3 Ways to Maximize Your Fall Preseason for Basketball Success

So I'm from Pennsylvania, and in this state, we're only 58 days away from the start of the winter season, and it's honestly hard to believe that it's coming that quickly. So for you as a player, it's important that you really start to maximize the things you're doing right now so that when we get to the season, you're prepared, you're ready to hit the ground running, you're confident, you're in shape. For some players, it's like, you know, this is really the last month that they have before the season starts. When that time finally rolls around, people are going to see how you spent your offseason. They're going to see the progress that you made or that you did. They're going to see the improvement that you made or that you didn't make. And so, you know, we want to make sure that we put ourselves in the best position possible to show the improvement that we've made. So I want to go through three things that you can do to maximize your preseason. Maximize the next month, two months that you have, and put yourself in a better position than 95% of players coming into the season. Right. Being able to start off strong, be able to start off confident, is such an important aspect of having a great season. I've seen a lot of players who will just start off the season slow, and that can derail the entire season for them. So we want to make sure that we don't do that. The preseason, to me, is like maybe the most critical time of year to lock in and really get yourself prepared. So I'll go through three things you can do to make sure that you are prepared when that day one rolls around and the lights come on. So number one is you want to play as much five on five as you can. Obviously, if you watch my videos, you know I'm a huge proponent of playing often 1 on 1, 2 on 2, 3 on 3, 5 on 5. Whatever the play may be, you just want to see a live defender as much as possible, and that still applies now, like, if you play a lot on one on one, keep doing that. You play a lot of two on two. Keep on doing that. I know for a lot of my team workouts right now, we're playing a lot of one on one, two on two. That's great. Keep doing that stuff. But also, you want to play as much five on five as you can. Reason being is that, number one, it's going to help you to get in basketball shape, so you're going to be prepared to run up and down the floor, play defense, go on offense, be able to still make decisions when you're tired. Like, you're going to build that ability by playing a lot of five on five, a lot of full court, so that's super important. But then also just developing that feel for the game and really starting to see and apply the skills that you've been working on and figuring out, okay, where can I contribute this year? You know, what can I do? What's a strength for me? What do I feel confident doing right now? And you're going to get to the season, obviously, it's all about five on five, right? So you want to make sure that you're prepared and you're confident when you're playing five on five. And that's a really important part of the preseason. You can be putting in all the work by yourself, you know, with the one on. Oh, getting up all these shots and. And all that sort of stuff, which is awesome. You should be doing that. But ultimately, we want to play the actual game, right? We play five on five. Nothing compares to doing that. So as often as you can, you want to be doing that. I would say if you can play five on five at least two times a week, that's putting yourself in a pretty good spot going into the season. Right. But if you can do it more than that, then. Then do that. Okay, so that's the first thing is you want to make sure that you're playing as much time as possible, because that, that game experience is going to put you ahead of a lot of players coming into the season. Number two is you want to almost adjust the way that you think about your workouts now. Okay, so shifting more of a workout view, obviously, you know, something that I'm a huge proponent of is making sure that your workouts are challenging. And I'm not saying challenging in terms of like, oh, you know, you're throwing up in the middle because you're running so much. Like, that's not what I mean by challenging. What I mean is that it's actual. It's actually challenging to your skills and to your ability to be successful. Right? So if you're going into your workouts and you're making every single shot and it's super easy and there's no struggle for you. A lot of players think that's a good thing. I actually will tell you that that's a bad thing because it means that there's no. Nothing is forcing you to get better. There's no reason to Improve if you're already succeeding at everything that you do. So we want to make sure that our workouts are challenging. We call being in the Goldilocks zone, where it's not too difficult but not too easy. It's just right. So we're failing a good amount of the time, and we're succeeding a good amount of time. It's a nice balance there. You want to be succeeding, like, 30 to 70% of the time in your workouts, right? So, meaning if you're taking. If you're doing a ball handling drill, that means that, you know, for every 10 reps you do three or four times, you might lose the ball. For every, you know, if you're doing a shooting drill or a finishing drill, if you find a way to make a challenging, you should be making 60, 70% of your shots on average, like, at the most. Okay. Because again, you want it to be misses. You want your brain to have to say, oh, wow, I missed that. How do I do better in the next one? How do I improve? How do I change? How do I adapt so I can be better? That's what improvement is. But we also want to consider the fact that we're. We're working. We are training for two things. We're training for learning, which is what? That. The whole thing I just explained to you is that that's learning, right? When we're in that Goldilocks zone and we're failing and our brain is having to figure out, okay, how do I improve? How do I become better at this? Right? We're training for learning, right? And that's the whole offseason. But we're also starting to train for performance. What that means is think about when you're in the gym for a game. There's the crowd and people cheering, and you got, you know, coaches on both benches and there's reps and there's a clock and, you know, there's a score being kept. And it matters for your record in those situations. We're not trying to be successful 60% of the time. We want to be successful 100% of the time, right? For a game. We want to make 100% of our shots. We want to never turn the ball over. We want to never, you know, make the wrong decision. We want to never look bad ever. That's. That's what we want in a game. That's performance moves, okay? We want to train to be able to feel confident in our ability to perform as well. So that means that the way that you approach your workouts in the presence in the preseason should be cognizant of that as well. Generally, how I would say that you can do this is that the majority of your workout, maybe the first 80% of it, is learning focus, you know, learning base. So you're again, putting yourself in that Goldilocks zone. If a drill is really easy for you and you're not ever missing or you're not ever losing the basketball, then you got to challenge yourself and say, okay, how can I make this a little bit harder? Do I need to go faster? Do I need to add something else to this to make it more difficult? Until you find yourself in that zone where you're only succeeding 60, 70% of the time in that drill. But then on that, that final 20% of your workouts, think about doing the things that are going to make you feel the most confident in your abilities. So if there's a certain shooting drill that you like that you know you're going to make a lot of shots, or a certain shot that you want to shoot that you know you're going to make a lot of, you can see the ball go in the basket over and over and over again. Do that. And there's a certain ball handling drill that you know you're not going to mess up at or you know, you're really good at. Do that, right? See yourself be successful, leave the gym feeling really confident in your ability to perform. Okay? So now we're only training to improve our skills, but we're also mentally preparing ourselves to play with confidence and feel good about our ability to perform. Okay? That's what we want our preseason workouts to do is continue to help us get better, but also really maximize our confidence going into the season. Right there. The third thing that's super important for you to do in the preseason leading into the year is watch and study the game. Okay? The best players have the best feel for the game. The best players have the best understanding of the game, the best basketball iq, and that leads to them having the most confidence in themselves on the court. A lot of players put in the physical work, but they underperform in games because they lack the basketball iq to actually apply the things that they work on to actually be successful in the situation that they find themselves in. And so if you want your mind to work for you instead of working against you, which is a problem for a lot of players, then you want to make sure that you're studying the game as much as possible as possible. Okay? So watching, you know, clips of, you know, your favorite players in different situations. If you're a point guard, think about players who play similar to you. If you know, if you, if, if you know you kind of play similar to Trey Young, then go watch some Trey young film on YouTube, right? It's very easy to find if you're more of a win. Well, maybe you go and watch some Paul George clips or you watch some Mikhail Bridges clips. If you're more of a big, maybe you watch, you know, Joel Embiid or you know, Nicole Jokic or, you know, whatever the case may be, you want to find players that you can kind of model yourself after or that you play similar to and see how they react in some situations that you may find yourself in. That's a really, really easy way of doing that right there. But watching, getting those mental reps is so important because again, that's going to help you to mentally be as sharp as you can possibly be coming into the season. Really, all three of these things go back to just how do you view yourself, how do you view the game and where are you at mentally as the season rolls around? Right there. And watching and studying the game is such a massive part of making sure that you're prepared. Again, not just from a physical perspective, but also from a mental perspective as well. So if you want a resource that's going to help you to learn the game, study the game like we just talked about, that's going to help you to instantly add points per game to your average, create more for your teammates, ultimately have way more success, become a better decision maker, a better finisher around the rim, and then really just unlock the skills inside of you. I want you to click the top link down below and check out my free basketball IQ masterclass, which is an hour long. It goes in depth to a ton of stuff that's going to help you develop your basketball IQ so that again, you unlock the skills that are inside of you and you're able to maximize your success this year on the court, right? So again, talking about starting the year off strong. Well, mentally, when you're really locked in and you know exactly what you want to do, you're going to have a step up over everybody else. And that's really what's going to go into how helping you feel way More prepared than 95% of other players coming into the season. So again, top link down below. Check it out. Completely free. I appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.