took 19 months to release. Shankar’s tentative ranking for the W11 puts it toward the bottom of shoes with angled carbon fiber, which still makes it a top 10–15 basketball shoe, but if you want a Way of Wade for dunking, the W10 or All City 12 are smarter buys.

The cheap-shoe answer for anyone without a budget for any of the above

If you can’t spend $150+ on a basketball shoe, go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and try on everything. Nike Sabrina 1s are the spiritual successor to the Kobe line and are great. The Jaws are decent. The LeBron NXXT Gen worked really well for Shankar’s brother. The KD 15s are good. Anything Nike makes goes on 80% off within six months at a factory store. The point is: try shoes on across brands first. You’ll learn your foot shape and what you like, and that learning compounds across every future pair you buy. (Adidas is generally too wide for both Shankar and me. That’s the kind of detail you only learn from physical try-ons.)

A short version of Shankar’s own dunk journey

Shankar is 6’4”–6’5”, 28 years old, and a former high school triple jumper / high jumper (2009–2013). He didn’t play high school basketball, just club and pickup. He got his first dunk at 15 at 6’2”. Hip injury in his early twenties pulled him out of jumping for years. The Covid pandemic and one specific Ballislife video (“what happens when pro dunkers take over an LA Fitness”) pulled him back in. That video featured Connor Barth (who’s the previous episode of this show), Isaiah Rivera, Austin Burke, and a few others. Shankar watched Connor (similar height) jumping the way he was and figured if he trained, he could get to 60 percent of that.

His training arc: tried ATG, didn’t work for his knee pain. Did Connor Barth’s program, got him into a base. Moved to THP because he plateaued. THP took him from a 31–32” vertical to a 37–38” vertical (39” on a great day). His main goal now is to get his head to rim on 9’10” or 10′, which would mean around a 43” vertical. He’s currently in the “the last few inches are the hardest” phase, which I’ve been hearing from a lot of guys in his vertical range.

The unique read he had was on what happens when you don’t try. Shankar said he had years where he assumed his athletic peak was rim-grazing and two-handed tomahawks. He never tested whether he could actually do more. Then the Ballislife video flipped him and he found out the answer was “yes, by a lot.” A lot of people in the dunk world stay on the “my genetics are limiting” story rather than running an actual experiment on themselves. That’s the read I think more dunkers should sit with.

A quick aside on hand speed (Shankar’s question to Hunter and me)

Shankar asked us how to build consistency on Eastbays and behind-the-back dunks. Two things I told him that I want to put on the record here:

1. Low-rim sessions are non-negotiable. I do two dunk sessions a week. Saturday at Minnesota Dunk Squad on 9’10.5” or 10′. Wednesday solo or with one or two guys on 9′ to 9’8”, repping out dunks at high volume. The low-rim day is where the hand speed actually gets built.
2. Don’t decelerate through the transfer. Jordan Kilganon told me this directly on behind-the-back dunks. People going full speed through the trick will instinctively slow down on the transfer to focus on it. The deceleration is what makes the dunk fail. Punch the dunk after the transfer at the same speed you started at and the conversion rate goes up massively.

Where to find Shankar

Shankar is “goire” on Instagram and TikTok, “Above the Rim Reviews” on YouTube. Go follow him. The shoe analysis is detailed enough that you’ll save yourself money the first time he talks you out of a bad pair.

Next episode is the Donovan Hawkins interview. After that we’ve got my own training breakdown for Dunk Camp, and after that the recap of the actual Utah Dunk Camp 2024 experience. The DunkMan League is also coming this summer. Comment with any dunker you want me to interview next.