This Is How I Would Become An INSANE Ball Handler (From 0 To 100)

I actually became a way better ball handler when I stopped playing basketball. Let me explain. You see, in high school I wasn't a great ball handler. And it's not that I didn't spend a lot of time working on it. Actually, it was the opposite. I spent a ton of time working on it. I used to get up at 5 o' clock in the morning every day before school and I would go to the YMCA and I would work out then. And on days when I couldn't do that, I'd get up early, I go into my garage and I'd put a plastic bag over my basketball to make it more difficult to handle. And then I'd work on my ball handling that way. And despite the effort and the time that I put into this, I never really saw, saw great results. And I never really was a great ball handler. And I didn't understand exactly why until years later I bought probably a hundred different online ball handling programs. Because this was a huge weak point in my game and I needed to figure out a way to fix this. Maybe you can relate to this, or at the very least you want to become a better ball handler. And right now I'm going to explain what exactly I would do if I could go back in time and do it over again. I know that I could have been so much better and there's so much improvement that I left on the table. So right now I'm going to go through those things so that you don't fall into the same traps that I did. If you follow these steps, I'm very, very confident that you're going to see crazy results when it comes to your ball handling, probably more so than you ever have before. The first area we'll talk about is ball control. And this is where I fell into the same trap that so many players fall into. Maybe you fall into the same trap. And it's the idea that developing ball control is all about just pounding the basketball and just going really, really hard. I spent a ton of time doing two ball pounds and the figure eight drill and finger taps and waist straps and all the drills that you learn at your first basketball camp as a kid. And I'm not here to tell you that those things are useless, but they're pretty close to use, especially if you're not a complete beginner. But I thought that those things were the key to developing ball control. So I spent a ton of time doing them when in reality they made very little impact. And it was a major reason why I didn't see a lot of improvement with my ball handling. Ultimately, I was completely missing the mark when it came to developing my ball control because I. I was ignoring the two things that actually matter when it comes to this, and that's your ability to manipulate the ball and your ability to keep the ball up with your body. Now, that might sound a little bit confusing, but it's actually very simple, and I'm going to explain it right now. Whenever you dribble the ball, you're not always dribbling it straight down at the ground. Sometimes you're dribbling it to the side, Sometimes you're kind of picking it up and moving it. Think about what you do when you do a spin move or when you do an in and out, or when you do a crossover, trying to cover a lot of ground. Your. Your hand's not always on the top of the basketball. Sometimes it's on the side. That's called being able to manipulate the ball. Being able to essentially pick the ball up and move it wherever you need to move it. Depending on what you're doing, that's your ability to manipulate the ball. And this is probably the most important thing when it comes to actually developing ball control. And yet a lot of players don't really work on it and they don't emphasize it at all. And this is a mistake that I made for sure growing up as a player. This is probably the most important single skill to develop if you want to be a great ball handler. And so it's something that you definitely don't want to ignore. Now, it's very, very simple to work on this. And a way that I will use a ton is just setting up a cone. And you're just going to dribble that ball over and back from side to side over that cone right there. And that's a great way to start right there. Just kind of develop that ability to manipulate it. Then we can add in what's called a pocket pull, which think about if you're wearing a hoodie and you have a hoodie pocket, you're just kind of pulling the ball to where that hoodie pocket would be before you put it right back down. So now we're. We're. We're working on our ability to be able to manipulate the ball, to be able to pocket it so that we don't have to put it down right away. We can keep the ball in our hands as long as possible. If we wanted to make a move or change direction or make a pass or just do whatever with the ball, it's A very valuable skill to have right there. So we can add that. And then of course, we can work on different changes, direction options coming off of that as well. So I go over and back with that cone, then I pull it to my pocket, and then I go with some sort of change of hand move to get it to my other hand. And now we're working on really being able to manipulate the ball, change hands, change directions with it. And we can also train this while moving as well. We can use moving manipulations too, to further train this skill. And that takes to the second aspect of ball control, which is being able to keep the ball up with your body. Now, when it comes to ball handling, the two limiting factors, meaning the two things that really hold players back from being able to confidently and successfully handle the ball in games is first of all, the ability to move well, and second, the ability to keep the ball up with their body. Now, we're going to talk about that first point in a second here, but speaking to that last point, the ability to keep the ball up with your body, it's really important that you can move however you need to move, and you are able to make the ball keep up with you. So if you're at a full sprint, you can keep the ball and control the ball. If you're really, really slow, you can keep the ball. And when you're playing in between there, you can keep the ball. When you make a really quick between the legs move or really quick wrap or a really quick spin move, are you able to keep the ball up with your body or do you have to slow down, play a little bit cautious because you're worried about losing the basketball. Players who struggle to handle the ball well in games, a lot of times struggle because they can't keep the ball up with their body when they're moving at fast speeds. And this is a huge area of ball control that as a player, I never even thought about. I never even understood what it was or how to train it. And so I think it's something that a lot of players make that same mistake with. I could do all the stationary ball drills in the world, and chances are, if you put me in a gym with a bunch of other players, I would be better at those stationary drills than anybody else. But all of a sudden you put me in a game and now I have to be able to make a quick move with defenders and limited time and space. Now all of a sudden I'm nowhere near as good as I looked with those stationary drills. And it's because that's one aspect of it. We have to develop this other aspect of it, too, which is keeping the ball up with our body. This is ultimately how you gain true confidence with the ball in your hands, is being able to do this. And now the question is, how do we train this? How would I train this? We can do this by working on making different moves and handling the ball when we're at full speed. So one thing I love to use to develop this is called a crawl start. If I go back in time, I would do this every single day. So I love this crawl freestyle, where I'm going to start in this crawl position, which is basically just a low position that allows us to hit fast speeds quickly. That's all that a crawl is right there, and that's why we're starting this position. And then I might go from the baseline to half court, and the only rule is that I only get moved, so I can't do normal dribbles. I might start with a normal dribble, and then I have to go crossovers between behind spin moves. I can only use those. And my goal is to get from the baseline to half court as fast as possible. So I'm not slowing down at all. I'm just going as fast as I can, using those moves, making sure the ball keeps up with my body. And I know I'm going to lose the ball a lot and I'm going to mess up and it's going to be difficult. But this is ultimately how we develop that confidence to use any move in a game and handle the ball in any situation, and to be able to go as fast as we can and not worry about, well, I don't want to lose the basketball. This is how we develop that right there. This is really difficult when you actually try and you apply yourself in these drills and these workouts, but it's something that I wish I would have done way more of as a player. And I know that would have led to me being a way more confident and successful ball handler. Now, the second thing that I would have done differently is really mastered, efficient and effective footwork. So, like I mentioned earlier, the. The two limiting factors, the two things that really hold players back from being great ball handlers is, number one, the ability to move, and then number two, the ability to keep the ball up with your body. So speaking to the first point now, ball handling is not just about what your hands are doing, and that is, unfortunately, how I spent 95% of my time as a player was focusing on, okay, how Do I improve what my hands are doing with the ball? Because that's what we think of when we think of ball handling, right? The, the. The word hand is in the actual term that we use for it. So we, we don't really think about how much our movement affects our ability as a ball handler, but it's. It's huge. It's crucial. It's a massive part of it. So it's really important that we work on our ability to move well. Great movers are the ones who are the best ball handlers. The fact of the matter is, if you don't move athletically and at a high level, it doesn't matter how good your hands are with the ball, you're never going to be a great ball handler. Think of players like Kyrie Irving or Steph Curry, guys who we consider some of the best ball handlers ever. And you can watch and see they clearly have ball control. But what really makes them great and what really allows them to make these spectacular highlight plays with their ball handling is their ability to move. They move well. And because of that, and because they have the ability to keep the ball up with their body when they move, they're great. They're some of the best of all time. Now, your ability to move starts with your footwork. So it's really important that we, we develop this ability. So understanding starts and stops, which is as simple as it sounds, right? So starts, your ability to go from stopped to going, your ability to go from not moving to moving, that's. That's what a start is. But we can access that, we can get to that through different types of footwork. So drop footwork, different sorts of drop options like a drop cross or a drop through are great ways for us to get from slow to fast. I'm going to explain exactly what these terms are. I'm going to give you guys actually a workout you can do that goes through this stuff as well. So you can start to add this to your game if you don't know what I'm talking about with that. But different sorts of drop footwork, different sorts of float options can allow us to get ourselves to starts a little bit better. And then on the flip side of that, we have stop footwork. So different sorts of punch drags, or, you know, under drags, snatches, inverted drags, different ways that we're able to go from moving to not moving or, or moving to changing direction. We have to be able to control our feet when it comes to our ability to stop as well. So I actually have a free training program that you can get that is linked in the description down below that goes through this start footwork and the stop footwork. Again, absolutely critical if you want to be a great ball handler. So go check that out, completely free. Add that to your game, it's going to immediately make an impact on you, especially if you, if you haven't done this stuff before, even if you have just becoming great at becoming elite at controlling your feet. Something that I talk to my players about a lot is the ability to control your feet is such a critical skill to have. And if you're great at it, chances are you're going to be really, really good with the ball in your hand. So like I said, completely free. Check that out in the description down below. The ability to control your feet is so valuable and it's something that I wish that I would have had as a younger player. But again, this is something that I didn't even think about. But here I am trying to give this knowledge to use that you don't fall down and make those same mistakes that I did. So sticking with that idea of movement, the third thing that I would have spent way more time on as a player when it comes to training my ball handling would be training my ability to move well with the ball. And specifically this is on top of start footwork, stop footwork, obviously that's an important part. But now what about the in between? What about when we're actually moving? That's where we talk about being able to control and change your pace at a high level. And so being able to play slow when you need to and being able to play fast when you need to, as well. The ability to play with a great control and a great ability to, to change your pace is what makes the most unguardable players as unguardable as they are. So think about Kyrie, Steph, like we talked about already, think about Luka Doncic, think about Jalen Brunson, Trey Young, or pretty much any ball dominant guard and you're going to see that they have elite ability to change pace. So play slow to get the defender to relax, raise up so the defender relaxes, and then boom, hit 100%, drop to low positions and be able to accelerate so that they're always unpredictable and they always have a split second of an advantage over their defenders. This is an area that I largely ignored as a player, as crazy as it sounds, especially now. Like, I think about how much I value it and how much I work on pace with with my own players. Now, like, it's something I never really thought of and I really understood how to work on. And so here's how I would have done things differently. I would have worked on handling the ball, moving at different speeds. So there's a lot of things that we can do here. But I think to keep it simple, what I love to do to train pace is to use different freestyles. So I love using what's called a percentage freestyle, where you're just going to pick an area. It could be like the half circle towards the top of the key or like the circle at half court. Just pick an area that's, you know, 6ft, 8ft, 10ft, whatever, and you're just throughout that area going to freestyle dribble. But you're going to mix up the intensity you're going at. So sometimes you're going to be at 100% intensity, where you're really going hard. Sometimes you're going to raise up and be at 20% and nice and relaxed. Maybe you hit 50%, maybe hit 100 again, maybe you drop down to 80. Then now you're 20, now back to 100. And so we're just working our ability to play at different percentages, right? So basketball is not all about start, stop. It's not all about 0 and 100. It's also about, hey, can I play at 50% and be good there and be comfortable there, and then can I slow down to 20 and then hit 100? Being able to play those in between speeds, such a crucial skill to have. And I think using the percentage freestyle is a really, really good way to develop that. Other things that that I would do is like a slow freestyle. So I'll just go from the baseline to half court. Just dribbling slowly. I'm at like 20% effort. Just freestyling slowly, right? Just getting comfortable playing slow, deliberately playing slow. I also love using a relaxed to explosive freestyle. So I'll go maybe baseline to opposite baseline, where part of my freestyle, I'm nice and relaxed. So think about like 20% effort and then, boom, I'm going to hit 100% and be able to get myself to explosive positions and explosive movement. And then, okay, and back down to relax, whatever. And I'm mixing up that freestyle as I'm moving forward down the court. Another thing I'd love to do a little bit more unorthodox is just free Sound of Music. So picking a song that you know well and just freestyling, kind of flowing with it, and that's a great way also to just kind of build your pace without really even thinking about it, too. So. And the great thing about this, too, is that it also helps us to work on things we just talked about. So we're working on keeping the ball up with our body, with that ball control. We're working on our start footwork, our stop footwork with this, and we're working on our ability to actually move. So now we're covering our ability to handle the ball and our ability to move well. And. And like I just said, those are the two areas that hold most players back when it comes to their ball handling. So that's why I love using freestyles to develop this ability. And it's something that I wish I would have done way more of as a player going with that. The fourth thing that I would have done differently is I would have freestyled way more. A big problem with the way that players train their handles is that it's way too monotonous, repetitive, and predictable. The actual game that we're training for is nothing like that. Right? The games that you play in are not predictable, they're not monotonous, they're definitely not repetitive. You're doing different things, you're seeing different things. You have to make different sorts of moves. You have to react differently in different situations. And so we want to be able to. To train for that. I think back to the way that I worked on ball handling, and everything was scripted. It was do this move, then do that move, then make this dribble. And I was like a robot. Everything was just so robotic and it was scripted. And then I get to a game where things were unpredictable and chaotic and I wasn't successful, and I couldn't figure out why that was. But the way that I was training had no. There was no way that was going to transfer to me being effective in the game, which is a completely different environment that's going to require completely different skills than the one that I was working on in my own workouts, in my own practice. The best ball handlers are creative, and they can play through imperfections, and. And they're unpredictable. Going back to what we talked about with some of the best ball handlers ever, right? Think about how they almost seem limitless with things they can do with the ball. It doesn't matter what the defense throws at them. It doesn't matter who's guarding them, what part of the floor they're on. It seems that they always have a solution. They always have an answer. And even when things aren't perfect, they find A way to be able to make plays and be successful. And this trait, this ability to be adaptable is what we want to develop if we want to be great. And we can do this by freestyling more. And so growing up, I never freestyled like I did all the traditional stuff pound dribbles like I mentioned before, but I never worked on this ability to just be creative and, and have solutions and be unpredictable and be able to handle chaos and things not going according to what the script might be. Freestyling, in case you're wondering what I mean by that, is just dribbling without a script. So instead of saying, okay, we're gonna go pound between between behind, saying, hey, I'm gonna go pound and then I'm gonna go with three moves. But I gotta, I gott moves every time, so I can't do the three same every single time. So maybe the first time I go cross between behind, the next time I go behind behind between, the next time I go cross behind behind. And now I'm just mixing it up every single time. That's a very simple way of freestyling or mixing up what you're doing right there. You aren't trying to rehearse a sequence of dribbles or moves. You are just dribbling and changing it up as you go. So the pace resells I mentioned earlier that we went through are, are great ways to, to do this. Obviously those are some of my favorite freestyles. But also just being simple as making, doing a, a full court freestyle, just freestyling from one end to one end, right? Or baseline, a half court, whatever. But just getting comfortable with freestyling and being creative and, and not having to be perfect, right? And being able to do things differently all the time is, is. Is an important skill to have. So another thing that I like is called kill the grass where you, you're going to pick an area so you can go like, again like the, you go like the paint area, you can go the, the half court circle and you're going to imagine like this grass all throughout that area and you have to dribble in every blade of grass inside of that area. But you just mix up the moves that you get to. So maybe you mix up your moves, you mix up your pace, you're just freestyling all throughout that area. We can also use like timed freestyle so you know you can do that same thing where you're in that area and you have to go for a certain amount of time. Even when we do the manipulation drills like I mentioned earlier, you just got to mix up your moves every time. So if we're going to go over and back and then do do a move, I don't want to do the same move every time. I want to mix up the moves that I do so that I get used to not being scripted and being able to string together different types of, of, of solutions when I need to. We want to become adaptable if we want to become great ball handlers. And this is definitely something that I missed the mark on as a young player. So if I could go back, I would do way more freestyling. I spend way more time doing that because it's a great way to build those skills that are going to transfer to you being successful in games. The last thing that I would have done differently is that I would have dribbled against defense more. Now all things we've talked about so far are great and they're, they're necessary and I wish I would have been doing them. But another thing that I wish I would have done more is just handling the ball against defense. So ultimately the best way to learn how to apply the things that we've worked on to games, learning how to handle pressure and physicality, how to make good decisions with the ball, and ultimately how to have confidence in your ball handling is by handling the ball against the defender. So small sided games, which just means anything that's not five on five, basically. So specifically, one on one is a great way to target this specifically. So it could be as simple as like an alley drill where you say, okay, we have sideline to lane line, right. And we're going to go from baseline to half court. You can't go outside those boundaries. You got to handle the ball one on one against the defender. You got to get from the baseline to half court. Very, very simple way of doing that you've probably already done before. Right. But I think doing that way more so that that would have benefited me a lot. And there's a lot of ways that we can do that. We can do the kill the grass drill we talked about with the freestyles, but you can add a defender in there. So now you're in your area trying to dribble on every blade of grass, but now someone's trying to steal the ball from you. So maybe you have to go for 10 seconds without losing the ball to win the drill. Right. And that's a great way to add in defense and, and again really help apply the things that we're learning that we're working on. We can play a one on one where maybe you start on the wing and you're just kind of relaxed, freestyle dribbling it, and there's the defender in front of you and they're going to try and reach and steal the ball from you. And as soon as they try and steal from you, it's now live, you're trying to score. So now you're handling that pressure and great way to, to develop that confidence with the ball, that confidence against physical defense. And there's really a million ways you can do this, a million ways you can work on these things. But I would have made myself handle the ball so much more against defense. And honestly, when I was playing pickup games, when I was playing 5 on 5 in the offseason, I would have made myself handle the ball more in those situations, right? I would have been okay with, hey, you might lose it sometimes, but we've got to get the reps and build the confidence by seeing defense as much as possible. So I think that's something that I would highly recommend that you do is just see defense as much as you can. Whether it's one on one, five on five, doesn't really matter. But the more you can handle the ball against defense, the better it's going to be. And that's something that I wish I would have done a lot more of as a player. I'm going to leave you with one more thing. And by the way, thank you. If you've made it this far. There's been a lot of information so far and this is like, there's a lot here. So I appreciate the fact that you've made it this far. And I want to leave you with one more thing. And it's the acronym ABD Always be dribbling. I mentioned earlier that I've become so much better as a ball handler since I stopped playing. And what that really means is that since I stopped really training myself, I've become better than the days when I was training, which seems backwards, right? But there's a couple reasons for this. One of the biggest reasons is ABD always be dribbling. Always. Now I'm in the, I'm in the gym with players, you know, all the time, maybe, you know, for some days, maybe hours at a time. And I've always just got a ball in my hands. I'm always just dribbling the ball around, just around the court, whatever, in between workouts, during workouts, whatever the case may be. I just always was dribbling. And I noticed once I started doing that and I stopped training myself, but I was working with all these other players. I was like, why do I feel more comfortable with the ball now? And it was because I was just always dribbling it. And there's something to be said about just kind of developing your ball handling by making the ball a part of you. Making it an extension of your hand is having the ball as often as possible. And that's one of the big reasons why I got better now. Another reason is because I now understand these concepts that I've. That I've mentioned on this video, right? So by you also understanding these concepts now and then also applying this acronym abd, you are going to get so much better as a ball handler. Again, making that ball like a part of you and it's just something that you always are doing, you're always dribbling and it's just something that becomes fun, it becomes second nature for you, is a great way to become the, the ball handler that you probably want to be. And then obviously again, incorporating all the other stuff is just going to make that even better. And again, when you incorporate this other stuff, eventually that weakness for you is going to become a strength. And that's when the game becomes very, very fun. Because when you have the ability to handle the ball, the world is your oyster. You can do anything, you can go anywhere with the ball now. You, you can go. You're not limited, right? When you can't handle the ball, you're limited in what you can do and how you can score, how you can make plays. But when we take away that limitation, everything is available to you and that's where you want to be as a player. Like I said, thank you. If you made it this far, in my opinion, the best thing you can do if you want a step by step system that's going to help you to apply the things we've talked about in this video is to check out my ball handling program. Elite Ball Handling 2.0. Elite Ball Handling 2.0 was built on these exact concepts, these exact principles. And a lot of the clips that you've seen in the video today are actually directly from that program. I've seen hundreds of players take their ball handling to the next level with elite ball handling 2.0. And it's something that I really, really wish that I would have had access to when I was a player. But luckily for you I didn't. And so I had to create it. And here we are now is something that you're going to be able to use to avoid the same mistakes that I made as a player. So that's the top link in the description down below. If you're not ready for that, that's completely okay. Like I mentioned before, I also have my free program that's linked down the description as well. That 2 program is going to be get you better in the next two weeks than you probably ever have in a two week period before. So go ahead and check that out if you want to do that as well. Both options are down there for you. I appreciate you for watching. If you made it this far. We'll talk soon. Peace.