The 3 BIGGEST Keys To Having A Successful Season (Podcast Episode 101)

Foreign welcome to the Vision of Fast Trading podcast. Appreciate you guys, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, wherever else we've been listening from. And of course, everybody right now who's watching on YouTube, shout out to you guys, you're on YouTube right now. Make sure you drop a like subscribe. If you're new, leave a comment, let me know what you think. If you have any questions, any podcast suggestions for me, let me know for sure. And if you guys are on Apple podcasts, go and leave a review for me. I always appreciate when you guys do that and Spotify as well. You can leave me review. Obviously, you know, we're into November right now. Season starting up, team that I'm coaching with, we started up this week, so I wanted to take some time and talk about three keys to having a successful season as a player. And I think that if you really commit to these three areas, it's going to put you in the best position to play at your best, right? We're now in the season where we need to perform and everything that we do needs to be with performance in mind. Meaning that a lot of my podcasts talk about the learning side of things, where, okay, how do we get better at this? How do we continue to improve? How do we challenge ourselves? How do we expand our capacity to perform? But there's the key word, right? There is perform, right? We're trying to expand our ability to perform, but at some point we have to perform. And this is where we now need to be able to perform at our best every single time that we step out on the court for every game that we're, you know, that we're a part of, right? And that is really what these keys are going to play towards. How do you make sure you perform at your best as often as possible? Because that's why we work the whole, the whole, the whole year is so that when we get to the season, when these games matter and you have to be your best, you're prepared to do so. You're prepared to perform at the best of your ability. So the first thing, the first key to having a successful season is to control the controllables, right? So this is the common sense stuff, but I think it needs to be said anyway because I think that is important. So showing up, bringing your best every single day, right? Bringing the energy, bringing your effort, trying to be your best every single day, regardless of how you're feeling, working through those days, when you're tired, when you're a little banged up, you know, when you, you don't feel like it because it's a long season and we'll talk more about that specifically. But, you know, you're not going to feel like it every single day. So are you still able to bring your best on those days? And that, I think is half the battle with a lot of this is just being able to show up, right, and do your best. Because most, most people can't do that. Being able to do that for a long period of time consistently is very, very difficult to do. So if you're able to do that, that, that immediately gives you a leg up on a lot of, a lot of other people who aren't going to be able to do that. And so ultimately that's, that's the first controllable that you need to take care of is bringing your best every single day. The second thing is eating enough, sleeping enough, drinking enough water, doing those sorts of things to make sure that your body is ready to go every single day. You know, really making sure that you are. If, you know, if you have any little injuries, you have any sort of issues, you're getting that taken care of, whether it's seeing your trainer or stretching or whatever that might look like for you, making sure that you're taking care of your body. And you know, if you're not taking care of your body, you're not going to put yourself in the best position to perform at your maximum capacity. So there's another very important thing. It's not just about showing up and going to practice every day. It's also about what you do outside of practice, outside of games, that's going to affect you when you step onto that court. Okay? So understanding those things as well is very important. So the first thing and the most common sense thing is control. The controllables, the things that you can do to be at your best, control those things, your effort, your energy, the food you eat, the, you know, drinking enough water, getting up sleep, doing those sorts of things. That's the first part of this. Number two is don't backtrack on the process, the progress that you made in the offseason, right? So making sure that, you know, you can, you know, outside of your practices, right? Team practices, you're not going to get a ton of individual skill work, right? You're not going to be able to get a ton of shots up. You're not going to be able to really focus on making sure that you stay sharp. So finding opportunities outside of those practices to still get your, your reps in. So whether that means you're Able to go before practice, after practice, maybe meet you define a time to go to the gym, you know, outside of your practice times, make sure that you're not getting dull. Because what happens to a lot of players, and this relates to a couple different. A couple different areas, but they'll start the season off at their peak, right? They've been working the whole offseason, and they're at their peak come November, December, whenever the season starts for them. And then they stop trying to keep themselves sharp. They stop putting in, you know, that extra work. They stop getting those shots up. They stop working on the things that they were working on. And as the season goes on, they continue to get duller and duller. And then by the time, you know, they get to the. The end of the season, they get to the playoffs, whenever, when they need to be at their best, they're actually worse than they were when the season started because they haven't been keeping themselves sharp. Okay? So making sure that you find time, you make time to be able to get your work in and keep yourself sharp. I think the other kind of relating to what I was saying earlier about performance versus learning, right? When we're in the season, I say this to my players all the time. During workouts, especially when we're in, like, September, October, it's like, I really don't care if you, like, kind of feel bad about yourself when you leave because you didn't. You don't feel like you shot well in this workout. Like, that's kind of my goal sometimes is like, I'm trying to make you miss shots. I'm trying to see where you're at, how can we expand what you're able to do. That's going to require, you know, you missing sometimes. And that's going to mean some days you're going to leave and not feel super confident in yourself. Come winter, when it's time to perform, I'm just trying to make sure that confidence is at its highest as much as possible, right? So when you think about getting your work in, you just need to think about putting yourself in a position to where you feel confident in what you need to do. So if you feel like, hey, I got to be able to hit this corner three, well, I'm just going to shoot till I feel confident in my corner. Threes today, that's going to be the extra work I put in. I'm not necessarily looking to do a set number, right? And we talk about extra work. This can mean, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes of work. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. Again, we're just thinking about what can I do, how can I show up to make sure that I keep my skills sharp. But most importantly, I remain as confident as I can be in the things I need to be able to do. And I think that's really, really important is now we're going from okay. I'm not necessarily worried about getting better at a specific thing. I'm really just worried about being as confident as I can be in what I'm able to do. Because again, you know, we're in the winter season, we're practicing playing like you kind of are what you are in terms of how good you are. Not to say you can't get better during the season, but you know, especially we talk about the, the minutes that you play. So this is also another caveat to this. How much you're still training in season depends a little bit on your role with your team. If you're the star player and you know, let's say you, there's a 32 minute high school game, let's say it's, you know, four eight minute quarters. If you're playing 30 minutes a game and you know, you're barely getting breaks and you're practicing every day, you're probably not going to be able to go as hard in training outside of that because again, we're trying to perform. If you're constantly playing, putting all those minutes on your body and then you're going and training super hard, you're never going to recover. You're not going to have time to recover. So you're going to get worse and worse as the season goes on. You're going to. Injuries are going to start to pile up for you. You're just never going to be at your best because you don't have time to recover. So. So if you're playing a ton of minutes, you're probably going to scale back what you're doing outside of practices and games, right? Likewise, if you're the opposite, if you don't play at all, then you can probably go a little harder in those workouts outside of, you know, your, your team practices and games and stuff like that. And it's the same thing with the weight room too. A lot of players get to the season and get to November and they just stop lifting weights. They've been doing it the whole off season. They stop. And the problem with that is that again, now you're, you're getting duller and duller as the season goes on. And now we all of a sudden get ourselves to, you know, February, March, you've got to be at your best, and you're weaker than you were in November, right? So now this is also going to be a change because, again, we're not. You might have been lifting four days a week in the off season, going super hard. Now we can't afford to do that because, again, we got to recover every single day. We've got to be prepared to play the next game. We've got to be able to, you know, perform at practice that we're ready to go for those games. So when it comes to lifting, this can be scaled back a ton, too. We. We're really just thinking about maintenance here. So how can I maintain what I have, right? How can I. How can I make sure that I feel good? So this can be as little as one time a week. Maybe you get in and you lift one time a week and you just hit, you know, each part of your body for, you know, one exercise. Maybe you go, you know, like back squats, you go bench press, you go pull ups, and, you know, maybe you go deadlift or something like that where you're just hitting, you know, you're. You're hitting those major movements. But maybe it's, you know, probably a lot lighter than it would be. Maybe it's two to three sets of, you know, six, eight, 10 reps, but those reps are lighter than they probably could be. You're not trying to break records. You're just making sure that you keep on practicing those movements, right? Because that's all those lifts are, is just movement. So you're keeping yourself in that groove of being able to do that, and you're, you know, you're not getting weaker as. As the season goes on. You're able to keep what you have, right? But. But also understanding the fact that you don't want to push yourself so hard in the weight room that you're super sore the next day, and you can only show up to your game at 70% because you're so sore. We don't want. We definitely don't want that at all. So if we keep that lift into once, twice a week, where we're going for a max of 20, 30 minutes in the weight room, and, you know, then we're kind of in and out, keeping it light, but enough that we can maintain what we have, then that's perfect. That's going to allow us to, throughout the season, stay sharp, and that's ultimately what we're trying to do. When it comes to our training and season is just stay sharp, stay confident, and the goal is to be at your best every game. You want to be as close to 100% as you can be. So you can't let that training, it's a fine balance. You don't want to do nothing, but you also don't want to do so much that you're tired or you're sore. You have to give yourself time to recover. So you got to find that happy medium where you're recovered by the time those games come, but you're still able to keep yourself, yourself sharp and ready to go for the next thing. So number two, don't backtrack on your offseason progress. Make sure that you are continuing to put in that work outside of your team practices so that you continue to stay sharp and you're at your best when it matters most. And then number three, and I think this is a really important mindset to have as the season goes on is you have to be able to stay level. Right? What I mean by this is that it's a long season, but if you're in high school or college, like, you're playing from October, maybe, you know, maybe October, November, you're going until February, maybe March, right? If you're in college and you. You make it to, you know, the NCAA championship, you're playing till April. So that we're talking four or five, six months of basketball. It's a long time. It's a long season, right? And if you allow yourself to get so bogged down day to day by what happens, it's going to be really hard for you to stay consistent. If the way you feel is dictated completely by how you just played the night before, the ability to be consistent is going to rely on you always playing well, which won't happen because nobody ever plays well 100 of the time. When I think about, you know, being. Being, you know, a consistent player, it just means you're able to kind of stay level, right? You're never somebody who gets super up whenever things are going well, and you're not somebody who gets super down because things aren't going well. You're able to kind of keep yourself just focused on moving forward, right? We're focused on continuing to get better every single day, continuing to bring your best every single day. I think that's what it has to go back to, right. For players who are super focused and super bogged down with, hey, I didn't play well, things aren't going well. Well, what you Control is not the outcome of things. Right. I think the best example is, like, as good of a shooter as you might be, you don't really control whether or not the ball goes in the basket. Like, you don't, because at the end of the day, you can be driving to the basket and you might put the ball up in the perfect spot where it would go in, but then somebody comes out of nowhere and blocks you. Right? You. You did everything right. You had the skill to put the ball in the basket, but somebody made a play and blocked it. Right? Or let's. Let's use an even, even, even, you know, I guess funnier example, but still true. Maybe you shoot a three and it's perfectly online, but the air conditioning turn got turned up a little bit for that game. And, you know, it kind of moved the ball a little bit, just, just a fraction of an inch enough where it rolls around the rim and doesn't go in. In another gym, that ball probably goes in, but in that gym it didn't. Right. That. That's, that's what I mean when I say that you don't really control the outcome of things. You can do the best that you can possibly do, and you might still not succeed in what you're trying to do in that moment right there. So the only thing you do control, again, is how we started the. The effort that you bring every day and, and the attitude that you have and being able to continue to just focus on, okay, I'm going to bring my best every single day. I'm going to try and get better every single day. I'm going to put myself in a position to where I'm making sure that I control the controllable things. And I know that when I do that, it gives me the best chance of being successful. Right? So I'm not sitting here worried about the outcome. I'm worried about making sure that the things I do put me in the best position so that the outcome is good ultimately, knowing that I still might do everything right and it's. I still might not get the outcome that I want, being okay with that. But still, even when that happens and you. You don't succeed, you get up the next day and you bring your best again because you know that you need to do that to put yourself in the best position right there. Okay? It's a very hard thing to be able to do, to be able to be good at, because again, the season's so long and it can feel like, you know, it can feel like the end of the world sometimes when things don't go well, but you have to be able to keep yourself level and just focus on what you control, focus on bringing your best every single day. And, and, and again, you know, when you need those, those boosts, like, okay, I'm making sure that I'm going in to get my work so I can feel confident in this and feel confident doing that. And again, there's a controllable thing, right? Making sure that you feel good about what you're doing, putting yourself in the best position to do so. So being able to stay level is such an important skill to have, you know, if you want to have a successful season. And, you know, especially when we talk about, you know, as long as the season is, if you want to sustain that over months and months and months, you have to be able to keep yourself steady and not get too weighed down with things going poorly. I'm always going back to just what do I control and how do I make sure that I can that, that I do that to the best of my abilities? And when I do that, I'm going to put myself in the best position to be successful as often as possible. So three things, three keys. Having a successful season. Number one, control the controllable things show up. Bring your best, your best effort every single day. Eat enough, drink enough water, make sure you get enough sleep, take care of anything that you might need to when it comes to injuries, when it comes to making sure that you're preparing yourself physically every single day. Number two, don't backtrack on your offseason progress. So making sure you're still getting in your extra work outside of team practices, getting up the shots you need to get up, making sure you feel confident in what you need to be able to do. And that being the goal of your training now is just, how do I make sure that I feel good every single day about what I need to be able to do on the court? And making sure, again, you're not forgetting the weight room too, but probably scaling back to the point where it's once, twice a week and also again, adjusting that for, hey, if I play a ton of minutes or even if it's week to week, right? If I have a week where I only have one game, you know, you might be able to go and lift twice a week. But if you have a, you know, if you have a game, if you have a week where you have four games and you're playing a lot of minutes, you might only lift one time that week, or maybe you lift twice but you skip, you know, a couple sets because you want to make sure you're prepared for that next game. That's the most important thing, is how do I make sure I'm as close to 100% as I can be for this game coming up so that I can perform as close to my best? Again, we are all about performance right here, right? Learning. That's what we were focused on when, you know, March, April through October. But when we're in the winter season, we're trying to make sure that we put ourselves in the best position to perform and show what we can do right now. So understanding that not backtracking on your offseason progress and the number three, staying level, not getting too weighed down by things going poorly and the negatives, being able to, you know, focus on the controllables and every single day, just get yourself back up on that horse and putting yourself in the best position to be successful by being great at controlling the controllable things. Right. Going back to point number one right there. So those are three keys to having a successful season. You know, this is my favorite time of the year. Honestly. I love the offseason. I absolutely love it. But, you know, being in season, being part of a team, I. There's nothing like it, and I really, really enjoy it. So these are three things that I think will help you a ton if you want to be at your best this season. And let me know what you think. Let me know if you guys have any other tips, any other suggestions. Again, if you guys have podcast suggestions, questions for me, let me know. Drop a comment below. You're on YouTube right now. Send me a DM on Instagram @ Vision different basketball as well if you have questions for me. Again, I appreciate you guys. If you're on YouTube right now, drop a like subscribe if you are new. And if you guys don't have a podcast, leave a review for me, Spotify, leave a review, all that sort of stuff. I really do appreciate it. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.