Building an Honest Dunk Baseline Near 50

In the restart post I published in March, I promised that the next Road to Dunk entry would be a baseline: honest starting measurements, and an honest look at the distance between where I am and where a dunk actually lives. This is that entry — the protocol I'm committing to, the exact numbers I'm going to record, and the empty slots where those numbers belong.

You will see a lot of brackets below. Everywhere a real measurement belongs, there is a marker like [DATA NEEDED: standing reach] instead of a figure. That is not a formatting mistake. I haven't measured yet, and I'd rather publish an empty slot than a flattering guess.

Why the first step is measuring, not training

You cannot see progress you never measured. That sounds obvious written down, and it is exactly the thing I skipped the first time around. I announced the goal in the original launch post back in September 2025, started training, stopped a few days later, and had nothing to show for it — not even a starting point. If I had measured on day one, the stall would at least have left a data point behind.

A baseline also protects me from myself. Without one, every session turns into a mood report. After a good night at the gym I'd be convinced I was closing in; after a bad one I'd be convinced the whole idea was ridiculous. Neither feeling is information. Honesty beats vibes, and the only way to be honest about a body is to write down what it did.

Finally, a baseline puts the goal on a real scale. A regulation rim sits at 10 feet — 305 cm — and dunking means getting a hand and a ball meaningfully above that height, not brushing the net. That side of the equation is public and fixed. My distance from it is the unknown, and describing that distance accurately is the whole job of this post.

Standing reach: the number everything else is measured against

Standing reach is how high you can touch flat-footed: feet on the floor, one arm straight overhead, shoulder pushed up, measured to the fingertips. It's set mostly by height and arm length, so it barely changes with training — which is what makes it useful. It's the fixed floor underneath every other number.

The method is plain: stand flush against a flat wall, chalk on the fingertips, reach and mark, then measure the mark with a tape. I'll do it in the same shoes I train in and say so every time, because shoes are worth a real difference and swapping them mid-project would quietly corrupt the series.

• Standing reach: [DATA NEEDED: standing reach, in cm and inches, measured in training shoes]

Touch height: how high I actually get

Touch height is the highest point I can reach at the top of a real jump — same chalk, same wall or backboard, measured the same way. I'll take it after a proper warm-up, over a set of attempts, and record two numbers rather than one: the best touch and the typical touch across the set.

The gap between those two is its own kind of information, saying something about consistency and fatigue that a single heroic number would hide.

• Touch height, best of set: [DATA NEEDED: highest touch]
• Touch height, typical: [DATA NEEDED: typical touch across attempts]

Estimated vertical: touch height minus standing reach

Subtract standing reach from touch height and you get an estimated vertical jump. I call it estimated on purpose. This isn't a lab jump mat; it's chalk, a wall, and a tape measure, and any error in either measurement lands squarely in this number.

• Estimated vertical: [DATA NEEDED: touch height minus standing reach]

Vertical jump is the number people like to quote, but here it's the supporting cast. What decides whether a dunk is possible is absolute touch height. A big vertical attached to short arms still comes up short; a modest vertical on long arms can be enough. I'll track the vertical because it's the part training can move, and judge the project by the touch.

Approach jump and standing jump, counted separately

There are two jumps worth measuring and they are not the same skill. A standing jump starts from a stop, usually off two feet, and is close to raw leg power. An approach jump converts horizontal speed into height, and for most people it goes higher — but it's more technical, and taking off from one foot versus two changes the result.

So both get their own slot, and I'll note which takeoff I used. If a dunk ever happens it will happen off whichever one is genuinely higher — not whichever one I assumed was higher.

• Standing jump touch: [DATA NEEDED: standing jump touch]
• Approach jump touch: [DATA NEEDED: approach jump touch, plus takeoff foot pattern used]

Body weight: still deciding how much to publish

Weight belongs in a jumping baseline for an unglamorous reason: it's the mass being moved, and ignoring it makes the other numbers harder to read over time. Publishing it is a separate question, and I'm still deciding how much of it I want on the internet.

• Body weight: [DATA NEEDED: body weight, if disclosed]

If I decide not to publish the figure, I'll publish the direction and size of the change instead, and say plainly that's what I'm doing. What I won't do is quietly drop the row and let the other numbers float free of context.

What a tape measure won't catch

Some of the baseline can't be a number, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. So alongside the measurements I'll write a short, dated set of observations: how the legs feel under load, how the ankles and hips move, how the landings look, what the body says the next morning, and how many sessions actually happened.

• Strength, mobility, landing quality, next-day soreness, session count: [DATA NEEDED: baseline observations]

That last item is the one I trust most, for reasons the restart post covers at length. Consistency is the input. Everything else on this page is an output.

How the measurements get repeated

A baseline only matters if the follow-ups are comparable, which means holding still everything that isn't the thing I'm trying to change. The rules I'm setting for myself:

• Same shoes. The pair I actually train in, noted in every report.
• Same wall, same rim. One location for reach and touch, so the surface never becomes a variable.
• Same warm-up. A fixed routine before every session — cold numbers and warm numbers aren't the same numbers.
• Same clock. Roughly the same time of day; a body at 7 a.m. and a body at 9 p.m. behave differently.
• Roughly monthly. Often enough to catch a trend, rare enough that it doesn't become a chore.

Monthly is the plan, not a promise. The lesson of the last stall was that a schedule which can't bend just breaks, so if a month gets away from me I'll measure late and print the date rather than quietly restart the series.

The point is my own baseline, not somebody else's highlight

There is no version of this where I compare well against a twenty-five-year-old, and building the project around that comparison would be a fast route back to silence. A hobbyist half my age is not my opponent, and neither is anyone else's clip.

The only fair opponent in this project is the version of me that showed up last month.

Measuring against my own baseline also makes small results legible. A centimeter is invisible next to a dunk and obvious next to last month's mark — and a run of centimeters is what an almost-fifty-year-old improvement curve actually looks like.

The next milestone, stated honestly

Here is what I am not doing: naming a date for a dunk. A target set before you know your starting point is a wish with a calendar attached.

The next realistic milestone is smaller and much less exciting: touching higher on the backboard, consistently. Not once on a good night with a perfect run-up, but reliably, across a full set of attempts, at a mark I can point to. Rim talk comes after that, if it comes at all.

What the progress reports will contain

Every future Road to Dunk report will carry the table above, filled in: standing reach, best and typical touch, estimated vertical, standing and approach jumps, weight or the change in it, and the qualitative notes — measured the same way, in the same shoes, at the same wall.

If the numbers go up, they go up. If they sit flat for months, that gets published too, flat and unspun. If they go backwards, you'll read about that as well. I can't promise the ball ever goes through the rim; nobody honest could. What I can promise is that the numbers here will be real ones, and that you'll see them before I know whether they flatter me.