How To Have High Quality Workouts (And See Major Results)

So our next question is how do I have quality workouts? Or what defines a quality workout? That's a great question. And I think that this is where the focus has to be for workouts. Anytime you look on social media, on Instagram or on Snapchat or on YouTube or whatever, it's always people bragging about, oh, I shot this many shots. Oh, I was in the gym for six hours today. I was doing this, I was doing that. And everybody wants to brag about how much they work, how much time they spend the gym, how many shots they make, but nobody, like, nobody cares to talk about the actual quality. You can go in the gym, you can make a thousand shots. That's, that's all well and good, but there's a difference between going in there and making a thousand quality shots and making a thousand not quality shots. And I think for the most part, when you hear about people doing thousand make workouts, most of the time it's leaning towards that, not quality shots. What we just talked about with, with, you know, when I was talking about my group workouts, all of our makes, all of our shots are quality makes because we go off of contested shooting or we go out of pressure situations where every, every single shot that you make is going to be with either a contest coming or with pressure riding on that shot. You have to make this shot or you go back to zero and you don't complete the drill. You have to get this shot off quicker than you might normally do in a workout because there's a defender coming at you trying to block your shot. So all those makes that we have, even though it might only be 100, 150, they're all going to be quality makes that are going to transfer to games very, very well. And that's the biggest thing. So kind of what I just mentioned, right, if you want to have quality workouts, you have to first ask yourself, how does this translate to the game? Is what I'm doing transferring to the game. If you spend 30 minutes a day just working on two ball pounds, right, that might make you feel like you're working hard, but how well is that going to transfer to the games? Even if you take it as simple as like, okay, if I, if I set up four cones and I just work on dribbling through these cones for two straight hours, you, that's working hard, you might be getting, you might break a sweat, you might burn a ton of calories doing that, but how does that actually translate to the game when all of a sudden now you have Defenders trapping you, you've got guys fouling you. Like, you can't necessarily just work on pound crossover. Pound crossover, because you're going to have to do so much more than that. So I think a couple of things you can think about when it comes to actually making your workouts quality is first of all, figure out how you can add in elements to your workout that are going to force you to work on adaptability. And all of that means your ability to just kind of figure stuff out. Basketball is not a perfect game. It's not a perfect game. And, you know, even though a lot of times our workouts might make it seem perfect, it's not. You know, I can walk into a gym and somebody can be working out and they can look great. Oh, they're making every single shot. But then I put a defender on the, on the floor, and all of a sudden it's way different because that's what defense does, right? It adds a completely different element to what you're trying to do. So when you're by yourself, the, the first thing I'd say is that every shot, every drill has to be a game speed. I'm going to say for the most part, if you're, if you have workouts where you're making 500 shots by yourself, I can almost guarantee that unless you have like a shooting machine doing. And even still, if you're doing all that by yourself, you probably are making every single one of those shots at game speed, game intensity, and you probably are just chasing makes at that point. I heard Duncan Robinson talk about, and obviously Duncan Robinson, we'll see if he's back with Miami Heat. It's currently a free agent, but one of the best shooters in the world, right? One of the best shooters in the history of the world. Phenomenal shooter. And so obviously what he does is not necessarily going to be applicable to every single player. But he talked about how this, this offseason for his training, he is not doing any spot shooting, right? Cash and shoot, five shots, five spots. Like, think about that. He's like, I'm not doing any of that. He said sometimes he'll do a little bit extra, like in the evenings, but for the most part, his actual workouts, like his main workouts, there's none of that. Every single shot that he shoots is coming out of some sort of game action. So coming off a pin down, coming off of a relocation, like coming off of stuff that he might see in games, and that's where all of his makes come from. So while I guarantee you if I were to ask Duncan Robinson, could he make more shots in that same amount of time, if he just did spot shots the whole time, he, he would say 100% yes. Yeah. If I just stood there and shot the ball over and over and over again, I could probably make double the amount of makes that I do in my workouts now. But would that make it a higher quality workout? No, it wouldn't. Because you're not getting that same game like translation that you are with what he's doing, where every single drill that he does is targeted to the game. And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying to not do spot shooting. I'll do spot shooting with basically everybody that I work with. But I think there's another element to that to think about. So how can you work on those game situations? Well, what shots matter, right? Are you working on the shots that are important? Shots coming off of a relocation where you have to slide to the corner and hit a three or you have to slide up to the wing, hit a three. Are you working on shots coming off of a jab or a shot fake like a one drill or a two drill pull up? Are you working on those shots right there? Are you working on developing a couple of quick moves you can go to? So if you're in the mid range, you need to get your shot off quickly. Do you have a step out you can go to or a puncher out you can go to? Right? Those things that matter, like that's what you got to work on. If your offense is a lot of pin downs. Do you work on being able to shoot the ball coming off of a pin down? Right. Do you work on if your offense has a flare read where you flare out to the wing, do you work on being able to hit a shot coming off of that? Okay, so getting good at hitting shots that matter at game speed. That's what I would define as quality when it comes to working on your shooting. So I'd rather have a workout where you make 20 high quality flare threes on each wing, that then you make 60 low quality, you know, low to mid quality flare threes on each wing. Even though you're making way more with the 120 versus the 40, the quality of that matters. So if you can go through 20 times at game speed and make 20 shots from a certain action that you do in games, that's going to translate for you so much better than trying to chase an arbitrary number of makes. So the first thing you need to do is Just throw that idea out the window. That makes the, the amount of makes you have matters. It does not matter. There are 150 shot workouts that are way better than a 500 shot workout. That's just how it is. It's all about what you're getting out of it. So you have to ask yourself, okay, what am I getting out of doing this drill? How am I getting better from this? And that's where the quality is going to stem from. What that might mean is that you're not going to shoot as well in workouts. And I say this to all my players. The point of our workouts is I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to mess up. I want you to not look as good as you probably feel like you should. I don't want this to be somewhere you can come to a workout and like, just kind of cruise through and be like, oh, yeah, I'm great. Like, I like, I want you to at times, like, really be frustrated with yourself. And I want you at times to sometimes lose a little bit of confidence right throughout that workout. Right. Obviously, at the end of the day, I want your confidence to go up, but during a workout, I hope that you're. You're being pushed enough, you're going. The speed is pushing you enough that you know, you. You struggle a little bit and that's, that's where you want to be. You want to be right on the edge of like, grasping it, but also struggling at the same time. And that's how you know that you're getting something out of that workout as well. So that's obviously with shooting. And another aspect that I'll talk about with shooting too is we'll add in like shot shooting series. So maybe our first shot is going to come. It's going to be a backpedal into the corner for a three, and then the next shot, you're going to slide up to the wing for a catch and shoot the next shot. You're going to be catch, jab, into a two, drill, pull up at the elbow, and then your third shot is going to be a catch and shoot at the top of the key. When you shoot shots like that, right when you're in a game, you might shoot a shot from the corner. Chances are you're not going to shoot a shot from the corner the next time you shoot the ball. If all that you do for your shooting is work on shooting spot shots at the same shot at the same spot over and over again. That's just not game like, because If I'm going to shoot 10 shots in the corner and I miss my first one, well, I can adjust real quick and say, okay, I missed that one long, so now I'm going to do this. In the game, you don't have that, that, that luxury because you're going to a new spot the next time. So how adaptable are you when it comes to I shot from the corner this time and the next time I get a shot it's a pull up of the elbow. Can you go from making it in the corner to then making it in the at the elbow? That's, in my opinion what it takes to be a great shooter is you, you have the ability to be adaptable and hit different shots. So I love using different shooting series to do that. Where I'm shooting three or four different shots in a row and I might say, okay, we've got to make three sets of at least three for four, or maybe two sets of four for four. And that puts pressure on those shots and, and it forces you to be adaptable. So that lends itself to quality right there. When it comes to like ball handling or even finishing ball handling for sure is all about creativity. So a ton of the ball handling we do is just creative based stuff. And ball handling, there can be some stuff that's less creative. Like I love like our dribble manipulations over the cone, where I have a cone in front of me and I'm kind of manipulating the ball over the cone and maybe adding some crossovers and some betweens, some double moves, whatever it might be. But literally just having a ball in your hands and like, okay, for 20 seconds you're just freestyling, doing like whatever kind of dribble combos you want. That in my opinion is great. And then the best way to train ball handling is just grab one person or two or two people and have them play defense on you. Say, okay, I've got to get from the baseline to half court and I've got one person or two people playing defense on me. That's the best way to train ball handling. But if you don't have that, then just working on your creativity with the ball because again, it's in a game you, you might not be able to go pound between crossover every time. You might have to go pound between crossover the first time to protect the ball and then a defender jumps out at you. You got to go quick between the legs again. So have you trained your ability to be adaptable and do that? So ultimately, when it comes down to the quality of your workouts. You have to ask yourself, what am I getting out of this? Right? It's not about the makes, not about the time you spend on the court. It's what am I getting better at through this? And what number one aspect that your workout should have is that it forces you to train, to be adaptable. And when you do those two things, you have those two things in mind. That's when you're going to have quality workouts. I want to give you guys my free elite Perimeter Score workout. We're going to target a bunch of skills that you're going to need to have if you want to be an elite player on the perimeter. All you got to do to get that is click the top link in my description right below and I'll get that right to you.