When your nickname is “Air,” your shoe brand’s logo features your silhouette in mid-flight (officially called the “Jumpman“) and you’ve won a couple of NBA Slam Dunk contests, people are naturally going to be curious about how high you can jump when compared to us normal human beings’ pathetic verticals.

Moreover, they’ll be curious how you developed your vertical leap, a.k.a. your ability to jump as high you do. Really, can you blame us for for wanting to be just like Mike?

So what was Michael Jordan’s vertical leap?

During the annural NBA Draft combine, one of the many battery of tests that incoming rookies and prospective draftees goes through is called the vertical leap test.

This test is where players both perform a running and standing test that determines how high they can explode off the ground. Back in 1984, vertical leap wasn’t officially tracked when Jordan came out of college. If vertical jump was tested then it wasn’t published out, unfortunately.

However, there are several un-cited sources that claim that Jordan’s recorded vertical leap was between 46 inches and 48 inches when it was recorded during the 1984 Olympic trials.

If true, this number has been incorrectly attributed and assumed to have been tested when he was wowing college students in Chapel Hill during his Junior season at the University of North Carolina.

Fully, Jordan supposedly had a 36 inch standing vertical jump, and a 46 inch maximum vertical leap (meaning no basketball in his hand). When MJ had a running start. Jordan’s vertical reached nearly 42 inches when performing a one-handed dunk, and slightly under 41 inches for two handed slam dunks.

This information likely came from a study that purportedly originated at UNC in 1983. The information may have originated from this Biomechanics forum thread that had the study abstract cut and pasted into it.

Perhaps one of the best measures comes from this reddit thread in which user inefekt attempts a scientific approach by measuring Jordan’s vertical lap through analyses of Youtube videos, head height, and player comparisons. Here’s what they concluded

“…in a similar environment ie in the two videos linked above, there is a maximum difference in head height of 1.25″ between the two. The difference in height between the two players is 3cm or 1.2”.

That almost matches the difference in head height in these two dunks (MJ -0.5″ vs GG +0.75″ = 1.25″) so we can estimate that Michael Jordan and Gerald Green had a similar vertical jump height for one handed dunks performed in a dunk contest environment. Therefore we can also estimate that Jordan would have had a similar max vertical jump of 46″ which corroborates the study once again that measured it at 45.76″

Assuming that the study actually happened, we can couple that data along with that detailed video analysis and use those two separate data points to conclude that Michael Jordan had at least a 45.76 inch vertical leap. 

How did Jordan learn to jump so high?

Now that we (sort of) know what Jordan’s vertical leap was, the next question is likely how did he train himself to jump so high?

We weren’t able to find much about Jordan specifically training to jump higher. It seems like Mike’s jumping ability was one part hard work and one part genetics. Here’s an excerpt from an 1983 The Sporting News article quoting  Jordan’s father, James Jordan:

“His leaping ability didn’t just happen. He worked at it.” said James Jordan. “When he was 13, I built a backyard court and he, his brother Larry and some other kids played almost every day. Michael was a fierce competitor. (He was called Rabbit because he always hustled.) Still, he knew that to be good at winning, you had to be good at losing, though he didn’t like losing.”

The article didn’t delve deeper into what “worked at it” meant, but from the sounds of it, Jordan likely practiced jumping by simply playing basketball. Mike “rabbit” Jordan got his jumping ability from hooping everyday and hustling around their backyard basketball court.

Michael’s older brother Larry was also very gifted in the jumping department. Watch the 5’8 Larry Jordan pulling off some slam dunk contest-type dunks in the following video.

Do we need to say anything else? Athleticism and excelling at sports seemed to run in the family. Even if Larry wasn’t blessed with basketball height, he knows how hard his little brother worked to become successful (and that leaping ability) as he told ESPN back in 2009:

“We played one year of varsity basketball together when I was a senior and Michael was a junior, and that’s when his play just went to another level,” Larry said. “Even though there were five guys on the floor, he pretty much played all five positions. His level of play was just so much higher than the rest of us. People ask me all the time if it bothered me, but I can honestly say no, because I had the opportunity to see him grow. I knew how hard he worked.”

Or maybe his ability came from prayer?

When Jordan was 15 years old and 5’10, he told his mother Deloris that he wished he was taller. “‘Mom, I really want to be tall'” recalled Deloris. To which the matriarch would respond. “Go put salt in your shoes and pray.”