Here's How You Should Be Training In-Season (Make This Change!)

Don't backtrack on the progress that you made in the offseason. Outside of your practices, right? Team practices, you're not going to get a ton of individual skill work, right? You're not going to be able to get a ton of shots up. You're not going to be able to really focus on making sure that you stay sharp. So finding opportunities outside of those practices to still get your. Your reps in. So whether that means you're able to go before practice, after practice maybe means you define a time to go to the gym. You know, outside of your practice times, make sure that you're not getting dull. Because what happens to a lot of players, and this relates to a couple different. A couple different areas, but they'll start the season off at their peak, right? They've been working the whole offseason, and they're at their peak come November, December, whenever the season starts for them. And then they stop trying to keep themselves sharp. They stop putting in, you know, that extra work. They stop getting those shots up. They stop working on the things that they were working on. And as the season goes on, they continue to get duller and duller. And then by the time, you know, they get to the, the end of the season, they get to the playoffs, whenever, when they need to be at their best, they're actually worse than they were when the season started because they haven't been keeping themselves sharp, okay? So making sure that you find time, you make time to be able to get your work in and keep yourself sharp. I think the other kind of relating to what I was saying earlier about performance versus learning, right? When we're in the season, I say this to my players all the time during workouts, especially when we're in like September, October. It's like, I really don't care if you, like, kind of feel bad about yourself when you leave because you didn't. You don't feel like you shot well in this workout. Like, that's kind of my goal. Sometimes it's like I'm trying to make you miss shots. I'm trying to see where you're at, how can we expand what you're able to do. That's going to require, you know, you missing sometimes. And that's going to mean some days you're going to leave and not feel super confident in yourself come winter when it's time to perform. I'm just trying to make sure that confidence is at its highest as much as possible, right? So when you think about getting your work in, you just need to think about putting yourself in a position to where you feel confident in what you need to do. So if you feel like, hey, I got to be able to hit this corner three well, I'm just going to shoot till I feel confident in my corner threes today, that's going to be the extra work I put in. I'm not necessarily looking to do a set number right? And we talk about extra work. This can mean, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes of work. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. Again, we're just thinking about what can I do, how can I show up to make sure that I keep my skills sharp. But most importantly, I remain as confident as I can be in the things I need to be able to do. And I think that's really, really important is now we're going from okay. I'm not necessarily worried about getting better at a specific thing. I'm really just worried about being as confident as I can be in what I'm able to do. Because again, you know, we're in the winter season, we're practicing playing like you kind of are what you are in terms of how good you are. Not to say you can't get better during the season, but you know, especially we talk about the minutes that you play. So this is also another caveat to this. How much you're still training in season depends a little bit on your role with your team. If you're the star player and you know, let's say you there's a 32 minute high school game, let's say it's, you know, four eight minute quarters. If you're playing 30 minutes a game and you know, you're barely getting breaks and you're practicing every day, you're probably not going to be able to go as hard in training outside of that because again, we're trying to perform in. If you're constantly playing, putting all those minutes in your body and then you're going and training super hard, you're never going to recover. You're not going to have time to recover. So you're going to get worse and worse as the season goes on. You're going to. Injuries are going to start to pile up for you. You're just never going to be at your best because you don't have time to recover. So if you're playing a ton of minutes, you're probably going to have to scale back what you're doing outside of practices and games. Right. Likewise, if you're the opposite, if you don't play at all, then you can probably go a little harder in those workouts outside of, you know, know, your. Your team practices and games and stuff like that. And it's the same thing with the weight room, too. A lot of players get to the season and get to November, and they stop lifting weights. They've been doing it the whole offseason. They stop. And the problem with that is that again, now you're. You're getting duller and duller as the season goes on. And now we all of a sudden get ourselves to, you know, February, March, when you've got to be at your best and you're weaker than you were in November, right? So now this is also going to be a change because, again, we're not. You. You might have been lifting four days a week in the off season, going super hard. Now we can't afford to do that because, again, we got to recover every single day. We've got to be prepared to play the next game. We've got to be able to, you know, perform at practice that we're ready to go for those games. So when it comes to lifting, this can be scaled back a ton, too. We're really just thinking about maintenance here. So how can I maintain what I have, right? How can I. How can I make sure that I feel good? So this can be as little as one time a week. Maybe you get in and you lift one time a week and you just hit, you know, each part of your body for, for, you know, one exercise. Maybe you go, you know, like back squats, you go bench press, you go pull ups, and, you know, maybe you go deadlift or something like that where you're just hitting, you know, you're. You're hitting those major movements. But maybe it's, you know, probably a lot lighter than it would be. Maybe it's two to three sets of, you know, six, eight, 10 reps, but those reps are lighter than they probably could be. You're not trying to break records. You're just making sure that you keep on practicing those movements, right? Because it's. All those lifts are, is just movement. So you're keeping yourself in that groove of being able to do that. And you're, you know, you're not getting weaker as, as the season goes on. You're able to keep what you have, right? But also understanding the fact that you don't want to push yourself so hard in the weight room that you're super sore the next day, and you can only show up to your game at 70% because you're so sore, we don't want. We definitely don't want that at all. So if we keep that lifting to once, twice a week, where we're going for a max of 20, 30 minutes in the weight room and, you know, then we're kind of in and out, keeping it light, but enough that we can maintain what we have, then that's perfect. That's going to allow us to, throughout the season, stay sharp. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do when it comes to our training and season is just stay sharp, stay confident. And the goal is to be at your best every game. You want to be as close to 100% as you can be. So you can't let that training, it's a fine balance. You don't want to do nothing but. But you also don't want to do so much that you're tired or you're sore. You have to give yourself time to recover. So you got to find that happy medium where you're recovered by the time those games come, but you're still able to keep yourself sharp and ready to go for the next thing.