How high can you jump?
Are you ready to compare yourself to the rest of the amazing animal kingdom?
Can you guess which animal can jump the highest?
There’s lots of incredible jumpers in the animal kingdom, but do you think you could match them?
Find out the highest jumpers and learn how you can jump higher with training.
IMPORTANT- Before we start, elephants, sloths, hippos and rhinos can’t jump because their legs don’t have the spring action that ours do. They’ll have to sit this contest out and cheer us on from the stands! Sorry guys!
Even though they don't have legs, jumping pit vipers can actually get themselves pretty high off the ground!
They can reach around 1ft which is almost half their body length.
Prretty impressive for an animal that spends most of its time crawling around on its belly, but no match for our other competitors...
Despite some amazing gymanstic leaps, humans generally aren’t the best jumpers.
The average vertical jump (that’s jumping upwards from standing) for a person is around 16 inches. That’s only about the size of an extra large pizza!!
However, Olympic athletes have been known to jump up to 8x the average thanks to their training!
And if you’re wondering who has the record for jumping the highest, according to the Guinness World Records, it was completed by Evan Ungar of Canada. He managed an incredible standing jump of 5ft 4in (the same height as the queen!).
Do you think you could jump that high one day?
Watch Evan’s record breaking jump
Lions are also incredible jumpers who can leap 5x their body length to around 36ft – that’s almost far enough to jump over a bus!
Lions can jump so high because they’re very strong and have flexible back legs, this comes in handy when they’re hunting or climbing trees.
And finally, drumroll please for the furthest jumper… the humble flea!
A flea can jump 17 inches, which may seem small, but is a whopping 150x its height.
That would be the equivalent of a human jumping over the Eiffel tower – they’d have to be a superhero to manage that!!!
While you’ll probably never be able to jump as high as the Eiffel tower, with training and practice you can improve your jumping skills to lift you even higher into the air.
To see how high you can jump, you’ll need a wall and some sticky tape (you might want to ask your grown up for permission).
1) Stand next to the wall and reach as high as you can with your fingers while keeping your heels on the floor and stick the tape at the highest point you can reach.
2) Then take another piece of tape, and jump as high as you can, sticking the tape to the wall at the highest point.
3) Now you can measure between the two pieces of tape to see how high you jumped.
