The official Guinness World Record for the ‘Highest Standing Jump’ is held by One Health Clubs Health Centre Manager Evan Ungar from Canada. He set that world record in May 2016 with a standing jump of 5.3-feet or 1.616-meters.
This is an almost unfathomable feat because humans aren’t designed to jump this high. You might think elite basketball players in the NBA are built to jump this high but basketball players don’t even have the highest jump among professional athletes, that honor goes to football players.
The explosive power of NFL athletes and constantly starting plays from a static position means that NFL players actually have the highest jump around. And that’s precisely why the standing high jump is one of the biggest metrics at the NFL Combine where NFL Draft prospects are evaluated.
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I haven’t personally dabbled in CrossFit (yet) so I can’t really say that I have any experience with the standing box jump. This video below was pretty fascinating because it dove into the details of how to train for something like this and how the 50-inches pushes the limits of human capabilities.
The NFL Combine’s record is 46-inches. Evan Ungar’s world record is 63.5 inches. Robbie Gonzalez from WIRED‘s YouTube wanted to find out why it’s nearly impossible for a person to jump 50 inches so he met up with the world record holder to find out why humans are virtually incapable of jumping over 50-inches from a standing position.
By the way, if you want to see that viral clip of Evan Unger breaking the world record for a standing vertical jump at 63.5-inches you can check out his Guinness World Record footage right here.