The first time Sergio Siderman dunked a basketball, it was like winning the lottery and climbing Mt. Everest all rolled into one miraculous, testosterone-fueled experience.
"It was, like, seven weeks into the training and it was awesome. It was \o7awesome\f7," Siderman says, grinning as he speaks. "I was hugging my trainer, and he was freaking out."
But the celebrated dunk didn't happen in high school or even college. It happened when Siderman had just turned 30 years old, had a 6-month-old son and was working as an attorney. Until that magical moment, one thing he hadn't done yet was dunk a basketball.
The ability to hurl an orange ball down through a hoop is surprisingly important to many. With no TV basketball recap complete without the acrobatics of magnificent dunkers such as LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, dunking has become a longed-for, but elusive, goal of high school athletes and weekend warriors alike. Hard-core basketball devotees know that being able to rise up 10 feet (regulation hoop height) and dunk the ball allows membership into an exclusive club, one that comes with bragging rights and macho credibility.
That's where Gil Thomas comes in. The 43-year-old trainer is an enabler of dreams. The official term for what Thomas teaches is plyometrics, or using explosive movement to generate force quickly. The unofficial term for what he does is vertical jump training, specifically for basketball.
Thomas promises clients that they will dunk, sometimes within a matter of weeks. To do that, he puts them through a grueling regimen that includes various jumping exercises -- some off a platform, others knee-to-chest. In return, they pay him $50 to $150 an hour.
As a consultant with Jump USA, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based sports equipment company featuring many products just for improving vertical jumps, Thomas has a simple philosophy: Genetics has nothing to do with it. "Anybody can dunk a ball," Thomas says, "if you train correctly for it."
He should know. He had hoop dreams of his own as a teenager growing up in Louisville, Ky., but at 5-foot-8 figured he didn't have much of a chance at making a team. Though he excelled in track in high school, he never gave up his obsession with being able to dunk, the hunger for information leading him to read Russian training manuals and quiz neighborhood athletes.
Using the plyometric methods he learned, he was dunking in six weeks -- and became something of an expert on the subject.
