How You Should Be Training In-Season (And Why It's So Important) - Podcast Episode 82

Foreign welcome to the Vision Driven Basket Podcast. Appreciate you guys, Apple Podcast or Spotify or Pandora or SoundCloud or Google Podcast, whoever you'll be listening from. And everybody who, of course, who is watching right now on YouTube, shout out to you guys as well. If you're on YouTube, make sure you drop a like subscribe. Leave a comment for me, whether it's your thoughts on the episode, suggestions or requests for future episodes, questions you may have for me, anything like that. And if you're on Apple Podcasts right now, do me a favor, leave a review for me. Scroll down the bottom of the page and let me know what you think about the show. As you guys who have listened and watched know, when I get new reviews, I read them. So I have one which is actually a very interesting review because it actually is exactly what I'm gonna talk about today. And I didn't even see this until right before I started recording. So very interesting how this turns out. Says Love the pod says, hey, I just started listening to your podcast. I'm playing pro ball in Spain right now and it really gave me a different outlook on several aspects of the game. Would love to hear you talk about how to maintain or get better during the season. Keep up the work. Keep up the great work. So again, funny how that works is literally one I'm going to be talking about today in this episode. So again, I appreciate the reviews and like I said, if you guys are listening on podcasts right now, do me a favor, leave that review. Also, if you're not following me on Instagram, my Instagram is at Vision Driven Basketball. Make sure you connect with me over there as well. Any questions for me, send me a dm, whatever, just be able to see what I'm doing, drills that I'm posting, all that sort of stuff. So there's another avenue for me, for me to be able to connect with you guys. So we'll hop into it a little bit. Like I said, good. Talk specifically about training in season, the importance of that from a bunch of different aspects and kind of give you the approach to take when it comes to training in season. So there's a few different, you know, avenues we can, we can, we can talk about here in different parts of training in season, you know, whether it comes to on the court, in the weight room, whatever. But let's first talk about, you know, on the court, right? When we think about the season versus off season, right? And I talked about this last week and I think the week before that as well, talking about kind of the performance versus learning distinction right there. So when we're in the off season, we're much more, we should be much more focused on learning, meaning our, our goal should be we're trying to get better. So that might mean that our performance in the short term isn't as good as it could be because we're trying to get better a certain skill. You know, you put yourself in a position where, okay, you're playing pickup and you force yourself to only score in the paint, right. That might mean that you're giving up open shots that you probably can hit. So maybe you don't score as many points, but you're also working on maybe a weakness in your game. So that's an example of prioritizing learning over performance, which is approach you might take in the off season, right. Doing a drill with a contest, right. So I'm, I'm focusing on being able to hit a shot with pressure coming to me and maybe you offer a read in that. So hey, you can also give a shot, fake one, dribble if you need to on the contest. And adding in that defender is going to lower your percentage in that drill than if you had no defender on there. But again, we're going for that learning over that performance. We're not just chasing pure numbers and pure, oh, I made this amount of shots today. We're trying to put ourselves in the best position to learn and get better long term. So that's. That the focus come in the offseason. When the season gets here, that shifts to right now and that's where we have to start prioritizing the short term performance and because obviously we don't just train to train, right? You don't train to get better at training. You train to get better at the games, right? So that you, you play well in the games. That's the goal of, that's why we train from, you know, March through November so that when we get back to November and it's basketball season again, you're, you're at your peak. You know that capacity you have to perform is expanded because of the work that you've put in learning over the past few months. But now our goal is to maximize our performance right now. So I want to talk about how you can do that while you're training in season, how that shifts a little bit and then really give you guys some clear cut ideas on how to prioritize and maximize what you're doing during the season this year. So I think the first thing is just understanding like 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. So 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 the 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, and 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. What does that look like now? Like I said before, when it comes to the off season, we're much more focused on that learning. And this is where, you know, that kind of emphasis on more random style training, more varied training is super important. And that's not to say there's not a, an avenue or, or 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 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 miss 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, 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, 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 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 than 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, just maximizing that confidence, which is going to lead to maximized performance. Now, the other aspect to this is the weight room. And this is an area that, especially for younger players. When I say younger, I mean like high school, mid, I guess middle school too. This is an area, another area where I think a lot of players fall off a little bit during the season. Even though I think it's important, you know, for, for any high school players who are aspiring to play at the college level, at that level, at every level of college, doesn't matter what D1, D2, D3, like, they're lifting in the season. They're not. They don't stop lifting when the season gets here. Right. I know, I know guys at the Division 3 level who lift with the team. The team lifts five days a week. Right. And not every team does it that much. But I. There are schools that lift five days a week in season, and not every single one of those days is a super heavy lift. Three of them, though, like, three of them are going to be legitimate lifting days. Two of them are going to be more so like core active recovery sort of days, but they're still lifting during the season. And a lot of players just kind of go away from doing that. Now, there's a little bit of a distinction here when it comes to college or pro versus high school, like youth players. And I'll. I'll talk about that in a second. But specifically looking at, from, from a youth like high school perspective, right, let's take the example of let's say you're a sophomore in high school and your goal is to play college basketball. You want to play at the next level. The majority of sophomores in high school aren't, are nowhere near physically mature enough to play at any level of college basketball. Like they would get ran off the floor at every level of college. Doesn't matter what D1, D2, D3. They couldn't handle a second on the floor because they couldn't handle the physicality of it or the speed of it. So obviously like that's not like that. That's how it is, right? You're, you're only a sophomore in high school. How it's just how it generally is. You have, you know, the Zion Williamson of the world that are exceptions, but there's not a ton of them. There's way more people who are not the exception. And so that, that's where you know, you should be working on your sophomore year, junior, senior. You're developing yourself physically, athletically so that by the time you get to that next level you can handle the speed, the physicality of it. Okay? Obviously by the time, you know, when you go from age 16 to age 18 or 19, you should, there should be a big difference in terms of how, you know, athletic you are, how physically mature you are. But that's why like laying that groundwork of, or that foundation of strength athleticism in the weight room now as a sophomore in high school is super, super, super important because at the next level the like players I think don't quite understand how different it is because of the physicality and speed of things. Right? You're not playing with kids when you get to the, you're playing with like adults at the college level. Like you're playing with people who are 22, 23 years old. And so walking in there as an 18 year old, if you don't have a solid foundation, strength and athletically you're not going to play and it's going to be a struggle for you to catch up because again, you're playing against 22, 23 year old, 23 year old girls, guys, right? That's how it is. So it's super, super important that you really are committed to that as a high schooler. When players take the entire winner off of being in the weight room at all, it just sets them back a lot. And this is not a time like this is a, this is a time in life where you want to, at least if you're not continuing to develop in that area, is maintain what you have. So you don't get back to March or April and have to start way farther back than you were in November. Because the other thing with that is, like I said with the skill stuff, if you just decide to not do any sort of training, when you get to February, you get to March and it's playoff, you're supposed to be at your peak. If you just haven't lifted at all since November, then physically you're going to be less than what you were then. And obviously that's not what you want at that point in the season. You want to be as, as good as you can be. So when it comes to the weight room in the, at that time, we have to worry about maintaining and then maybe making some slight improvements in that aspect. So that might mean that you're in the weight room two or three days a week, not quite lifting as heavy as you might in the off season. Because again, the goal isn't to beat yourself down and be super sore. The goal is to just keep your body moving, keep yourself in practice with those different movements, whether it be squats or deadlifts or the bench press, whatever it may be, those different movements that you're going through, keeping yourself, you know, attuned to those movements and ultimately keeping the strength that you have. And that is super, super important. Even if that means that your weight room sessions become 25, 30 minutes, that's probably all that you would really need a couple of days a week just to maintain what you have. But going back to my original point, if you're in high school and your goal is to get to that next level, you have to keep a long term view of your physical development. I know that we said we're maximizing performance right now, but like I said, we can maximize performance and still be in the weight room during the season. I say this because there's a lot of coaches out there, whether it be high school, but especially AAU coaches who like, don't they. That's not how they approach things. They say like, I, I don't want you lifting during the season because I don't want you to be tired. I don't want this, I don't want that. And this is a lot of times, like, I know this directly from coaches of like pretty good programs, specifically aau, where they'll tell their kids, like, you can't lift during the season, during our AAU season, which is like March through July. So imagine if this is how you do things. If you're a freshman sophomore in high school and you're Going November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July without lifting weights, that's nine months of the year. So you have three months to be lifting weights during your high school career. You do that all the way through your senior year. So you're only lifting for three months out of the year. Now imagine all the other players out there competing for the same spots as you are at that next level who are lifting. Let's even say they take the season off. They're lifting March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, or we'll say October, eight months that they lift in compared to year three. Now multiply that over four years of high school and how much more development do they get in those four years than you do by taking off? So that a lot of times isn't even necessarily on the player. My issue is with the coaches who in my opinion a lot of them have a what can you do for me now approach to oh, I want to win AU games right now, I want to win high school games right now. Even if it means at the expense of your potential long term development and your potential success at the college level. So that's my issue with some coaches out there who are telling their players to not lift because there's so many upsides to lifting and there's just about no downsides to it if you are smart about it. Right. If you want your players to be at their best, you should, they should be in the weight room. That doesn't mean they need to be in there doing the same thing that the football team is doing. Right. Obviously if I'm in with a player during the season and they have, let's say it's Monday and they have a game on Tuesday, I'm not going to have them doing five by five heavy squats, deadlifts, bench, and then, you know, throwing in some, some burnout sprints too. Like obviously I'm not going to do that because then they might get to their game tomorrow and again they're only at 70%. We're trying to be at 100 because it's about performance right now. So the weight room will have to suffer a little bit during the season because again we're, we're, we are prioritizing performance right now. So we might have to scale back a little bit on what we do. That's okay. But the idea of completely taking off of it, to me it's just not the right way to do things. And so I don't want to get on a big tangent here about that, but I really do have a problem when coaches, I think, don't, don't quite prioritize the actual players development and instead they're worried about, I don't want you doing anything right now that could potentially affect me winning games currently on your, you know, 14U 16, UAU team or your high school JB team. So anyway, that's, that's a podcast for another day. But the, the point that I'm making is that if you're in high school or middle school, like, you have to understand that at the next level, first of all, you're going to be expected to lift during the season. Like, you're gonna lift during the season, whether it's, it might not be five days a week, but you're gonna lift through the season. I promise you that. And so if those teams are doing it, if college programs are all lifting during the season, that probably tells you that, oh, there has to be some benefits to doing that, right? So if I hear people telling me that, oh, you shouldn't be lifting during the season because it's not, well, why would every single college program out there, many of them paying six figures to their, you know, their head performance coaches, performance trainers for their teams, if they're all doing it, chances are there's probably some benefit to it. So again, this is not to say you go in there and you completely beat yourself down during the season. Again, you don't want to do that. Do not put yourself in a position where you're only at 80% come game time because you went super hard in the weight room, But a solid 20, 30 minute, you know, session where you go in, you hit some squats with some, some lighter weight than normal, maybe you do a little bit of upper body stuff, you do some, some core work and then you're out and you're just getting yourself moving a little bit again, continuing to keep yourself, to keep yourself attuned with those movements. When you get back to the offseason, you can kind of, you know, get back into things fairly quickly in terms of you being prepared, and that's going to pay very, very big dividends for you. And going along with that is going to help you to prevent injuries, right? So again, these coaches who are like, oh, I don't want you doing anything that hurt me. Well, if your players are working on their strength and they're in the weight room doing the right things, they're probably going to be more resilient to injuries as well, right? I think the big thing, and this is something that I got from Paul Fabritz is. He was talking about how, you know, why is it that if we want to talk about all these players getting hurt, injuries are up, it's because players are doing too much. Well, maybe, but let's look at, you know, let's look at little kids, right? You have a kid who's 5, 6 years old who's at the playground and he's jumping off the slide, he's jumping off the, the monkey bars and doing all these like, big drops, right? I mean, you look at like strength training. You talk about like depth drops. Like, those are like, that's a specific exercise or depth jumps that are like, it's very strenuous on you. You're not supposed to do a ton of reps. You're probably going to get prescribed like three sets of three reps, right? And that might be all the depth jumps that you do for an entire workout. And there are little kids out there who go to the playground and do depth jumps from, from their entire, like, you know, their, whatever their height is, they're jumping, they're doing depth drops from four feet off the ground, and they're doing that 50 times in a day. And the kids aren't getting, you know, overuse injuries and major knee injuries and all this sort of stuff. Why is that? Well, it's just because they're, they're adapt. Like they're able to do that. Like, they, they have adapted themselves to doing that, right? They go out and play in the playground every day. That's just what they do. Their body is, has adjusted to it. That's, that's what, you know, the human body has an incredible ability to adapt. And you look at like even in other animals, right? You look at like a kangaroo. Kangaroos are just jumping around all day. And kangaroos have these like, crazy strong Achilles tendons. Well, why is that? It's because they've evolved over years to have to have those strong Achilles tendons to handle the force that's put on their bodies because of how much jumping they do, right? If, if a kangaroo just stopped jumping for like, you know, nine months and then tried to get back into it, probably going to be bad for their Achilles 10. If they're going to try and put all that force on it again, probably going to see a snap of that Achilles because they just didn't do anything for nine months, right? So when it comes to actually building more resiliency, the biggest thing is that you, first of all, don't try and go from 0 to 100 with stuff so you don't say, hey, I'm lifting 0 days a week now. So I'm going to start lifting five days a week, going super hard. That's asking you to overdo it and potentially hurt yourself. Right? You don't want to do that. But if you gradually ramp yourself up over time, you give your body the ability to adapt. And the human body is very, very, very adaptable to things. So when you have these, these kids who are doing all these, these crazy plyometrics unknowingly out in the playground, it's not that, you know, it's not that they are. There's anything different about them. It's just that they have, their body's adapted to it. So you're able to do that same thing as well when it comes to the amount of activity that you're doing. Right. And this is where it also comes into you listening to your body. Right? So if you are trying to lift three days a week, but you just had a game on Monday, maybe you let's say you had a practice Monday and then you had a light lift, and then we'll see you practice Tuesday and maybe you had a game on Wednesday and maybe you were going to lift on Thursday, but you just were feeling really sluggish, really tired, sore. You got a game Friday, skip the lift. Right. Again, we're trying to get back up to 100% by the time Friday comes around. You got to play. That's what matters. So you have to listen to what your body is telling you to do. If your body's telling you to relax, then relax. If your body's saying, hey, I can do a little bit more, then you can do a little bit more. So that's another skill that you have to kind of develop and be able to listen to your body and not overdo things. Like you have to go hard every single time that you're in the gym or in the weight room. And that's going to be a big thing for you. So that, that really is the biggest thing when it comes to end season training, is just listening to what your body's telling you, being cognizant of that and again, understanding that it's okay to scale back if the goal is to perform at your best right now, which is what it should be, is you want to be at 100% when game time comes around. So you got to do what you got to do to make that happen. Okay? But again, there's certainly ways that you can still incorporate on court, in the weight room and still make progress in both, but also see those benefits that'll actually help your performance right now as well and maximize what you can do right now and also keep you safe from injuries, too. So there's a lot there. But hopefully this gives you guys some ideas on how you can kind of go about your training and how you should approach things this season so that you can maximize your performance and ultimately play the best that you can. Because again, we spent all this time off season training so that we can get here and play well. So now we want to make sure that we're doing, we're doing everything in our power right now to maximize the work that you put in and maximize your current performance. So hopefully that gave you guys some ideas that helped you guys out. If you guys enjoyed this podcast, make sure you let me know in the comments below on YouTube or drop a review for me on Apple podcast. Again, I appreciate that a lot. And like I said, give me a follow on Instagram @visiondrivenbasketball. You have any questions for me, send me a DM, whatever. And again, I appreciate you guys for listening. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.