If "kick higher" worked, it would have worked by now. You've heard it at every practice, you've tried it with everything you have, and the toe touch looks about the same as it did last month. That's not a you problem. It's an advice problem.
"Kick higher" assumes the missing ingredient is effort. For almost every athlete stuck at this plateau, effort is the one thing already maxed out. What's actually missing is one of two very specific things — and both of them are trainable.
Missing thing one: a chest that stays up
Leg height is judged against your torso. If your chest dips toward your legs at the peak, the jump reads low no matter what your legs do — and kicking harder often makes the dip worse, because the extra effort pulls your shoulders forward with it. Before you change anything about your kick, film one jump from the side and look at your chest at the very top. Shoulders roughly over hips, eyes forward: that's the target. If your chest is diving, that's your fastest win, and it costs zero extra kicking.
Missing thing two: hip-flexor strength
Here's the part almost nobody tells young athletes: the muscles that lift your legs in a toe touch — the hip flexors, along the front of your hips — are probably the least-trained muscles in your whole practice week. Stretching gets its own time. Jumps get reps. The specific strength that pulls a straight leg up toward hip height against gravity, fast, while your chest stays tall? That usually gets nothing.
So the legs rise as far as the untrained muscles can take them, the body senses the shortfall, and it improvises — chest drops, hips tuck, knees sneak into a bend. Every one of those improvisations is your body's way of saying "I don't have the strength for the honest version yet."
The honest version is built on the floor, not in the air. And it builds faster than you'd think, because these muscles respond quickly to direct work.
If you want proof you're improving, film a front-on jump once a week — CoachVision gives you a measured read on your leg lines and chest posture from a plain phone clip, and watching the legs number rise while the effort stays the same is exactly the point of this whole article.
The drill — Seated Straddle Lifts at the Wall
Sit in your straddle with your back flat against a wall, hands off the floor. Lift one leg a few inches off the ground, hold for two counts, lower slow. Repeat on the other side.
The wall keeps your chest tall — no folding, no leaning back on your hands, no cheating the angle. That means every inch of lift is pure hip-flexor strength, which is precisely the strength your toe touch has been waiting on.
Do 3 rounds of 8 lifts per leg. Expect the lifts to be humblingly small at first; a few inches with a flat back is worth more than a big lift with a slumped one. Add this to your week and keep your normal jump practice exactly as it is.
In a few weeks, the same kick you've always had starts landing higher — not because you tried harder, but because the muscles doing the lifting finally got their own practice time. Effort was never your gap. Now strength won't be either.