Here's Why You Aren't Getting Better At Basketball (The TRUTH)

If you're somebody that works hard, that puts in the time, maybe you even outwork everybody else around you, but you still feel like you aren't seeing the results or the effort that you're putting in, this video might change your life. This is a struggle that so many players go through. I've gone through it personally, and I see it countless times. There's a few reasons why this might be happening. And once you fix these things, not only are you going to start seeing those results, but you're going to start improving at a rate that's faster than you ever have before, and it's going to make your workout so much better and more effective. And the last point is probably something that you've never thought about before, and no one's probably ever mentioned it to you before. But if you're making this mistake, it could be holding you back big time. So make sure you stay tuned until the end for that. Let's get into it. So the first mistake that players make that prevents them from getting better is that they do drills without a definable purpose, or they just do drills. To do drills. Here's what you need to understand. You don't need to practice more. You need to improve more. That's the mindset you need to make here. It's not about how much you practice. It's not about how often you practice. It's about how much you get better. We need to start to worry about what our drills are actually accomplishing as opposed to just doing the drill for the sake of a drill. At the end of the day, drills really don't matter, right? It's about, are we accomplishing a goal and can we use this drill to get ourselves closer to that goal? So what I mean by that is that players will see a drill on Instagram or, you know, they'll learn a drill at a camp, or they'll see somebody else doing something and. And they'll decide that they're going to do it too, but they're not actually going to ask themselves, why. Why am I doing this drill? Is this drill actually going to be something that helps me improve at what I need to improve at? How does this translate to the game? How does this translate to me being better in the game? A lot of players don't ask those questions to themselves. And so the word that they put in doesn't translate to seeing actual results in games. And a great way to solve this problem is to reverse engineer the drills that you're doing and the workouts are doing and you can use this method to determine whether or not the drills that you're doing in your workouts are actually helpful for you. So the first thing you want to do is ask yourself what you need to be able to do in a game. So maybe you want to get better at finishing around the rim, right? That's your goal. And then you need to ask yourself, why do I struggle with this? Like, what's the reason that I don't finish as well or on the rim as I want to? And, you know, maybe for you, it's your touch isn't very good, and maybe you can't make it when you're driving really fast to the basket, or maybe you struggle to finish through contact. Maybe those are your reasons why you don't do a great job finishing around the rim. And then you need to ask yourself if the drills that you're doing are solving those problems, are they helping you to improve on those issues? For example, the mike and drill probably is not going to help you get better at your touch or finishing while moving fast. Unless you're a beginner and the micro drill is a real challenge for you, then it might be something that's helpful. But if you're not that and it's easy, then it's not helping you get better at your touch or finishing with speed in any sort of meaningful way. So if it's not challenging you, it's not helping you fix any of your problems, right? Because to fix a problem, it's going to take work, and if it feels easy, then it's probably not fixing anything. So we can get rid of that drill in this situation, because it's not helping us achieve our goal, which is get better at our touch or finishing with speed around the rim or finishing through contact. Now, of course, we could manipulate it a little bit and make it more challenging where maybe you can only use your. Your weak hand, or maybe you have to start from farther away, or maybe you have to touch the net before you finish on the opposite side. Every time, there are ways to make it more challenging, but, you know, maybe instead of that drill, we do a drill like this, which really challenges your touch, or we do a drill like this, which really challenges finishing with speed. And now we have things that are directly targeting those problems that we have, those reasons that we have for not being able to finish well. And now we know that our drills have a purpose, and because of that, we're going to get better. Let's take ball handling, for example. Same idea. Let's say you struggle with ball handling because you can't control the ball when you're moving fast, you struggle to handle defensive pressure, and you aren't able to change directions very effectively. Does doing stationary pounds a million times in a workout help you to solve any of these problems? Again, unless you're a beginner and doing, you know, you're new to dribbling at all, doing a bunch of pound dribbles probably isn't helping you improve your ball control all that much. It's probably not going to help you control the ball when you're moving fast because you're not moving. And it's probably not going to help you get better at handling defensive pressure, right? So that's a drill that we can look on. We can look at and say, okay, maybe there's something better than that that we can do that's going to help us. So maybe we do a drill like this, which helps us to work on being able to keep the ball up with us as we move fast. I mean, when they say getting the ball on a string like this is how we develop it here is by working on moving fast and keeping the ball up with us, maybe we do a drill like this in order to work on being able to stop and change directions effectively. And again, these are things that are going to directly target those goals that we've set for ourselves, those problems that we have for why we aren't where we want to be when it comes to a certain skill. How about shooting? Maybe you struggle to make shots in games, but in games, you're always shooting different shots, right? Very rarely are you going to shoot the same shot two times in a row in a game. You might shoot from the wing, and then you might shoot a pull up on the baseline. Then you might shoot the elbow, you might shoot at the other wing. That's probably. That's how the majority of games goes, right? You're shooting a different shot after, you know, one after the other for the most part, because games are very random like that. But in your workout, all you do is work on five shots, five spots from. From three where you're just shooting the same exact shot over and over and over and over and over again. Then you get to a game, you wonder why you don't shoot the ball well, and it's because you haven't prepared yourself to shoot well in the context of a game. Or you haven't prepared yourself to shoot the ball well when the game demands are actually there, which is, hey, you've got to be able to make that shot and then a completely different shot right after that. So something as simple as mixing it up and moving differently into each shot that you take is a great way to make that drill help us or to. To create a drill that helps us meet those demands that a game is going to ask of us. And it's going to make it much more effective, and it's going to make it translate so much better. So that's how you truly design workouts and drills that are effective, that are going to get you better. And I have a free program in the top link of my description below. You guys can click on that and it's going to give you more drills to do that are going to target these sorts of things that are going to help you see actual improvement because they're purposeful and you can use them with a purpose. And I have a ton of videos here on YouTube that go through drills, workouts you can do. And if you really want to take that next step, that step further, I'll link my ball handling, shooting, and overall scoring program in the description below as well. But all that stuff is purposeful, and that's why it works, right? So a lot of times when players struggle to see improvement, it's because the drills they're doing, the workouts they're doing, there isn't a real purpose behind it. There's no thought behind it. They're just kind of doing it to do it. And when you're kind of aimlessly floating, that's a lot of times how you can hold yourself back from really seeing results. So you've got to make sure that you ask yourself these questions if you really want to start improving. The second reason that a lot of players don't see improvement, because they don't understand the Goldilocks principle. This is something that I've talked about a couple times. But you need to understand this. In order for improvement to happen, mistakes need to be present. Meaning if you go through workouts and you don't mess up ever, you're not getting better. And I know that's a cliche thing to say because, oh, you know, push yourself, push yourself scientifically. You. You cannot get better if there is no mistakes being made. You need the mistake reps, you need the reps where you drill the ball off your foot. Will you lose the ball? Will you miss the shot? You need those reps because that's what forces your brain to make that adaptation to make you better at something. And when I refer to, you know, like, when I talk about workouts here Right. We don't want easy workouts. That's where again, we players struggle to see improvement because their workouts are really easy. And it's the same thing over and over again. There's no challenge to it. When I refer to easy, I don't mean or when I say a workout is difficult, I don't mean a workout in which you're doing a thousand sprints and just beating yourself into the ground physically. I more so mean a workout that's challenging or a skill perspective or a mental perspective. That's what we have to be. We have to be right on the edge of your abilities, of on the edge of your comfort zone if we want to see that improvement. And this is referred to as the Goldilocks principle, the challenge needs to be not too difficult, not too much, but it also needs to be not too easy. And if we're right in the middle of that right there, that's where we're going to see the maximum amount of improvement in what we're doing. So a lot of players fall into the trap of their workouts being too easy and that's why they struggle to really see those results and that's why they don't really improve. You need to be in a constant state during your workouts in which you're only succeeding like 40 to 80% of the time so that there's enough of those mess up reps for your brain to have to adapt and be better. Right? You improve because you have to, not because you want to. You can want to get better all that you want from a physical perspective, from a physical skill acquisition perspective. The only way that you are going to improve is, is if your brain is forced to. And that's only going to happen when there's challenge. I've talked about. Getting better at basketball is very similar to getting stronger at any sort of lift, right? If you go into the weight room and you lift £100 every, you know, every time, you never increase that weight. Eventually you stop getting stronger because your body adapts, you can handle that weight and now there's no reason to build more muscle, right? Building muscle takes energy from your body and your body's not going to expend that energy if it doesn't have to. It's the same thing when it comes to improving basketball. Improving at a skill requires energy, right? And it requires your, your body to, to allocate energy to that. And it's only going to happen if it's forced to do that. So that's why you need to Be in a state where you're not succeeding every single time so that your body is saying, oh wow, we're messing up a little bit here, so we got to get a little bit better so we aren't messing up as much so we can achieve our goal. And you only are going to do that by making sure that you are putting yourself in a position where mistakes are being made. So again, the second thing that players do that holds them back from getting better is that their workouts aren't challenging enough. Right? Find yourself in that, in that place where you're succeeding 40 to 80% of the time during your drills, during your workouts, and that's where you're going to see max improvement. And then the third thing that holds players back from seeing results. And this is something that I think almost no one talks about, but shout out to my guy, Jordan from film don't lie basketball. I just saw him talk about this. This really got me thinking about it. But it's not believing in yourself or adapting your mind to your abilities. So if you've gotten better, do you really believe truly in the work that you've put in? Maybe this offseason you've put in a ton of work, you've gotten better at your shooting, your ball handling, your finishing, your basketball iq, your decision making, your. You've gotten more athletic, whatever the case may be. Do you truly, deep down believe in the work that you've put in? Do you believe in the new player that you've become? Or are you still operating as if you are the old you before you improved? Just because you make a physical improvement doesn't mean that you're going to see that improvement immediately without that mental shift to, hey, I'm a new player, this is what I'm now capable of doing and I need to approach things from this perspective. Now. If your mindset doesn't also change that you're going to be the same player you've always been regardless of how much better you get physically. So players hold themselves, hold themselves back and keep themselves in a box because they don't update their mental to match their new physical abilities. And it's a massively under recognized reason as to why players don't get better. Even though they seemingly put in the work, they do all the right things. And if you walk in and you see in practice, you know they're better, but they're not playing better when it comes to games. And a lot of times it's because they have that mental block and they can't seem to get themselves to a point where they actually can do what they've practiced and what they've. What they've worked themselves, you know, to get to the point of being able to do. And so you need to make this mindset shift and you need to build new habits. And much like I just talked about in the previous point, where you need to, you know, be in that Goldilocks principle where, okay, 48% of the time is where I'm succeeding, that's uncomfortable. It's a lot easier to just do a workout where you. Where you succeed every single time. That's way easier. And it's not uncomfortable at all. But you need that little bit of discomfort. So it's the same thing right here. You have to make yourself slightly uncomfortable with what you force yourself to do, especially early on. So you need to walk into every practice, every game, every pickup run, every workout, whatever, with purpose. Here is what I know I'm capable of doing, and I'm going to do this. I know that I've gotten better at shooting or creating my own shot, so I'm going to force myself into situations where I'm going to have to do this, right? Because off the bat, I haven't done this before in games, so I'm not really going to feel super confident doing it. But then you're going to do it a few times. Recognize, oh, yeah, I do have the ability to do this. And then it's going to become something that's way more natural. But you've got to get yourself to that point first. If you've gotten better as a ball handler, you've got to put yourself in positions to handle the ball. And then as you do that and you prove to yourself, like, yeah, I'm capable of doing this, it's going to become much more natural for you. But what that requires is that you force yourself to take risk. Risk of failing, of not succeeding, of looking bad. And it's going to force you to potentially fail early on until you get to that point of building that confidence. Right? The rich get richer when it comes to confidence. So if you don't have any confidence, you're only going to get that by obtaining confidence, right? And I know that sounds like, like, okay, obviously, but what I mean by that is that somebody who has confidence, they have an abundance of it because they're confident, so they play with confidence, so they see positive results, so they gain more confidence, so they play better, so they gain more confidence, and it's. It continues to go up. If you have no confidence. You go out, you play poorly, you. You lose even more confidence, you play poorly again, lose even more. So it's a downward spiral. So if you don't have it, it's an awful place to be in. You are only going to gain that confidence by going out and seeing yourself succeed at something over and over and over again to the point where you feel very. You have a high level of belief in your ability to be successful in any given situation. When you do that, that is how you become somebody who is confident, a player who is confident. But again, you only are going to get to that point by forcing yourself into some uncomfortable situations until you see that success. So that, to me is the other area that a lot of players struggle in, is just updating their mindset to match the player that they've become. Right? Especially early off, you know, off the bat, your teammates and your coaches who might have known you as one thing, they might not know what you're capable of doing now. So they may still keep you in that box too. You've got to get yourself out of that box and you are going to do that by making things uncomfortable for a minute. Right? You have to be a little bit of a disruptor both for yourself and for other people. But eventually you do that, you gain that confidence, and then you start to see those results pay off. And as you do that, you're gonna see your results work for you way faster when you adopt that mindset and that approach. So again, three reasons why you might not be seeing results, you might not be getting better. And if you fix these things, not only are you gonna start to get better, but you're gonna make improvements at a way faster rate than you probably ever have. So let's. Like I said earlier, guys, click the top link in our description below to get my free elite perimeter score workout. Drop a like subscribe if you're new. I appreciate you guys for watching. Talk to you guys soon. Peace.