Ethan Khoza says 5-8 hour basketball workouts backfire because you can't maintain game speed that long. He recommends 1-2 hour focused sessions instead, where you can hit near 100% intensity reps that actually carry over to games.
Questions this video answers
Between an hour and two hours.
Yes—two sessions per day are fine if you give your body rest between them so you can go 100% each session.
At most two hours, but for most people more likely about an hour and a half.
Chapters
So here's the question. Should you be working out for five hours a day if you want to get better? Now, obviously, I'm picking five hours because that's just a random time, but really the question is, should you be working out for as many hours as possible every single day? If you really want to see the most improvement as a basketball player, let's get into it now. A lot of times I'll talk to players, I'll get messages from players who talk about what their plan is for getting better over the offseason. And a lot of times they'll bring up working out as many hours as possible per day and think that that is what's going to take them to the level they want to get to. They hear all the stories about various players who worked out for eight hours a day and then ended up playing professional basketball. Or they have a friend who claims that they work out for six hours a day and their friend's really good. Or maybe they hear somebody on YouTube talk about how you need to work out for eight hours a day if you want to become a great basketball player. Growing up, I heard all of these, and at one point I actually believed that that was true, that you had to work out for five, six, seven, eight hours a day if you wanted to be a great basketball player. But notion is completely false. Let's talk about it off the bat. It makes sense, right? The more hours you spend on a basketball court, the better you're gonna get. The more shots you can get up, all that. But you gotta consider, we want to make sure that our results transfer into games. You've heard of the term practice player before. That's a player who does great in practice, but when the games come, they don't do anything. You don't want to be a practice player, you want to be a game player, right? So we gotta make sure that our practice prepares us for the games. And if we're working out for eight hours, that's not game. Like you don't play a game eight hours. Your game is maybe an hour and a half long. So why would we make our practices eight hours and then think that's going to help us when we have an hour and a half long game? So here's the thing. When you work out for eight hours a day, you're not really working out for eight hours. You're going to get there, you're going to shoot around for an hour, you're going to take a little bit of a break, you're going to mess around, shoot Some crazy shots you got to kill eight hours of time. You're not going to be able to spend eight dedicated hours straight working out. And even if you could do that, your body can only go at 100% for a maximum of two hours, probably more likely an hour and a half for most people. So if we're gonna work out for eight hours, at least six of those hours are not going to be effective. Game speed, 100% reps you're gonna be getting in, they're gonna be less than 100%. Meaning when you get to games and you have to go 100%, all those reps that you did are gonna mean nothing because they weren't at 100%. So they're not going to help you when you need to be at 100%. So we need to make sure that we gear our workouts for our actual goals, which is to play better in games when the lights turn on and it's game time. So you should never be working out for five hours, for six hours, for eight hours. That should never happen. We want to make sure that our workouts are between an hour and two hours long because that is the perfect time. We're going to be able to give 100% towards our workouts. And at the same time, we're not going to be not giving enough. Here's an analogy I'll use. Imagine you want to climb to the top of Mount Everest. You have to make sure that you climb far enough, but you also have to make sure that you don't climb too far, because both of them are going to be counteracted to what if you don't climb far enough, you won't get to the peak. But if you climb too far, you're going to climb over the peak and back down the other side of the mountain. That's what this is like. If you don't work out for long enough, you're not going to get to the peak to the best spot where you're going to be able to get into that prime training zone. But if you work out for too long, you're going to overextend it. You're going to end up going against what you're actually looking to do, which is get better at game speed, game reps. So like I said, your workout should be between an hour and two hours long. And obviously, if you need examples of workouts to use, I've got a ton of them linked up above. Check out my playlist. There's going to be a ton of workouts you guys can use there. And going along with that, I'm going to be dropping a program in a couple of months that I know is going to help you guys get better. And best of all, everything can be between an hour and two hours long. And it's going to really supercharge the way you guys can play. Like I said, check out the workouts I have on the page. They're going to get you guys better and make sure you guys don't fall into the trap of thinking you have to work out for too long. Now, one thing that players also say is, well, coach, can I work out two times a day? And that is definitely fine. And that's something that I've done. It's something a lot of players do. Where you might get up in the morning, go to the gym for a couple hours to train, you're going to go back home and go through the rest of your day. And then that evening, that night, you're going to go back for another hour and a half and train again. That's fine because you're giving your body a chance to rest in between those workouts so you can go 100% for both of them. But the issue becomes when we think that we have to go for five hours straight, you don't want to do that. You want to make sure if you're going to go for multiple times, you give yourself a chance to rest in between so that you can hit it going 100% every time that you go, that's when you're going to see the results. If you're frustrated because you feel like you put in a lot of hours of practice and you don't see game results, evaluate the way that you're training. Are you going 100% game speed for every single rep? Well, if you're not, then that's the issue. So you need to make sure you adjust how you train. It's not about the amount of time that you spend in the gym. It's about what you do with the time in the gym. If you get in the gym for eight hours and you're just messing around going 75%, doesn't matter if you get in the gym for 45 minutes, but you're going 100%, that's much more effective than the opposite. If you guys like this video, go ahead and leave a like and subscribe. Click the link in my description below to to join our private basketball training group. I'm giving you guys free workouts, personal coaching for me, and a ton of exclusive stuff. I want to see every single one of you guys in there. Like I said, link in the description below 100% free. Just go ahead and click on it, enter your email. I'll send you guys the link to it, and we'll see you guys in there. Like I said, if you enjoyed the video, subscribe. Hit the little black button right here to make it easy. Guys, I really appreciate it. And drop a comment for me. Let me know what you guys want to see next. That's it, guys. Peace.
