Stop Trying To Look Good in Practice

Foreign podcast. Thank you everybody for tuning in this week. Really appreciate it. If you guys are an Apple podcast, I really would love it. If you scroll down to the bottom page right now, leave a five star review. Really helps out the podcast. Helps more people to find it, helps us grow, helps me bring you guys more content. So if you guys take a little bit of time right now, so scroll down, click that five star, that'd be awesome. If you're on YouTube right now, make sure you leave a like on this video and subscribe if you're new. I have a new podcast coming every single week, so be on the lookout for that. Plenty of videos and also other different topics. Just put out a video this past week on a film breakdown on how to attack, close out how to beat your defender. So I got a lot of stuff coming out like that. So you guys are going to want to stay tuned and see that as well and really going to help you guys out. And while we're at it, my Instagram at Vision Driven Basketball. And if you guys have any questions and you just want to see stuff I post on there, once again, more stuff related to what we're talking about, go ahead and give me a follow there at VisionDriven Basketball. And that's awesome. So again, appreciate you guys for tuning in today. And we're gonna talk about something today that a lot of you guys have heard me talk about before. Specifically, I thought about this after I had a live ball handler working on YouTube yesterday. So I was just kind of thinking about this whole, like, the whole topic. Well, it'll be three days to go from when you guys see this, but yesterday I'm recording this on a, on a Friday. So Thursday I had a live ball handling workout. And there's something I say during every single one of those workouts that again, those of you guys who've tuned in before, tuned into multiple of those will recognize it. But, you know, I'll hop into that in a second. But you know, one thing I want to talk about, kind of to lead off, this is going to be kind of a reoccurring theme is just, you know, kind of an epidemic that we have throughout the world right now. Obviously, play on words, but people, people literally based their entire lives off of Instagram. And this is kind of how we're trending. Obviously this is not a new part of, you know, human, human motivation, human psychology. But now it's just we have the social media, so we kind of live our entire lives through that at this point. You know, people can craft an entire image online that a lot of times is completely different than what they actually are like in person. Right. Their real life might be completely different than the image that you or I might see of them on Instagram or on YouTube or on Snapchat or on any sort of social media platform. So, and the thing is with that, like the majority of people these days are guilty of that to an extent. You know, not everyone to the same extent, but they're, I think every single one of us is guilty of it. And it's not always necessarily wrong, but that's kind of how things are. And that is something to always keep in mind. Something that's crucial to keep in mind is that what people post on Instagram is the highlights, right? That's the highlights of their life, okay? That's not their normal day to day. That's not, you know, that's not the bad stuff. Of course not. That's just, that's the highlights of their day or, or of the moment that they're in at that point. And that's what you see. So seeking out highlights is basically the way that we've become wired to live, right? So everything that we do, we're trying to find highlights out of it so we can get the next Instagram post, you know, that next, that next Snapchat story, whatever it might be. And from a basketball perspective, we can think about it in, in terms of when you see players who post pictures or more specifically post, you know, workout videos, right? You see a player who posts like a 30 second clip of them working out. You know, it's edited, got music with it. You're seeing them make all these plays, right? You're seeing the highlights of that workout because at the end of the day, you're seeing 30 to 45 seconds of an hour and a half workout, right? So you aren't seeing any of the missed shots. You aren't seeing any times they dribble the ball off their, off of their feet. You aren't seeing the time they missed the layup during that workout. You're not seeing that. You're seeing the dunks they had. You're seeing the threes they hit. You're seeing these great moves that they made, right? You're not seeing the actual entire part of it, okay? So if you start to believe that that's how your practices should always look with you making these great plays every single time, never should be any misses, never should be any mess ups, that's going to stunt your growth long term, okay? For A lot of these guys, not all of them, but for a lot of guys, the extent of. Of their workouts. Okay, can I get a picture? Can I get a video? And then, boom, now I can prove I'm in the gym working out. I did this, I did that. And that's kind of the extent, right? So if that's. And that's the image, they're going to craft themselves, right? They're going to craft the image of, you know, I'm a Hooper, I'm in the gym every day doing this and doing that, which is fine, but really, it means nothing to you, okay? What they post, their. Their 30 seconds of their workout that they post doesn't mean anything to you, because there. There are going to be ups and downs of that workout. There are parts of that workout that were just as bad as those good as those good parts were good. Right? So that's what you need to keep in mind. And again, by no means am I saying that that's every single player, but what I'm saying is you need to stop wanting everything to be a highlight reel because it shouldn't be and it's not going to be. And there's. There's a lot that you don't see that goes into it, okay? So a lot of times this causes issues because now all of a sudden, we're trying to chase perfection in our workouts, okay? Now, obviously, we want to become great, okay? You want to become great throughout your workouts. You want to get better every single day, okay? But if it becomes about you being perfect in your workouts, but you not making, you not messing up every play has to be perfect, then you're going to struggle and it's going to hurt you long term if you approach things that way. Okay? Practice and workouts should not be a time where everything is perfect. It's the time for things to be imperfect, for you to mess things up, for you to look bad, okay? It's the time to try new things. And really, it's how you expand your abilities as a player. Because when you're in the season, that's the time where practice needs to be a little bit more perfect. Okay? When you're in your team practices, that's the time where really there's not. There's not a lot of room for mistakes. Okay? Maybe, you know, there could be a mistake in a play you guys are running, but in terms of individual training, there's not a ton of room for you to be messing things up all the time. Okay? When we talk about off season workouts, talk about your own personal workouts. That's where things become a little more, a little bit different. Where you have the freedom now to not have to be perfect, okay? And because of that, you're going to find that you're, that's where you're going to hit the most amount of growth, okay? And you can't do that by not messing things up from time to time. You're going to have to mess things up. You're going to have to. There's really no way of getting around it. And that's in every, every aspect of your life. But basketball specifically, you're going to have to mess things up for you to get better at doing it as a whole. Okay? And again, so going back to what I was talking about, my live ball handling workouts where, you know, a bunch of you guys are on. And it was a good workout. But something that I always say in every workout at times is, you know, guys like you cannot be afraid to lose the basketball. What we're doing these drills like, you can't be afraid to, to dribble the ball, your foot, or to lose the basketball because you're, you're going too fast or because you know you just missed the ball. If you go through an entire workout and you don't mess up any of the drills that we do, you probably weren't pushing yourself hard enough. You probably didn't get, didn't get better the way that you probably could have. Okay? And staying inside of your comfort zone the whole time during, during that workout is not what you want to do if you want to get better. And that's what I always remind my guys when we're doing our workouts is like, listen, you can mess this up, you can lose the ball right here because at the end of the day, you're going to continue to get more comfortable with that. As you mess it up one time, you might mess it up again. Maybe you get it the third time, okay? Now all of a sudden that's your normal right there. All, all of a sudden that speed that you couldn't handle before, you messed it up a couple times. Then all of a sudden you started to pick it up and you got it slowly, slowly. Now all of a sudden that's what you can do and you're comfortable with doing that now. Now you raised it up again. All of a sudden you're making all this progress because you messing something up wasn't what deterred you from pushing yourself still. Okay? And that's how you get better. Now, this doesn't mean you should be out of control with the stuff that you do. It just means that you need to find the right zone that's going to push you slightly farther than, than what you're comfortable with. And, you know, the, the kind of going along with that, you've probably heard coaches talk about, you know, making practices harder than games. Right. You know, so if I make, you know, if practices are really, really difficult, then you're going to get into games and games are going to feel easy. Okay. And obviously, you know, you can never truly simulate a game in practice. You know, you can play, you know, you can scrimmage, you can, you can play pick up. You can do all these things. But the. It's always something different about a game where you have reps and you have fans and you have a time. You know, you have a clock and some cases a shot clock as well. It's just a little. It's just different. But there's a lot of things you can do to simulate that. But what you can do is you can break down individual situations and make those more difficult in the game. That's very, very possible. And that the whole notion of making practices more difficult than games, that's something that I completely, wholeheartedly agree with. And I think that it's something that, that, that we should all look to try and do. And you can do that with your own workouts, with the workouts you guys are doing right now, you can do that for yourself. And obviously, again, we've covered ball handling where I say, when you do your ball handling drills, make sure that you are pushing yourself. You're finding that limit that's a little bit past what you're comfortable doing. And you're constantly getting to that point, constantly getting to the point where you're really pushing the way the speed you can do things or the pace you're doing things at, you're getting better because of it. You're not staying in your comfort zone because of it. And speaking of ball handling, within probably the next two weeks, so kind of getting closer. I'm putting kind of the finishing touches on recording, editing, building all the stuff I need to build for my elite ball handling program that's coming out again very, very soon. And, you know, I talked about a little bit on the live yesterday, but it's going to be, you know, for those of you guys who struggle with your confidence with the basketball, you know, you struggle at handling pressure. You know, you want to be a guy that your coaches and your teammates trust with the ball. You know, maybe you. You have issues turning the ball over. Maybe you just feel like your handles aren't where they need to be. This program is going to really be a game changer for you guys because it's really going to target the areas that you're going to need to improve upon if you want to be a great ball handler. And, you know, I talked about it. I've done a lot of. A lot of research on this over the past, really since. For this entire year. And I, you know, I was talking about. My ball handling has never been better just because I've implemented a ton of the stuff that I've been. I've been. I've been learning. And it really. The thing with ball handling is that it's. There's a lot of stuff that's a part of it that is a little bit more. It's. It's a lot more complex than you might think that it is. Right. It seems really simple. Let's go out and dribble ball. But there's a. There's all different type, you know, parts of ball handling. It's not just about, I can dribble basketball. It's also about your pace, your height, your ability to react and be creative with the ball. There's a bunch of things that I'm going to talk about in more detail very, very soon that is really going to help you guys out. So again, if you guys, if you guys have any sort of struggle with. With your ball handling, this is going to come out soon, be very, very helpful for you guys. So I'm going to keep you guys updated on that. You're going to be hearing a lot more about it over the coming couple weeks, so be on the lookout for that. But again, we talk about ball handling. You can take your drills you're doing and make sure you push yourself to the right to, you know, right past the edge of your comfort zone so that you get better at what you're doing. Okay, now we can talk about shooting because shooting is a little bit different the way that I would approach it personally in terms of trying to. To push yourself. You know, what I'll do with a lot of players, especially guys who. A little bit more advanced, you know, if you're not quite as advanced as a shooter or if you're trying to, you know, remake your shooting form, which we'll talk about in a second. If I'm taking a player who's a pretty good shooter, we might take some drills, and instead of you know, we'll say. We'll say, you know, five. Five spots, five shots, right? Where you have the two baselines, two wings in the top, where you got to make five. Five shots at each. We might say, okay, you know what? You've got to make four in a row at each spot to go to the next spot. So you're gonna start in the corner. You've got to make four shots in a row before you can move to the next spot, okay? So now all of a sudden, that has a whole other dimension of pressure onto every single shot, because you can make one shot, you can make two shots in a row, you can make three shots. If you don't make that fourth shot, you're back at zero. You got to start over again. So you really got to be able to focus and keep up that. That same level of intensity the entire time. And there's really. You don't get any shocked off, okay? So that's going to take you. You got to get through all those spots, making four in a row. Now all of a sudden, you get back into a game, and it's like, oh, man, now I'm. I'm just making this one shot. It's going to feel much more automatic. You're going to have less pressure on those shots because you're so. You're so used to having to make the shot, you're like, man, I have to make this shot, right? When you're in practice, like, 2, 3, 4, like, there's no option to miss the shot, okay? When it's just five shots, you can be like, oh, you know, I missed it, but hey, you know, I have my next one, right? But also, you got to make four in a row. That. That has a whole other level of pressure to each shot you're gonna take, which is. Which is really good. When we talk about developing your confidence as a shooter and again, making things just more difficult in general. So that's something to consider as well, you know? And it might not just be that we might say, you know, we might take those five spots again, and we'll go, you know, nine for 10 shooting. So how that. What that means that you're gonna have to make. You're gonna have to make nine shots at each spot, and you can't do that with that. You cannot miss more than two in a row, right? So you start in the corner, you gotta make nine shots, but if you miss two in a row, you're back at zero, okay? So you can choose your first one. You make it, miss Your second one, make your third one. Cool. You're at two. You're at two makes now. Okay? Make your next one, make your next one. You miss two in a row. Back at zero, okay? And it could be for really any number, could be four. You can make four without missing two in a row, five, whatever you want it to be. But I'm just talking about ways to add pressure, add difficulty to the drills that you're doing right now and make it with shooting. Specifically adding, you know, requiring yourself to have to make a certain amount of shots in a row is a great way to do that. You can do it with different types of moves. So you can do it. You can say, okay, five spots. I've got to make a right handed pull up, a left handed pull up, and then two catch and shoot threes. I got to make all four of those shots in a row before I can go to the next spot. There's literally an unlimited amount of shots you can add to this, and unlimited type of shots you can add to this that are going to make everything a lot, a lot more challenging for you. Okay? And you know, I mean, literally I can keep going. You could say, okay, you're going to alternate your ranges. This is actually very difficult when you alternate your ranges. So you say, okay, you know what, I got to make six shots in a row. I'm going to make one mid range, one three. One mid range, one three. One mid range, one three. Okay, you got to make all six of those to go to the next spot right there. All of a sudden you can add all these different types of drills, but that pressure of having to make them in a row is going to make it a lot more difficult and a lot more challenging for you. So highly recommend you guys, you guys try that out if you can. And again, you're going to see the payoff because of that. So when we talk about shooting and ball handling, those are really the two things that I would say are really going to be helpful for you guys. And, and you know, again, this is, this is just a concept that's everywhere in basketball. Okay. Because I also have talked about before, like, you know, you want to find players who are better than you and play against them, right? When I talk about pickup, like, you want to try and go find the best players possible to play against. Because now when you go playing as guys who aren't as good, right? If you go find the best player in your area, you know, maybe that's not feasible, but you go find, you know, your teammate who's the best player on the team. You go play one on one against him every day, okay? Now, when you get back to the season and you're playing as guys who aren't as good, well, it's going to be easier for you, okay? So that's, that's, that's the mindset you need to take. And I always talk about how, you know, if I'm playing pickup somewhere, like, I love walking into the gym and being the worst player in the gym. Like, I love that because for me that means that first of all, I'm in a, you know, it's going to be good basketball. First of all, if I'm the worst player in the gym, it's going to be good basketball in that gym. And that means I'm going to have to raise my entire level of, of play. Okay? I'm going to have to stick to what I do well, but I'm going to have to also do some other things that I'm going to have to do. If I'm one of the better players in the gym, right, there might be things that I can get away with doing. I'm going to have to try as hard on defense. I'm going to have to be as cautious with, you know, with the ball in my hands. I might not have to be as quick on my shot, right? I'm able to take more time. I might be able to make different sorts of reads that might be there, but now maybe they aren't there, or maybe there's reads that wouldn't be there before, but now they are there that I have to be able to make or, okay, everything's going to change depending on who I'm playing. But when I'm going against guys who are really, really good, that's gonna, that's gonna force me to be better as well. And long term, again, that's better for you. Because then if I go back to any other gym where I'm not the worst player there, all of a sudden, like, things are just easy. It's really, really easy at that point. So, you know, competition is such a massive part of everything. And again, kind of the overarching theme, if, if, if the issue is that you can't, you aren't able to handle this. You aren't able to handle missing shots in practice. You aren't able to, you are able to handle losing the basketball in practice or in workouts. You aren't able to handle losing to someone who's better than you in practice. You want to, if you try to avoid that stuff. You're not going to, you're not going to see the rate of development you might want to see. Okay? You need to be willing to look bad in practice. You've got to be willing to do that. You got to be willing to say, you know what, it's okay to look bad right now. It's okay to lose right now. It's okay to lose the basketball, it's okay to miss. It's okay if it takes me 20 minutes to get through this spot because I'm trying to make shots in a row. It's okay if that happens right now. It's okay if I lose to somebody who's better than me right now because long term is going to make me better. Okay? That's kind of the point of all this. Long term, you have to stop thinking short term, short term. It's not fun to lose. To lose someone better than you. It's not fun to do that. Okay? It's not fun to go into a gym and have to make four shots in a row and you keep getting stuck at three. That's not fun, right? It's not fun to be doing ball handling drills that are difficult and you keep losing the ball. That's not fun. It doesn't look good. It's just. No one wants to do that, right? But you have to think about a long term. Long term, again, as you start to get more comfortable making those shots, you, you get more comfortable doing that ball handling stuff. You get more comfortable playing against guys who are better. That's going to make you better. Long term, your level is going to elevate as you continue to do that over and over and over and over again. It's going to suck the first few times and it start to get better, better and better and better. You're going to get better and better and better and you're going to see that improvement right there. So, you know, that's kind of, that's kind of the, the, the really major point you need to take away from this. And, and the other thing I'll talk about is, are you willing to have that long term approach. Are you willing to be okay with looking bad right now so that when the games come, you look good, you want to look bad in practice so that when the games are here, you look good? Or is it something like, I gotta look cool right now, I gotta look cool practice, I gotta just be cool about everything. And then when the games come, you're not going to be the level that you probably could be. At, okay, the players who are great are willing to look bad at times. They're willing, they're okay with that because they understand the payoff long term. You know, are you willing to spend a couple weeks close to the basket shooting while you change your shooting form? Is that a sacrifice you're willing to make? Are you okay with like not being able to shoot threes for a little bit because you're trying to fix something on your form? You know, maybe you guys have heard this story, but Steph Curry, when he was in high school, when he was a sophomore in high school, so he was, he was already playing, you know, he was, he was going to be a varsity guy as a sophomore. So, you know, he was, you know, again, like it was important part of his high school career. He's trying to, you know, kind of cement his place at his school. And you know, he was, he was a good shooter at that point, a really good shooter at that point. But his release point was really low because he was always really small. And because of that, he had kind of a very shot that was very easily blocked by higher level defense. So, you know, his dad, obviously being Dell Curry, said, you know, if you want to play in college, Steph, you're going to have to change your form because you're just, it's going to get blocked too easily at that level. And so Steph Curry, that, that off season of his sophomore year, spent the entire time rebuilding his form, moving the release point of his shot, changing up all of these things because it would pay off for him long term. And there's a quote that, that he had where he says, you know, I really couldn't shoot outside the paint for like the first three weeks all summer when I was at camp, people were like, who are you? Why are you playing basketball? I was really that bad for a month and a half before I finally figured it out. So Steph Curry was, he was already a really good shooter at that point. Already was a, was a really good player at that point, but made that change, made the sacrifice to look bad where he had to go to these camps where all his friends are all these people, like, man, like, you're bad. Like, you can't shoot. Like, what are you doing here? Right? He was willing to go through that, he was willing to go through looking bad for a little bit because he understood, okay, if I keep, if I stick with it, if I, if I can push through this long term, it's going to pay off for me and I'm going to look good. Obviously that the rest is history because he's the best shooter of all time. But he was willing to make that sacrifice. Think about this. If he's not willing to do that, if he's not willing to look bad for a period of time, where is he now? He's not the best shooter of all time, I'll tell you that much. Maybe he's still in the NBA, but if he can't get his shot off, what good is it to be a great shooter? Okay, now he's got a shot that is basically unblockable, that he can basically get over anybody, that he can get off very, very quickly. And that all came because of those sacrifices that he made. That the time that he was willing to put in to looking bad to again spending three weeks in the paint shooting basketball, right? Everybody wants to walk in the gym and shoot threes, but you know, this guy's willing to walk in the gym and slowly get back to the level that needs to be at. Okay? And again, we see the finished product now. Okay, we see Steph Curry, right now. We see, man, Steph Curry, so great. He's going to go to heal these three, all these crazy shots, like all these, the handles, all this stuff. We see Steph Curry now the two time mvp, the, the NBA champion. What we don't see is, we don't see that summer that he, that he spent his sophomore year. We don't see that. We don't see the three weeks of shooting in the paint only. We don't see the long, the long days where he's trying to fix his form and it just feels like everything's going wrong, right? We don't, we don't see those camps he went to then where everyone's like, man, this guy's terrible. He can't shoot at all. We don't see those things. We don't see all the misses that he probably had to go through. Okay. We don't see all the makes that he had to make to get to this point as well. So all we see is the end point. And what I want to relate back to is again, all we see when we look at Instagram, we see these, these highlight tapes, all this stuff. We see the finished product, we see the best of the best. We don't see the missed shots, we don't see the turnovers, we don't see the time that they had to spend doing this or doing that. We, we see the end product. So again, don't try and compare what you're doing with somebody's you know, 30 second clip, okay? Be willing to look bad in practice, be willing to make those sacrifices so that long term you come out ahead, you come out in a position to where you can all of a sudden be that guy. You, you can make those plays, you can be consistent because you've built a great foundation, a great base, and that's really what it comes down to. I also think that there, there's a major, major correlation between your willingness to look bad in practice and how you can respond in games. If you're too insecure to look bad at all in practice, how are you going to respond in a game where you, you know, you miss some shots? What if you come out in a game, you air ball your first shot, like what, what's your reaction to it? Because if you're too insecure to ever look bad, you can never look bad. Even when there's nobody in the gym, you're by yourself, working on something, you get in the gym, there's people there, coaches there, like, that can really, you can crumble at that point if you're not used to being able to do that. So that not only is going to help you build your physical skills, but mentally just knowing to yourself, okay, you know what, I'm okay with looking bad. Like, I can get over it. It's not something that's a big deal to me. That in itself is going to help you out as well. So multifaceted part, multifaceted approach to all this. So again, kind of the point I'm trying to make through all of this is stop trying to look good in practice. I say that to my guys all the time. Stop trying to look good in your workouts. Just go out there and push yourself and get better. Okay? Forget about how things look in the short term because the reps add up. I always talk about the shooting. When you're shooting a basketball, there's going to be days where you are just terrible. You're just going to miss shots. There's going to be days that you're just going to be bad. That's to be expected. Everyone has days like that. But the reps add up. Okay? So you're going to see, right, if it's a graph, okay, if it's a graph that you got, it's going to be heading in that direction, right? Going up, okay. It's not going to be a straight line. It's going to be kind of up, down, up, down, up, down. But as the reps add up, you continue to go up with it, okay? So you can't look at one day and be like, oh, I was bad this day because I'm a worse shooter. Well, no, no, no, no. You've got to look at long term. These reps add up. So over the years, as you continue to shoot and get better and better and better, those reps you put up four years ago still matter to this day. They still matter. Okay? They still are building into that muscle memory that you're going to do to develop, okay? So understand the reps add up. Be willing to do those little things to do the things that make you uncomfortable. Live on the edge of that comfort zone when you're training, okay? Especially when it's something that you're trying to drill in. Obviously there's going to be times where we can talk about you're adding in a new move or something where you slow it down. That's cool. But once you have those things down, you're going through your shooting, your ball handling, kind of the more basic stuff. Get on the edge of that comfort zone, push yourself, get better right there. And I promise you guys, that's going to pay off and you're going to see long term returns on that investment that you're making right there. So that's what I wanted to cover today, a topic that I talk about all the time I get on my live workouts. But I wanted to go more in depth on it to kind of explain to you guys why I think this, why it's going to be helpful for you guys. And hopefully you guys can take this forward with you throughout the rest of your workouts, your training, you know, again, first, I want to give a shout out to everybody who is in my DMs every, like literally every day about the perimeter score system. Doing great stuff with that. So shout out to all you guys who are in there working. Again, really, I'm really excited to see how this season goes for a lot of you guys because the improvements so far have been great. Like I said, elite ball handling program coming out very, very soon. That will be, you know, that that's. I'm again, I'm going to continue to update you guys on stuff that's coming up. I'm going to be putting out a video next week, either next week or the week after, talking about the four major keys you need to develop. You want to be a great ball handler and all four of those are areas that we're going to cover heavily in elite ball handling. So again, like I said, for those of you guys who struggle with your handles who want to get to that next level. This is going to be a game changer for you guys so again be on the lookout for that. Super excited to get going with it. Going to be as soon as I'm done recording this I'll be back to working on that. So best believe I'm super excited and it's going to be well worth the wait for all of you guys. So again I really appreciate all you guys tuning in. Apple Podcast go ahead and leave a review below if you're on YouTube like and subscribe and as always you have questions for me guys give me a follow on Instagram visiondriven Basketball send me a DM and I'm always answering questions every single day and again a lot of times the questions I answer are what I talk about my podcast. So again any questions go ahead and send it to me. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.