How To Improve at Basketball TWICE as Fast as Your Competition

Most players out there can be getting better at basketball twice as fast as they currently are. And if you're watching this, that's probably you. Here's the flip side of that, though. If you don't take full control over your development, that you're going to get left behind. Those players who are ahead of you, you're never going to catch up to. We all have the same amount of time during the day, and we all have access to tools that can help us to maximize our development. So it's all about recognizing what tools you have that you can use and making sure that you use them so that you get the benefits of them and you don't watch as everybody else is using them and leaving you behind. The good news about this is you can be getting better at basketball way faster than all of your competitors without spending any more time on the court. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you don't know who I am, my name is Ethan Koza, and I help basketball players who struggle to score and make an impact on the court become confident in high IQ playmakers. The big thing you have to understand is that the game of basketball is evolving. Five, 10 years ago, it was okay to just be skilled. You could just go on the court and be able to hit all the shots and make all the plays, and it was enough back then because the game was not nearly as skilled as it is now. In the last five, 10 years, there's been such an explosion of social media and online basketball training and options and knowledge and all this stuff. And because of that, players today have never been more skilled. What that means is that the level that it takes in order to stand out on the court is way different than it used to be. And so if you just put in your work on the court, with your workouts in the weight room, you think that's enough. You're going to be really frustrated when you're not seeing the results in the court that you think you should be. Now, maybe that sounds kind of depressing, but there's a really, really good opportunity in there for players who want to find the edge, because the pendulum is swung towards everybody being super highly skilled. There is a major, major, major gap in the game today, and I'm going to explain to you exactly what it is and how you can start to fill that so that you get better way faster than everybody else does. Here's really why this matters. If you're doing the same things that everybody else is doing, you're never going to separate yourself from Anybody. If you're in a position where you're trying to catch up to players who maybe are ahead of you, you're never going to do that by doing the same things that they are. Everybody's working out, everybody's in the weight room, everybody's doing those things. So how can you find a way to actually separate yourself? You are limited when it comes to the amount of time you can spend on a basketball court every day. Two, three hours maybe of good work you can do. But again, then that leaves the other 22, 21 hours left in that day where you're not really getting any better. Even if you go and you're in the weight room, maybe you play pickup, maybe that's five or six hours a day, that's still a ton of time left that you could be getting better. And then most players will say, well, you know, I put in my four or five hours today and now I'm done. The answer to this is not to spend more time on the court. The answer is to find another way to gain an edge over everybody else. And when you gain an edge and you double down and you stick to that consistently, you're going to make massive, massive progress in comparison to everybody else who's not doing that. This edge starts off with utilizing mental improvement and mirror neurons. The concept of mirror neurons is very simple. We have a very powerful ability to be able to watch somebody do something and have mirror neurons fire in our own mind as if we were the one who were doing that thing. This is how humans learn to do everything. We learn how to walk because of this, learn how to dance because of this. We learn how to run. We learn how to play sports because we watch other people do it. And then we're able to recreate that in our mind so that we can also do it. That part is so powerful to understand because like I just mentioned, you can be sitting there watching somebody do something because of those mirror neurons. Your brain is firing as if you are the one who's actually doing it. But we're not actually getting the taxation on our body that the physical reps cause. So what that means is that outside of your encore training, if you utilize these mirror neurons and you focus on mental improvement, then you're going to be able to continue to get more and more reps even though you're not on the court anymore. Nobody really focuses on this because everybody's so focused on the on court training. Like, like I said, it's never been easier to find workouts, to find drills. So Everybody's doing it. But if you don't do this, then you're missing out on the opportunity to get better at a rate twice as fast as everybody else. Because not only are you putting the work in on the court, but you're also putting the work in off the court as well. Now, there's a couple of different ways we can use mirror neurons. Probably the easiest way and the best way, the way that you can recreate the most is by studying players. So pick a player at your position. This could be college, NBA, EuroLeague, whatever. But pick somebody who does things that are similar to you and study them so you. So break down their movement, break down their decision making, break down the little details like their footwork and whatever other things you notice. The couple ways you can do this is number one, by watching a full game. So obviously you could get on and watch like the NBA or you could watch a college game on TV, but you could also get onto YouTube and find a full game on there and watch that player. You're not watching the ball. You don't care about anybody else. You're just watching what that player does. Whether they have the ball in their hands, whether they don't, whether they're on offense, defense. You're just focused on them. You could also get on YouTube and you could look at game highlights. I prefer game highlights over season highlights because typically with season highlights you have like, crazier plays that are not quite as common. If you just watch a game highlight from a random game in February, more than likely the stuff that you see is, is more typical and stuff that happens more often. So either of those methods are fine to do. Let's say you're a wing player and the player that you choose to watch is Brandon Miller. You're watching the film and you see him make a cut to the basket and get a layup. We'll rewind that and ask yourself, what did he see? Why did he make that cut? What caused that? What triggered that? Take note of that. It's something that you can potentially apply in your games as well. Maybe you see that he's really good at getting to his left hand drive. Break that down, rewind it, slow it down. Ask yourself, okay, well, how is he able to do that? What is he doing to set up and get that left hand drive open? How is he able to consistently get to it, Recognize the type of shots that he's consistently hitting? Is he catching and shooting a lot? Is he getting the shots off of like different pull ups? How, how is he scoring? Points and how is he able to consistently create that? Now, once you've gone through and you've watched and this doesn't have to be for hours and hours, this could be for 10 minutes, could be for 20 minutes. It doesn't have to take all this time, but once you've done that, replay those moments in your mind. So let's say you see a play where he catches it, he, you know, has a close up coming at him, rips through, gets to a 2 drill, pull up, close your eyes and replay that moment as if you were the one who is doing it. So in your games, you create the surroundings that you would see in one of your games and just visualize that situation so you, you can, you can feel your feet in the shoes on the basketball court. You catch it, rip through to drill, pull up. You want to visualize yourself making those same decisions and having those same outcomes. This is the key to getting high quality mental reps and getting better at a rate way quicker than everybody else. Something that I talk about a lot is how I've gotten so much better at basketball since I stopped playing. Because now I spend so much time watching and studying the game and working with players and watching their film and talking with them about things that they're seeing. So I'm able to put myself in different situations all the time. One of the examples that I gave is that I was playing pickup with a bunch of college guys last year, and I came down the court, it was a transition opportunity. I had the ball, and there was one player who was trailing me. He was timing me up to block me, and instinctively, without having ever practiced that, I went to the Pinoy step, which is like a little slow step layup, and ended up throwing his timing off and getting a wide open layup because of it. I've never worked on that move, never practiced it, but I've watched Tyrese Halliburton do it. Like, I've studied guys who have done it, and in that moment, instinctively, I was able to use it. So right there is a cut and dry example of how you can get way better at basketball without even spending time on the court improving something. Now think about, if you're purposeful about that every single day, the amount of things you can add to your game, the amount of improvement that you can see just by doing that. The other way that you can make this really valuable is that after you've used, spent time watching and studying other players, go watch your own film and look for opportunities that maybe you missed, maybe you Made a wrong decision. But after you've spent time studying somebody else, you see, oh, well, if I had done that instead, I might have been successful there. And then go through that same visualization process. So you're in that situation and now you visualize yourself making the right decision, making the right read. Now, taking visualization a step further, you can also do this when it comes to your on court stuff. So before your practice, before your game, spend five minutes visualizing your yourself succeeding and executing in different situations in your game. So if you know that you're using ball screens, visualize yourself coming off of a ball screen, seeing a certain coverage and making the right decision. Maybe you score, maybe you make a great pass, if you know that you come off a lot of pin downs, visualize yourself in those situations, making the right decisions. Whatever it is that you do in your games that you want to do more of, visualize yourself for five or ten minutes before every practice, every game, and then it's going to feel way more natural and you're also going to be more prepared to make the right decision in those moments. And, and then the second thing that you can do to apply this into your on court stuff is when you go into your practices, your games, your pickup games, whenever it is that you're playing, go in there purposeful, especially if you're playing in pickup games or a one on one or a three on three games that don't really matter, you want to go in there very much focused on applying the things that you've learned. So you might be a really, really good shooter off the catch already, but you've been studying Brandon Miller and you see how he's able to get downhill, you and instead of taking those shots in those pickup games that you probably could take and make them because you're good at it already, you say, no, I'm not going to shoot those. Instead I'm going to work on getting downhill and getting better at driving to the basket. Even if it means that I don't score as many points in this pickup game. Even if it means that, you know, I might lose the ball or my team might not win, or I might not look great. I'm focused on figuring out how to apply this into my game. And when you go in with a purpose like that, you're going to get better way faster than everybody else who's just kind of out there existing. If you do that alone right there, you're going to make improvement so much faster than everybody else. So make this habit of film study and Mental improvement and use using visualization and mirror neurons, a daily habit for you, Like I said, doesn't be a ton of time. Even if it's 5, 10, 15 minutes, that's great. And then the last piece of this is going to help you to get better so much faster, is to play against the best players you can find as much as possible. There's two different modes you can be in. You can be in learning mode and being in performance mode. Like I just mentioned, when it came to going into pickup games and three on three and one on one games that are kind of meaning list with purpose. That's because we want to be in learning mode. We don't care about performing, we don't care about looking good, we don't care about the outcome really. We care about did I get better today or did I not? And when we go in there with a purpose on trying to get better and implement something, that's when we make sure that we actually are getting better. And it's the same thing when it comes to this. When you can go and find the best players possible, even if it's just a one on one or a three on three, if you can go and do that, you're going to lose a lot. If you're finding players who are better than you, you're going to lose maybe every single time. But it's going to force you to raise your level just to compete, which is the first part of it. That's kind of the common sense part. But the other aspect of that is that going back to mirror neurons, when you're around really good players, you're going to start to subconsciously pick up on things. You're going to see that one player consistently does this little thing and it always gets him open, or he does this little thing and it always helps to finish around the rim. And before you know it, if you're around that long enough, you're going to start to instinctively do do those things as well. The saying is that you are the average of the five people that you surround yourself with. And the same idea applies right here. If you're around five really good players, you're gonna pick up on a lot of their habits and it's gonna make you better. But if you're around five really bad players and you're gonna develop bad habits and you're probably gonna move the opposite direction. So like I mentioned at the beginning, the game has swung and everybody is so skilled because everybody only focuses on developing skills. And you should be doing that. Chances are if you're watching this, you probably are doing that. You what that has opened up though, is a massive opportunity for players who are willing to also focus when it comes to mental improvement and utilizing film study and mirror neurons. Because nobody's doing this. Nobody's talking about it. You get on YouTube and look at basketball training stuff. It's all about the on court stuff. But what's missing in today's game is basketball IQ and feel for the game. And that's what this stuff is going to help you to develop. And that right there is going to set you apart from everybody else. And it's also going to help you to get better so much faster. Now I actually created a free guide on how to get better at basketball twice as fast as everybody else. That's going to be the top link down below. It's going to walk you through all this step by step. It's going to give you daily schedules to follow. Super, super valuable, completely free. Like I said, top link down below. Make sure you check that out. Appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.