How You Should Be Training During The Season (The TRUTH)

Now that the season's here, things are different. There's added pressure to everything, and you probably have a lot going on. On top of that, you need to be able to perform at your best every single day. There's playing time on the line, starting spots to be won or lost, and goals that you've been working towards all offseason, maybe for multiple offseasons that you're trying to achieve. In this video, I'll go through exactly how you can maximize this season, exactly how you should be training on the court and off the court, and all the other little things you need to make sure that you focus on to make sure that you have the best season possible and truly see your hard work pay off. And make sure you stay tuned to the end of the video, because the last tip I'm going to give you is the difference between you having a bad season filled with regret or a great season filled with success. Let's get into it. So I think the overarching thing you need to understand if you want to have a great season is they need to do enough for your situation when it comes to training. So what I mean by that is that everybody's situation is a little bit different in terms of what they need during the season. The important thing is you need to make sure you're doing enough. What that means is that, first of all, you can't stop getting your extra work in because it's the season. I think this is a mistake that a lot of players make. They get into their season, they're practicing every single day, and they think that that is enough. That's a replacement for the work that they were doing, you know, all. All offseason. Your job as a player is to be at your best for the entire season. And I think the issue is that a lot of players will get to the season, stop doing the. That work that they did to get them there. And then they almost taper off as the season goes on. They get to November, the season starting, and they're at their peak, and they just become less sharp as the year goes on. And so now you look on, and by the time we get to February and March, when you need to be at your best, you're actually at. You're actually way worse than you were in November because you haven't been keeping yourself sharp as the time has gone on. And so you don't want that to be you. Right? You definitely don't want it to be you because you want to be at your best and you want to feel Confident for the entire season. So you need to be doing something. And this depends a lot on what your season looks like in terms of your role and how much you play. For example, do you play a lot and are you happy with the role that you have? If that's the case, our goal might be more so maintenance. Right. Just making sure that we retain the skills that we've built all off season and making sure that we can continue to perform at our best every day. Right. That's gotta be pretty much what our focus is gonna be. Because you're playing a lot and you're in a role that you're happy with. We need to focus on maximizing your abilities right now. That's gonna be our main focus. So this is where your work might just be confidence building and maintenance and making sure you continue to feel good every single day. So here's a couple examples of what those workouts might look like. Here's. And I'll put these up on the screen so you can see them as well. So for example, we might go for like 20 or 30 minutes as our workout. It doesn't be anything crazy. You're already going through team practices again. We're, we're assuming that you're playing good amount. So you know, there's a lot of wear and tear already coming towards you. So we don't want to overdo it in terms of what we're going to do outside of it. But here's an example of something we could do really more with more of a shooting focus. Right. So 30 minutes. The first thing we do is just some form shooting. So you know, wherever you want that to be at 10 to 20 makes as an example. And then we go paint jumpers. So we're just shooting different shots in the paint. So it could be off the catch on the dribble, really whatever you need to feel good about. And then we could go with spot up threes. So there we have like 10 makes at all five spots there. And again that can look like however you want to look like. Maybe you shoot off of a lot of pin downs. Do you want to work on those? Or you shoot off of a lot of, you know, maybe you shoot off of like a lot of extra pass threes coming from like the, the wing, the corner or the corner to the wing. So you want to work on those. But getting up those sorts of shots. And then two dribble pull ups, 10 makes on each wing. Right. And this is a workout you can get done pretty quickly, but it's going to allow you to work on the things that you probably do and see the ball go in the basket a lot, which I think is really important at this time of year. So we're not necessarily challenging ourselves and we're not really forcing improvement, which we'll get into in a second. But this is a great way to just maintain confidence and maintain the ability that we have so that there's a quick 30 minute workout. If we wanted more of a ball handling focus, we could go with like a stationary ball handling circuit for five to seven minutes. And I'll link something above too, if you guys want a video that, that would kind of fit into that category. Just something quick that you know you could use. And then we can go on the move. Ball handling freestyle for five, seven minutes. And there's a bunch of different ways you can do that. But just whatever the one, whatever way you would choose to do it, you know, you're just kind of moving freestyle with the ball again, making sure that you feel good with the ball in your hands. And then we go form shooting 10 to 20 makes. Catch and shoot threes at the 10 spots again or the 5 spots again for 10 makes. And then ball screen threes 10 to 15 at each slot right there. So again the quick workout, more of a ball handling focused. If you're more of a lead guard, that might make more sense for you. Or depending on the day, that might make more sense for you. And then here's a quick like 30 minute finishing workout you can use. So we have like a crawl start to a floater finish and we have 10 to or 15 to 20 makes right there. Then we have crawl starts to fit to actual finishes of the rim. Then we can go with like rip throughs or jabs into finishes at the basket. And you can mix up your favorite finishes or you get to what you feel like you're gonna get. You're gonna finish with the most in games and then foreign shooting and then catching you threes ten makes the five spots again. So again, really quick. None of this is really challenging. It's not super challenging. It's just stuff that you is going to make you feel good. It's gonna help you maintain the abilities that you've built all offseason so that again we get to the games and we're feeling good. We're playing at our peak. We're maximizing our current abilities right there. With all of these workouts, the goal isn't necessarily to challenge ourselves or to make things difficult. And the main goal is see the ball go through the basket, feel the ball in your hands, make sure that your control over it feels good. And what that's going to do is help you to build that confidence, which is going to help you in the immediate future. Off season workouts are very different. And if you've watched my videos or my workouts, then you know, you know what I'm talking about. Because in the off season, the goal is to expand your capacity to perform. The goal is to. Is to push yourself right on the edge so that you start to expand what you're able to do. And the only way that you do this is through challenge and failing a lot. Being in workouts worth the Goldilock principle, where it's not too easy, but it's not too difficult, we've got to be in that place where you're. You're only succeeding, like 30 to 70% of the time, you've got to be failing a lot in order to really push yourself and expand. Here with these sorts of workouts, you might breeze through these. You might. But again, the goal is not to challenge ourselves. When we look at an important concept that I'll run through quickly here we have learning mode versus performance mode. All off season, we're in learning mode because we're trying to get better. So what that looks like is again, we're in workouts that are challenging or where you might not always look very good throughout a workout. Again, if you're. If a workout is really doing its job in the off season, then you're going to have days where you. You don't look very good in your workouts. You lose the ball a lot, you miss a lot of shots, you don't win a drill like that's how it's supposed to be in order to get better. Once the season gets here, we. We turn it, we switch that into the opposite, which is performance mode. Now we need to go out there and our results need to be at our best as often as possible, right? Workouts are not about results. They're not about, oh, I shot this percentage in a workout. This is. That was pretty awesome, right? Ultimately, it's about, did I get better or did I not? In a game, it's not about getting better. It's about how well did I play. So we change into performance mode. Our goal right now is to maximize results, and everything that we do needs to help us play at our maximum capability. Right now, we have to perform a. And we want to leave workouts feeling good about ourselves, feeling confident, because it's probably going to help us to perform at our best from, you know, on a daily basis. Now, there are times during the season where this might not be the case. You might want to be in learning mode, and that could be if you aren't playing a lot or if you're in a role that you're not happy with and you, you want a more expanded role. If that's the case, then you might want to continue to be in learning mode and continue to get better so that you can play more or have a bigger role or different role. What. Whatever the case may be with that, and if that's the case, you got to be finding time to improve and not just maintain what you have. And if you want to know what that looks like, I'll link a video above that goes to exactly how to get better. And that's the distinction, right? If you're playing a lot, you like your role. Maximum performance right now with some stuff we already talked about, if that's not the case, you're not playing a lot and you know you are in a role that you love, then, or even if you aren't playing super well, then you want to make sure that you're improving. That's going to be the important thing. If you're not playing a lot, you don't have a role that you like. You can approach your workouts a lot like you would in the offseason, where your goal is to get better and challenge yourself and improve. I think that's an important thing to understand. Now. You definitely don't have to exclusively stick to one of these, right? But as a, as a generality, that's kind of where you want to be focused. It's a good guideline to follow. With the players that I train, for example, I'll tell them when we start in the offseason, like, hey, I don't care about how you feel. Even the gym, it's March or April and we're still like, I don't care. I don't care if you walk out of here and you feel like you're terrible or you feel like you had a bad day. Doesn't matter to me because my only focus is making you better so that you come back the next time better, right? It doesn't matter to me how you feel on a day to day basis. Doesn't matter to me. It is the complete opposite by the time the season gets here. November, December, January, February, March, right? Those are times where I really care about how they're feeling, leaving the gym and that's that to me is what matters the most. I'm constantly asking them like, oh, how are you feeling? What are you not confident doing right now? What are you confident doing right now? What do you want to do today? What do you want to focus on right now? Because I need them to go into the game, they have the next day feeling really good about where they're at. So a great example of this from a couple days ago, I was in the gym with one of my high school players and, and we were in a workout. I threw a couple of challenging things at her, shooting wise, and she just wasn't shooting well. And mind you, she's an elite level high school shooter. Really, really, really good shooter. But this wasn't her day. And so if it was the off season, I would have just let that ride out. I would would have made her work through it and I might have made it more difficult, like, who knows? But I would have definitely made her just figure that out and just deal with it, get through it. But because it's in season and I need her to feel good about her shot, feel confident about her shot, I scaled it back and I made things significantly easier so that she would see the ball go in more and she would leave feeling better about where she's at. Because right now it's about feeling good. Feeling good is typically going to lead to you playing better. That's all that matters right now. So that is the big distinction right there. Keep that in mind as you continue to move through your season. The second thing I think it's important to understand is that it's bigger than just the skills, right? So you want to make sure that physically you feel as good as possible throughout the entire season. So if you're somebody who has been in the weight room the whole offseason, you can't stop once the season gets here because again, you're going to be at your peak in November, and then by the time January, February, March gets here, you're a shell of yourself physically, right? So you probably won't be lifting with the same frequency or intensity as you were in the off season. Again, assuming that you're playing a lot and you're getting a lot of minutes, you might not be able to go as hard as you did. But being able to get in the weight room for, you know, 20, 30 minutes, one to three times a week, probably not impossible, and definitely a good thing for you to do if you want to maintain what you have athletically throughout the season, I think that's important. And Going with that, just being sure that you manage your time well. I think this is something that is really important for players to do. Obviously throughout the season, like I already mentioned, there's a lot of stresses that get added to what you're doing. So not only are you physically working more because again, you practice play every single day, but there's all those added on mental emotional stress of okay playing time, you know, who do you know, preparing for different opponents, traveling. Depending on where you're at, you might have to travel a lot, getting your school work done. On top of that, there's a lot of added stuff that goes into that. So it's important that you're finding time to make sure that you sleep enough because what. What would happen? And this was a constant for me. It's like every single year I get super sick during the battle season. And I think a big part of it is because I didn't do a good enough job managing my time so that I can make sure, hey, I. I can get to bed at this time so that I can recover and be able to handle all the stressors that are going to come with this time of year. So managing your time, getting all of your responsibilities done in a timely way so that you can make sure that you're sleeping as much as possible is a really important thing as well. And if you do these things, keep a focus on them, you're going to put yourself in a position to have the most successful season possible. And the last thing that I want to mention to go along with that is that you want to make sure that you're at the end of the day, you look back at your season and it's not filled with a what if, right? If you've been someone who's put in work over the course of this offseason and you've gotten better, you have to at some point go out and prove that. You have to go out and be willing to prove that. And that might sound obvious, but it's not. Because what that's going to require of you is to do things differently than you did a year ago, right? Maybe last season, you. You didn't have the same abilities you do now because you worked for it in the offseason. Well, you're gonna have to go in and probably consciously force yourself to do those new things because they're new to you. They're not habits yet. What you can't go in and do is just be the same player that you were and allow yourself to do that. I see this all the time with players that they have these new abilities, but they don't go out and apply them because they're afraid of looking bad or messing up. And they're so worried about, you know, what a coach thinks of them or what a teammate thinks of them, that they don't go out and play to their. To their potential or to the. Their highest capability. And it's one of the most difficult things to do. But you really have to force yourself to be okay with the fact that you might fail, you might look bad. But what I will say is that at the end of the day, if you have the worst season possible, right, you go out and you apply yourself and you miss every shot, you turn the ball over, you just. You. You play terrible, you're gonna feel a lot better about knowing what you are and know, okay, I need to get better at this still. You're gonna feel a lot better knowing that than you will if you didn't know that because you didn't go out and try. You just kind of stayed in your box the whole time. And now all that work was for what? Because you don't know what you need to get better at. You also don't know what you're good at because you didn't do any of it, right? So all that to say, you need to make sure that you really take risk and don't allow yourself to play fearful or play to not mess up. You've got to go out and you've got to play to be your best. I think an important thing to think about is a lot of times players who struggle with this are very afraid of, like, looking selfish, right? They're afraid of taking too many shots and their coach yelling at them or taking too many shots and their teammates get mad at them or, you know, driving and shooting a shot and missing an open teammate because, oh, I should have hit. They're always worried about that. What it actually is, though, is to an extent, it actually becomes selfishness. Because what a lot of times players will do in these situations is that they will use that to basically allow themselves to get free of any sort of responsibility. So, hey, if I just make sure that I pass the ball and I don't really do anything, well, now all of a sudden, if we lose, it's not my fault, right? If. If. If that guy misses the shot on him, it's not on me. And that's actually the most selfish thing you can do. When you're the person who can make a play and you decide in that moment that you're not going to because you don't want to look bad or miss the shot. That's you being selfish. Not being selfless and being a team player because you passed the ball or because you didn't take the shot. That's not what it is. So understanding that sometimes it's important to to be selfish because it's actually the selfless thing to do. I think this is an important thing for players to understand is that you don't want to have a season filled with the regret, right? You want to know what you are and you want to put yourself out there. So again, if that's you, I I challenge you to just make sure that that's your mindset going into the season right here. I promise you you'll appreciate the results way more than if you approach it the opposite way. So again, hopefully you guys got something out of this. Hopefully you guys have a great season. If you guys season started already in the comments down below. Let me know how it's going. If you guys have any problems like let me know. If you guys have any suggestions for topics you want me to talk about, let me know that as well. I appreciate you guys. Make sure you guys click the top link in my description down below. Comment get my free Elite Perimeter Score program if you guys are looking for, again, you know, workouts during the season to be able to help you get better or if you want to get a jump on your offseason training, whatever the case may be, that's going to help you take those skills to a new level. So again, top link in the description down below. Completely free. I appreciate you for watching. Drop a like subscribe if you're new. I'll talk to you soon. Peace.