This is episode 23 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, no guest, just me walking through how I added 4 inches to my vertical between Dunk Camp 2023 and Dunk Camp 2024. I’m Dylan Haugen. I’m 16 years old, 5’11” (just measured at the doctor; I’ve been telling everyone 5’10” for months and apparently I grew without noticing). I just officially tested a 41.5-inch vertical at Wisconsin Dunk Camp 2024. The year before that I tested 37.5 at Dunk Camp 2023. This article walks the full 12 months in order so you can see exactly what worked, what didn’t, and where the inches actually came from.
Starting point: 36.5” at Dunk Camp 2022 (first official test)
My first ever Vertec test was June 2022 at Dunk Camp. I went in expecting around 38”. I tested 36.5” (touched 10’9.5”). Disappointing in the moment, but it was an honest number that I’ve used as my baseline ever since. My standing reach at the time was 7’9”.
Between June 2022 and June 2023 I worked hard but was mostly running unstructured programming. A couple of programs I started and didn’t finish. Basketball plus AAU made consistency hard. Despite that, by Dunk Camp 2023 my reach had grown an inch and a half to 7’10.5” and I touched 11’0”, which gave me a 37.5” vertical. One inch of gain in a year while playing AAU is fine, not great. I knew I could do better with structure.
July 2023: founding Minnesota Dunk Squad, learning right-left
After Dunk Camp 2023, I came home and started Minnesota Dunk Squad. The idea was simple: a weekly session with a small group of Minnesota dunkers (Gideon, a few others) so I could feed off the energy of dunking with other people instead of grinding solo.
July was also when I experimented with right-left plant for the first time. If you watch NBA dunkers go up over people (Ja Morant, Anthony Edwards), they’re usually right-left jumpers. I wanted to learn it. The experiment didn’t stick. I’m a left-right jumper and the right-left attempts weren’t productive enough to keep splitting reps. By the end of July I went back to left-right exclusively. The experiment cost me about three weeks of clean focused training. Useful data, but in retrospect I should have stayed on dominant plant.
August–September 2023: low-rim explosion, big sessions
I spent August and September aggressively low-rimming and starting to set up bigger sessions as forcing functions. New dunks I landed during this stretch:
- On 8’: 360 Reverse Hide-and-Seek, 360 Kilganon Windmill (blind dunk where you can’t see the ball at the apex), Windmill off two.
- On 9’: Behind-the-back, Scorpion, Hide-and-Seek, Underboth.
- On 9’9”: Dribble Windmill.
September was when I had my first session with Gideon at the National Sports Center. $50/hour gym rental, $100 total for two hours. The cost made it sustainable as a once-a-month destination session, which became the forcing function for the months that followed. I’d set a date, train hard for three weeks toward it, mini-deload, and use the session as the test.
October 2023: first Eastbay, partnering with JumpX
October 21, 2023 (two days before my 16th birthday) was the session that changed everything. I’d invited Hunter Castona down from Wisconsin and planned the full month of training in a notebook leading up to that day. Lift heavy, jump twice a week, no organized basketball.
I landed seven new dunks that session:
- First Reverse Windmill.
- First Reverse Pump.
- First Dubble Up.
- First Dubble Up Windmill.
- First Between the Legs.
- First Eastbay (on a 9’10.5” rim, the one I’d been chasing for months).
- Off-the-wall Windmill (had hit it the previous month too).
This was the session that made me realize my actual ceiling was significantly higher than where I was. Around the same window, Tom Barnes and Austin Young reached out about joining JumpX. I showed them the October 21 session footage on the 21st itself. We finalized the partnership shortly after. Every single workout from there to Dunk Camp 2024 was a JumpX-programmed session.
November 2023 – February 2024: high school basketball compresses everything
Late November 2023 was basketball tryouts. I made the team. Practice was 5 days a week, Monday through Friday. The volume was brutal on my knees because I hadn’t been doing five basketball practices a week. My body was acclimated to dunking and lifting, not running sprints and defensive slides for two hours straight.
The schedule I locked into for the season:
- Monday–Friday: basketball practice, give 100%.
- Saturday: total rest. No dunking, no lifting, nothing.
- Sunday: 1-2 hour dunk session at home, maybe a slow lift after if the body was OK.
It wasn’t enough volume to gain vertical. The goal was just to maintain. The reality was a little better than maintain:
- December 2023: first in-game one-hander dunk.
- January 2024: first in-game two-hander dunk. Second Eastbay in a Sunday session.
- February 2024: third Eastbay, plus Cuff 360 Pump, Dubble Up Eastbay (one of my best dunks ever), Dubble Up Reverse.
The Dubble Up Eastbay was a technical breakthrough. The two-hand push motion off a person’s head into a clean Eastbay transfer was a dunk I’d been trying with a one-hand grab for months. The two-hand version landed and felt insanely good. February was also when basketball season started winding down and I started shifting energy back to dunk-first training.
March 2024: Hunter back up, fifth Eastbay, new dunks despite vacation
March basketball ended. I was probably sitting around 39” on average and 40” on best days, just from physical maturation through the basketball season plus the occasional Sunday dunk work.
I planned a session with Hunter for late March back at the National Sports Center. I trained for about two weeks, then took a week-long family vacation to the Dominican Republic. I told myself I’d lift while I was there. I didn’t lift once. (I did dunk twice and landed a new Dubble Up Two-hander on roughly 9’11”.)
The March session with Hunter, even without that final lifting block, went well:
- Fifth or sixth Eastbay (lost count).
- First Windmill off the backboard.
- First-ever Off-two-foot 180 Inverted Scorpion (briefly a world first on that height, since someone from another country beat my PR a few months later).
April 2024: real training, 300 squats, first caffeine experiment
April was the first full month of 6-day-a-week JumpX training plus weekend dunk sessions. The lifting numbers I hit during this block:
- Half squat: 300 lb for reps, multiple sessions per week.
- Power clean: 185 lb for 3 (new PR).
The middle of April I tried caffeine before a session for the first time. The first 30 minutes felt awful. I’d overdone the dose. Then the switch flipped. The rest of the session was the best I’d felt in months. I hit another Eastbay, a Dribble Windmill, a Two-hand Windmill, and a Dwight Tap, all in the same day.
Later that month I drove two hours to Winona, MN for a session with Justin Blanchard and the Winona State Dunk Club. The gym was a flimsy 9’10” rim. I landed a clean Eastbay, got close to Hide-and-Seek, and got close to an Underboth. It was one of the more fun sessions of the year. (Justin’s full story is in episode 13.)
May 2024: low-rim block, met T-Dub
May was hand-speed prep for Dunk Camp Utah. I shifted from heavy strength to lower-rep / lower-volume work (front squats, hang cleans instead of power cleans) and stacked low-rim sessions. Best dunks landed in May, all on 9’:
- 180 Scorpion off two foot.
- Dubble Up Scorpion.
I also met T-Dub and dunked with him in person for the first time this month. Unrelated milestone but a meaningful one personally.
June 2024: cut 8 pounds, deload, two Eastbays in a session
June was the camp month. The first big move was a deliberate eight-pound weight cut. I’d bulked to 168 pounds in May (heaviest I’d ever been at 5’10”). On June 1 I cut one meal per day, specifically the late-afternoon ice cream / ramen / chips-and-salsa snack meal that had been adding most of the bloat. Eight pounds gone by the time I flew to Utah. 160 pounds, easily the leanest I’d been all year going into a camp test.
Mid-June I had my first deload session of the cycle. I wasn’t even fully deloaded yet. I hit two Eastbays in the same session, the first time I’d ever done that. Jumping was probably already at 40+ on that day. That session gave me the highest confidence I’d ever had going into a camp.
Utah Dunk Camp 2024: tested 41.5″
I flew to Utah Saturday, didn’t do anything Saturday or Sunday (a couple of light sub-max jumps to stay loose). Monday morning was the vertical test. My standing reach measured the exact same as Dunk Camp 2023 (7’10.5”). I had not grown vertically in the previous 12 months. My knee pain spiked a little in warmups (gym was cold), which was unusual.
The test:
- Touched 11’0” easily (last year’s max).
- Touched 11’2” easily.
- Got 11’4” on second attempt.
- Missed 11’5” by maybe an inch.
Tested 41.5” running vertical. No caffeine (camp rule that you can’t take it before testing). The rest of the day I dunked through three more Eastbays on an 11’-rim, got close to an Underboth, and hit an Elbow dunk. The Eastbays on Monday were the cleanest of the year.
July 2024: 3×8 maintenance + AAU + a week off
July was a maintenance month. I shifted into 3×8 lifting cycles (lower intensity, higher volume) and added basketball back in. I also took a week-long vacation in the middle. The goal was to stay healthy and ride the strength I’d built without trying to PR again before Wisconsin camp in August.
Wisconsin Dunk Camp 2024: didn’t re-test, hit Hide-and-Seek in the pre-show
Wisconsin camp the first week of August was the second camp of my year. I didn’t re-test vertical (no point, since Utah’s 41.5 was already the PR). But I dunked in the 9’ contest at about 70% effort because I had a low-grade fever, and then the pre-show on Thursday I landed a Hide-and-Seek. Youngest dunker to ever hit that dunk by about three years.
What actually drove the 4 inches
Looking back at the full year, the inputs that mattered most in roughly the order they mattered:
- JumpX programming starting October 2023. The single biggest delta. Periodized training with Tom Barnes and Austin Young. The structure was the unlock.
- Structured dunk sessions as forcing functions. Every 3-4 weeks I planned a big session with Hunter or the Minnesota Dunk Squad and trained toward it. Without those, the consistency would have collapsed.
- Eight-pound weight cut before camp. 8 pounds at 5’10” is real vertical. The cut alone was probably 1-1.5 inches of test-day vertical.
- Basketball season management. Cutting volume to Sundays-only kept me healthy through January and February when most dunkers I know lose their vertical to overuse.
- Low-rim trick work. The Eastbays, Hide-and-Seek, Underboth attempts on 9’ and 9’9” built the transfer mechanics that made the 10’ dunks possible at lower max-vert than they should have been.
What I’d change if I could rerun the year
- Skip the right-left experiment in July 2023. Three weeks of cleaner training would have meant more inches by October.
- Lift consistently during basketball season instead of treating it as optional. Even one Tuesday lift would have helped.
- Pre-camp meal cut should have started 8 weeks before camp, not 4. Could have been 165 instead of 160 going in.
Where to find me
I’m on Instagram and YouTube as Dylan Haugen. The full Dunk Camp 2024 training year is documented across the Dunk Talk podcast. DunkMan League starts this summer. Next episode is the Jason “JaySmoove” McCoy interview. Comment on YouTube with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.