How To Keep Your Skills Sharp During The Season

I know a lot of players, and especially from a younger point of view, like, really get away from doing any training in the season because generally you're practicing every day with your team and you're playing a lot of games and all this sort of stuff. So it almost seems like, well, do I need to be training? But the thing is, you know, how many shots are you really getting up during a practice? You know, I've played and coached with a lot of teams. Not a lot, but a few. And there's not like, not every team puts a lot of time into, you know, whether it be shooting or ball handling or finishing, like, they don't spend a ton of time actually practicing those things. You're spending a lot of time maybe getting shots out of your team actions. But how many shots is that really? Like, is it really a lot of shots? Right. Maybe you work on ball handling because you have to run through your offense, but is that really helping you get better at it or even feel more confident doing it? Probably not. Especially, you know, if you're, if you have an hour and a half practice prime, most that's spent with team concepts, you're not really getting any better or even maintaining when it comes to your actual ability as a, as a, you know, your individual skills, right? So there, there's certainly a need for that training to continue because what can happen is that you start off November, you're at your peak, and then you go November, December, January, February, without putting in any sort of extra, you know, on court training yourself, and you just kind of slowly decline. So by the time you get to February, March and playoffs get here, and you have to be at your best or you want to be at your best to hopefully win. And you're, you're going to see other teams at their best. You're actually worse off than you were in November. So that's why it's important to continue to train as the season goes on, obviously that's going to be different and you're going to scale back a little bit. That's kind of. We're going to hop into a little bit, but specifically on court, right? So we talk about what you should be doing to, to keep your skills sharp. What does that look like now? Like I said before, when it comes to the offseason, we're much more focused on that learning. And this is where, you know, that kind of emphasis on more random stuff, style training, more varied training is super important. And that's not to say there's not a, an avenue or, or a a use for that come season time, especially in kind of smaller doses. But I think the biggest thing is that once, once you get to November, for the most part, or whenever your season starts, for the most part, you kind of are what you are, right? The work that you put in the last few months has gotten you to where you are and you don't have a ton of time or extra energy at your disposal to increase that capacity to perform very much over the season, right? If you're practicing or playing six days a week and let's say you're getting heavy minutes on a team, you're not going to have a ton of bandwidth to be able to actually, you know, expand your ability very much during the season. So the, the, again, the one thing we need to think about is when maximizing confidence, right? Especially shooting the basketball. So that's where just getting up shots whenever you can. So spot shots and just seeing the ball go through the basket is super, super important. So what that might mean is that, you know, it just depends on kind of your schedule, right? If you have time to get to the gym outside of your team practices for half an hour and 45 minutes, shoot the ball, that's great. But even if it's a situation where maybe you're able to get on the court 20, 30 minutes early on practice and get some shots up, or maybe you're able to stay after and get, you know, for 15 minutes and get a bunch of shots up, I mean, if you're really focused, you have a rebounder for 15, 20 minutes after a practice, you can get up a couple hundred shots like pretty, like pretty easily. And so that's something that you should think about. But when it comes to confidence, you seeing the ball go through the net over and over and over and over again is what's going to build that confidence for you. Especially if you are going through a slump or you missed a bunch of shots, Just seeing the ball go through the basket is super important. And in this part, again, we're talking about maximizing performance right now. And confidence is one of the biggest keys to that. If you're confident and you go out and you play confidently, you're going to, you're going to play better, you're going to perform better. So the, the more that we can do to maximize that confidence on a day to day basis, that's what we want to focus on doing. So just getting up shots really, and this can be, this can be spot shots. A lot of it can depend on what you have to do. So if you're somebody who's a real floor spacer, catch and shoot sort of person, you know, working on those spot shots or working on, you know, relocations or, you know, getting, you know, one or two draw pull ups, just the shots that you might see during a game and just repping those out as much as you can. Now, I say I shouldn't say that because you also want to keep in mind that again, if you're practicing or playing six days a week and you're somebody who's in the rotation playing a lot of minutes, then you don't want to put a ton of extra stress on your body, right? So you kind of want to limit the amount of time that you're spending doing this, right? You don't need to be going for two hours before or after practice getting up a ton of shots because it's probably just going to lead to you not performing as well because your body is going to be more beat down. And again, this is about maximizing performance. So we have to allow that long term development to kind of stall a little bit while we're focused on being the best we can right now. So literally just 20, 30 minutes, you know, if you're part of it depends on how you feel. So if you have, you know, if you feel good enough that you can do that every day or five days a week, right, Then go ahead and do that, right? Get 20, 30 minutes of just shots up before after practice, on your own, the morning before school, whatever your, your schedule allows. It just depends on how you feel. If you're really beat down and you're tired, you just had a back to back, you got practice that day, and you're only able to go and get extra work in three days that week, that's completely fine because again, we want to be ready when 7 o' clock rolls around. It's tip off, that's what matters. So you want to be feeling as close to 100% as possible. So if your workout the night before will cause you to only be at 90% the next night, then skip that workout, don't do it. It's not going to be, it's not going to be something that you need to do. And that's again where we're looking for opportunities to maximize performance. Even if it's meaning that you have to put in a little bit less work to let yourself recover a little bit. Okay. But again, we're trying to build that confidence when it comes to on the court sort of stuff. It's literally just doing stuff that you're able to see the ball go through the net over and over and over and over and over again, and you feel like you can go on the court and make shots. That I think is the most important part when it comes to training on court during basketball season. And of course, there's also opportunities for you to, if you're struggling with something, a certain finish, or you're struggling with your left hand or whatever, taking 10, 15 minutes and working on that weakness is another great way to boost that confidence and feel better about that as well. Right. If you're struggling, finishing with your left, then taking 15 minutes and working on just finishing with your left hand, coming from different angles, off one foot, two foot, opposite foot, whatever you may want to do with that, and then maybe taking 15 minutes to shoot, and that's 30 solid minutes of work. It's probably going to help you feel better, boost your confidence, and ultimately help you play better. So that's kind of a template you can follow when it comes to actually training in season.