Watch This If You Want To Become A More ATHLETIC Basketball Player (FULL Weight Training Program)

If you aren't lifting weights as a basketball player, you're gonna get left behind. Every single player you watch on tv, whether it's college or the NBA, is lifting weights, and the best players in your area are probably also lifting weights. And for some reason there's this myth that lifting isn't that important in basketball, which is just complete nonsense. So get that idea out of your head and stop listening to whoever told you that. In this video, I'm gonna explain exactly why you need to be lifting weights and getting stronger if you want to achieve all of your basketball goals. Do you want to score more points or become a better defender or. Or earn that starting spot on your team or make it to that next level that you're trying to get to? If you want anything like that, focus on getting stronger. And it's going to put you way closer to being able to do that. And make sure you stay until the end of this video, because I'm also going to give you a lifting program that you can do that will make you stronger and more explosive. And I promise you, it's going to help you take your game to a whole new level. Let's get into it. So I get this question asked so much and it's why is this even important? Why are you even telling us about this? Why is lifting important? How is it going to benefit me? It comes to the game of basketball, and I talked about this in a video I just did, talking about how to become an unguardable one on one player, somebody who can score at will. When you look at the best scorers in the game, what do they do and how can you emulate some of that so you become a better scorer? The best scorers in the NBA, when you look at them, the best one on one scorers are very strong. Between Luka, you have James Harden. Steph Curry is a great example where Steph doesn't look so super strong physically. He doesn't look super imposing. But, you know, I remember they were talking about that with the Warriors. He had like one of the strongest Delos on the team, is like over 400 pounds, right? And this guy's probably, you know, 190, 195, 200 pounds maybe, but he's super strong, which allows him to just handle physicality at a super high level. Which is why, you know, you look at stat, he's probably pound for pound the strong, one of the strongest players in the NBA, right? And that no doubt has a huge impact on his ability to score the ball. And really just make plays in general at such a high level. So let's talk about why that is. The first thing is that you can handle the physicality that comes with the game of basketball. So you can go where you want to go on the court. When you drive and you want to go to a certain place, you can get there because you're strong enough to not be bumped off of your path. Conversely, you also, you know, aren't going to go places you don't want to go. You don't have to dribble into a trap because you aren't strong enough to stop or go a different direction. You don't have to get funneled into a corner or whatever the case may be. You're able to, again, go where you want to go. And it also, you know, translates to other areas like being able to finish through contact. You know, a big part of that is your strength. Right, I. I get that. Players, I get that question so much from players where it's like, coach, how do I get better at finishing through contact? Well, there's a couple of things you can do. Do it more. It's the minor. That's the first thing I say. But the second thing is get stronger. The stronger you are, the less contact is going to actually affect you or the more content it's going to take in order to affect you. So, you know, handling ball pressure is another great example. If you want to get better at handling pressure when you're dribbling the ball get stronger, you're going to be able to deal with physicality. You know, defenders can get away with a lot in terms of contact. It's not always going to get called. You've got to be able to play through physicality, especially when you're being pressured. And one of the best ways to improve in that area is just to get stronger. You are going to inherently be better at every area of basketball if you get stronger. And that's not to mention, like the other areas of basketball where we talk about a third of it, but, you know, we talk about defense and rebounding, you're going to get significantly better at both of those things. If you get stronger when you're weak, your reliability on defense, when you're weak, your liability, rebounding the basketball. And. And you know, that can be a reason that you don't play. That can be a reason that you don't get that certain starting spot that you want. That can be the reason why you don't make it to the next level is because you aren't strong enough. To deal with the physicality that comes with that level of basketball, right? Or being the guy, like you aren't capable of handling that physically, and so you'll never be able to be that, right? So, you know, there is no room for weak players in the game of basketball. So if that's you, you. You have to change that. You can't be a weak player in the game of basketball, Especially as you get to higher levels where you're at now, maybe it's not that big of a deal, but as you could think of the game of basketball like a. Like a triangle, right? And the lower levels at the bottom, there's a lot of players out there. There's a lot of room for everybody. There's a lot of teams, a lot of people are playing. As you start to, you know, move up in levels, the triangle gets narrower and eventually gets to a point where not everybody can make it to that next point. So who do you think is going to make it? The strongest and most athletic players, for the most part, are the ones who are going to do that. So you got to make sure that you're taking care of what you can control, and you absolutely can control how strong you are. So every single player that you watch on tv, like I said before, lifts weights. Every single college player you watch, every single player you watch, every single one of them lifts weights. So if you want to be like those players, you should be doing the same thing. You should also be getting stronger. So let's talk about two reasons why players. Players don't lift, right? And I'm imagining that if you're watching or listening to this right now and there is some sort of thing that popped your mind was like, well, I don't know. This is probably one of the two things that it prevents a lot of players from lifting or considering lifting. And, you know, the first thing I'll get out of the way is, you know, one reason is just general laziness, right? Players just don't want to do it. I'd imagine that if you're watching or listening and you've made it this far into this, you probably don't fall into that category. Most of you probably don't. So I'm going to skip that one. Because, you know, again, this is. It's not really what I'm here. If that's your problem, you've got other issues. But I'm going to talk about two other issues that players really struggle with. And the first one is players think that it's going to mess up their shot or it's going to affect them shooting the basketball. And this is not true in any sense, by any means. This is completely false. If Steph Curry is the best shooter in the history of the game, and again, I just talked about his weight room feats, do you, do you really think that lifting weights destroys your jump shot or hinders your jump shot? If Steph Curry didn't lift weights, would he be a better shooter? No, I would say he wouldn't be. But I'll tell you this, if Steph Curry didn't lift weights, he wouldn't be in the NBA because you wouldn't be able to handle the physicality the way he does right now. Right. Defenders can't guard him because even if you say, okay, we're going to be super physical, we're going to bump and we do all this sort of stuff, he's strong enough to handle that, so there's nothing you can do to guard him. If he wasn't that strong, there would be other ways to guard him and he wouldn't be as effective. Right? So not only will I say that again, shooting is certainly doesn't destroy his shot, he wouldn't be in the NBA and he certainly wouldn't be a superstar if not for his physical strength. Right? So let's talk about how it could though, right? Because there is a scenario which lifting weights could affect your shot. If you lift weights, right? Like you're training to be Mr. Olympia or something, and you never shoot the ball, ever. You never work on your shooting. Yeah. You're not going to be able to shoot the ball very well. Just like if you only sit around and play video games all day and you never work on your shot, you're not going to be a very good shooter. Or if you just live a normal life, but you never practice shooting, you're not going to be a very good shooter. If you do anything and don't work on your shooting, you won't be a very good shooter. It's the same thing with lifting weights. As long as you're continuing to work on your shot and you know you can be lifting at the same time, and your shot is not going to be affected by that. The only thing you're going to reap is the benefits of every other aspect of your game becoming better because you're stronger. And on top of that, I'll say this, when it comes to your shot, you're going to be better because you're going to be able to shoot from farther away. It's going to be easier to shoot farther away, you're going to become more efficient shooting from farther away. And end of the day, like, there really, there's only benefits to your shot when it comes to lifting weights. So there's that first thing that a lot of prevents a lot of players from lifting, which is just think it's going to harm their shot in some sort of way. And let's talk about the second reason. The second reason is because there's this myth that it will stunt your growth, that lifting stunts your growth. Right. If you're. And that's also 100% false. This is the conclusion of one study by the American Academy of Pediatrics says the American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that contrary to what many believe, proper strength training does not stunt growth. In fact, the AAP recommends strength training for kids 8 years old and up as a safe way to build strength and stay physically fit. Now, just a caveat, does that mean that if you're 8 years old, you need to be, you know, in the gym doing Olympic lifts and. No, not necessarily. But the point being, strength training is something that is, it is a myth that that stunts your growth and that you have to wait until you're, you know, I can't. I gotta wait till I'm done growing before I can start lifting weights, or else I'm not going to grow to my full potential. That's just completely false. Not only is lifting weights safe, it's beneficial when performed correctly. Right? And this myth kind of stemmed from the idea that, you know, a growth plate injury can stunt growth. Right? And lifting stresses your growth plates are, puts you at risk for injury or growth plate. And in reality, you're much more likely to suffer a growth plate plate injury playing sports or playing outside with your friends or playing at the playground and falling off of the swings or off the monkey. Like, you're much more likely to injure a growth plate doing those things than you would be from lifting. And if you're lifting correctly, then it's completely, you know, that that's a very safe thing to do. And again, there's only benefits to that when your weight training with proper form safely. So again, I kind of, I reiterate that lifting safely is really the most important thing. So it's important, especially as a beginner or a younger player lifting, not to, like, push the weight too quickly or push, push how heavy you're going too, too quickly before you really get a good feel for your form and doing things correctly. And that's why it can be A great thing to lift with, you know, a trainer or a coach who kind of knows what they're doing or, you know, getting somebody who can just introduce you to form and how to do things correctly, really taking that seriously. Because if you do, then lifting and weight training can be very beneficial for you. And again, it's not something that's going to stunt your growth, right? And again, that's been disproven by countless different studies. I post some screenshots and stuff of different studies that have talked about this. But major myth is that players will have their growth stunted by lifting weights. That's just completely false. As a basketball player, the goal for everything you do is to get better at the game of basketball. That's the goal, is to get better. And so our lifting should aid us in that. It doesn't really matter. We don't really care about, oh, I got to make sure I get my bench to, you know, 225. That's what Matt like, that's not. That won't necessarily have an impact on your game. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But what we do want is, hey, I want to be stronger on the court. I want to be able to handle physicality better. I want to be more explosive. I want to be able to jump higher, run faster. Those are things that obviously are beneficial and that you want to have as a basketball player and will directly, positively impact your game. So that's got to be our goal, right? Stronger allows us to handle physicality better, play with more confidence, become more injury resistant, and then being explosive allows us to be better on the court. Specifically when it comes to, again, running, jumping, and just being an athlete. I get this question from players a lot is like, what should I do in the weight room here? So we'll kind of go through this right here. Just a program you can do that will really emphasize getting stronger and getting more explosive. When you do those two things, it's going to translate to good things happening and improvement on the basketball court. Again, it's going to lead to you being better in every single area of the game if you really focus on taking this stuff seriously. First, let's talk about kind of the basics so you understand why we're going through this, right? Let's think about upper body. There's four things we got to take care of, and if we do those four things, we get strong at these things, you're going to be. You're going to become a stronger basketball player. The first thing is a vertical push. So think Like a push over your head. So that'd be like an overhead press. Simple enough. The next one will be a horizontal push. So think about like a bench press or a push up. Those are horizontal in front of you. And then we have the same thing but pulling. So we have vertical pull. So like a pull up or we have a lat pull down and then we have that, the horizontal pull. So we have seated rows or we have face pulls or, or we have inverted rows, or we have barbell rows or landmine rows, whatever the case may be. But you're pulling something from in front of you, towards you, right vertical. We're pulling something above us, towards us. If we take care of those four planes of motion and we get strong at doing those, upper body wise, you're going to be pretty strong. And so that's upper body, lower body. We're just thinking about push, so being able to push. So like a squat, and there's a lot of different variations of squats we can do back squat, front squat, goblet squat, dumbbell, whatever you want to do. There's a lot of different variations of squat we can do. We have a leg press and we have a lunge or just a single leg exercise where we have, you know, we're isolating one side of our lower body. And then also with lower body we have our hinge movements. So we have deadlifts, we have RDLs or straight leg deadlifts. And you could do that off of a single leg as well, just like with lunges. When we talk about getting explosive, it's important that we don't just get strong, but we make sure that we can actually apply what we're doing to the court as well. Right. Basketball is a very explosive game, so it's important that we work on that too. And we're not necessarily going to get all of that explosive work just by lifting weights. Right. It's also important that we do things we want to get better at. So what do we want to get better at? We want to get better at jumping, we want to get better sprinting. So it's crucial that we do both of those things pretty often so that we, we're comfortable doing them. What this is going to allow is that as you get stronger with your lifts, it's basically going to extend the capacity you have for these explosive movements. Right. If we're training them as well. So as I get stronger at producing force through my squat or my deadlift, and I also get better at using that force explosively through working on My jumping or working on sprinting, it's going to lead to me becoming a better athlete on the basketball court. That's why we have these two things merged together with the strength and the explosiveness. Really, it's simple for jumping. We work on jumping as high as possible or as far as possible. We're just trying to push ourselves what we do. So this can be as simple as running and trying to jump a certain spot on a wall or trying to touch a certain spot on the rim or the backboard, trying to dunk the ball or dunk a tennis ball or a volleyball. Anything where we're just maximally jumping, it could be a broad jump where we're trying to jump as far as possible. It could be a triple jump. Anything that we are doing, or we're really working on being as explosive as possible when it comes to jumping. And then sprinting is the other thing. So super simple, just working on sprinting at maximum speed. And when I mention, when I say this, get away from the thought of, like your basketball practice sprints. Like, we're not here for conditioning where, okay, we're going to run 17 here, right? Or we're going to, okay, guys, we got 10 up and backs here. That's conditioning. We're talking about improving our max capacity, our max output in our sprint, which is going to allow us to get faster. So we just want to go for a short distance as hard as possible, and then we're going to give ourselves a ton of time to rest so that the next time we go, we're back at close to 100% and we can do that same thing, max output. What that's going to do is it's going to increase our potential output, and then you're going to get into games to be able to run faster. That's also going to lead to you being able to jump higher and be more explosive in general. So those are the two things we're thinking about. Strength and then explosiveness. So I'll put a screenshot right now, but here's workout one here. And for that, for the first part, we're just going through a warmup. So this can really be anything where you're just getting yourself moving a little bit. So, you know, if you are. If the. Your weight room is, you know, a part of, like, a gym that has a court or there's a court outside or whatever, like just going and shooting around to just, like, you know, just go for five minutes and pretend someone's guarding you and, you know, go get buckets right? Just do that for five minutes, you're going to feel pretty warmed up after that, you know, maybe even less than five minutes if you're going real hard. But do something to get yourself warmed up. If you don't have that, you can go on a bike, you can just get on a treadmill. If you have none of that, you can just go for a little bit of a jog, get yourself going. Whatever you got to do to get yourself warmed up, that's kind of on you. At that point. We're going to jump right into our explosive work because we want to be as fresh as possible for this, because, again, we're talking about max output. If we do this after our lifting, we're not going to be as fresh and we're not going to be able to jump as high, run as fast. We want to do these things first to get them out of the way. So for explosive work on. On day one, we just have two sets of six to eight rim jumps or backboard jumps. Basically, you're just going to go up and try and dunk, right? If you can already dunk, then see how high up you can get on your dunks, right? If you can't dunk yet, see how high up you can get on the net or how, you know, high you can get on the rim or whatever. If you want to try and go backward, how high can you touch on the backboard? Challenge yourself, depending on where you're at and jumping as high as possible in. In relationship to a rim. If you're at a place that doesn't have a rim, then just pick a spot on a wall or pick something that you're trying to touch, right? And try and challenge yourself and beat that spot every time that you jump. So we have six to eight jumps right here with about a minute of rest in between. Again, this is because we want to be fresh. We're not doing this for conditioning. You should feel really fresh in between each jump. And we're not doing that many jumps either. We have two sets of six to eight, so that's. You might only do 12 jumps that day, but we want to make sure every single one of those is like max effort, right? We're getting max output. I'm jumping as high as possible, and all these give myself time to rest in between each, and then I'm going to go do it again. Okay, so just rim jumps or. Again, this can be dunks if you're dunking. This can be tennis ball dunks if you're. That's where you're at, whatever it's got to be. You're just working on jumping as high as possible, making sure you rest for a good amount in between. And then after that, we're going to do three sets of half court sprints. So again, simple enough, you're on a basketball court, start baseline, you're just sprinting as hard as you possibly can from, you know, baseline to half court. If you have somebody with you who can be like your timer, that's even better. Just have them stand at half court and as soon as you get there, stop the timer and just try and beat that time. Your only goal is to get from baseline to half court as fast as you possibly can. And you're going to give yourself a good amount of time again to, to rest in between each of these right here. So I've given myself like a good minute, minute and a half until you feel as close to 100% as possible. And then we're going to get to that next one right there. Okay. So again, this is a sample of explosive work that you can do that will lead to you becoming better at jumping and sprinting, which are two major parts of being an explosive basketball player. Once we finish those, we're going to get into our strength parts, into our lifts. So first we've got is three sets of six to eight reps on. I have barbell back squat here. What I'll say about a lot of these lifts, if you don't know what you're doing, if you don't know how to squat, then don't feel like you need to go to a barbell back squat right away. Right. If you don't have someone to learn from, then you can go with just a dumbbell squat where you're just holding a dumbbell and you're gonna squat right where it's a little bit safer. There's not as much, you know, you don't have weight on your back anymore, you can drop it much easier. So I would say do something like that. Or you can also go with like a leg press too. So if you don't know how to squat, you know, the back squat, front squat, don't feel like you have to go do that, go do something easier. You could do that, you know, dumbbell squat, or you could do a leg press instead. But for this we have 6 to 10 reps and you want to be in terms of like weight here. The goal is to progressively overload with our weight. So let's say we're going for eight reps we want to do a weight that, you know, we're kind of close to failure on, right? Like, we're going to get to like 8 and you maybe could get one more, right. So we're not necessarily going to failure every single set, but you want to be pretty, pretty close to it, right? I get to 8, and maybe I could do 9, maybe 10, but, like, I'm pretty close. And what you're going to want to do is gradually every workout, if you can, is increase that weight a little bit, force your body to adapt to it. Okay? So that's our goal when it comes to these things. For the next things, we're gonna do three sets of that can rest for, you know, about, you know, maybe one, two, three minutes in between each of those. And then after that we're gonna go to two to three sets of six, 10 reps for single leg RDL. So this is just a straight leg deadlift where now we're working on a little bit unilateral work where we have just. Okay, we're working on left leg, right leg, separate from each other. Because again, in the game of basketball, not everything is off two feet. You're playing off of one foot a lot too. So building strength in that. And now we're working. We have our push movement with the, with the, with the squat, and then we have our hinge movement with the rdl. So that's our, the first two lists we're going to do. This is going to be our, pretty much our biggest lifts of the day, which is why we're doing them first. And then for superset 1, what a superset is, is it means I'm going to go from the first exercise to the next exercise, then back to the first and then the next one and back to the first to the next one. So three sets I'm going to go, you know, for the first one. So we have dumbbell bench press and the seated row. So I'll do my set of bench press, and then I'll do my seat, my set of rows. I'm going to go back to bench press, back to rows, and then one more time, that would be my three sets. So what we're going to do for this first superset is three sets of eight to ten for dumbbell bench press. And then we're going to do three sets of eight to ten for seated rows. Okay. And I mentioned a lot of examples of like, other horizontal pulls. So if you want to substitute in something for that, again, this is just an example of what you can do. If you have no idea what you're doing, you need something, this will work for you. But a few things you want to substitute in, you can feel free to do that as well. And you, you know, about 30 to 60 seconds of rest in between each exercise. And then for superset number two, we're gonna go with three sets of eight to ten dumbbell overhead presses and then three sets of eight to ten pull ups, right? Or if you, you know, if you can't do pull ups, you can try and do assisted pull ups with a band or with a machine that has it. Again, you can, you can adjust it so you can do, if you want to do chin ups or neutral grip instead of a pull up, that's completely fine. If 8, 10 pull ups is easy for you, like for, you can throw on some weight too. You got, you got, you know, a weight, a belt or a weight vest you can put on and do that as well, like challenge yourself again. If you're getting the 8 to 10, you can, there's a way to make it more difficult. Then do that again. About 36 seconds of rest in between. That's workout one. Workout two, similar idea. So we've got, you know, warm up, same thing that's on you. Explosive work where two sets of six to eight broad jumps. So think about starting at like the, the baseline, right? And you're just jumping as far as possible, right? You're trying to get as close to that free throw line of your broad jump as you can, where you're just off two feet. You're just jumping as far as you can forward and just seeing how far you can go. If you have a tape measure with you, you can measure each jump to see, oh, okay, I got this far on this rep. Now I'm going to try and get farther on the next one. That'd be a great thing to do if you have access to that. Again, give yourself a good amount of rest in between each of those. And then next we're going to go to sprints. So we have three sets of 30 foot uphill sprints. Again, you can, you can kind of estimate on the exact, how exact, how far you're exactly going, but about 30ft if you have access to like a hill. Ideally, if you don't have that, then just any other sprint, any sort of sprint work, you can do exactly what we did for the last workout where you're just doing half court sprints right there. We're just trying to get maximal output sprinting. That's our Goal and then being able to add a, a, an uphill element to it can, you know, just give us a little bit of a different, you know, stimulus. So if you have access to that, cool, go for that. And then we're getting into our lifts here. So now we've got three sets of six to ten deadlifts. Deadlifts are very one of the more complex exercises too. So again, if you don't have someone to learn this from, don't feel like you have to do it, you can move on from this or you can go back to like the single leg deadlifts and do that instead. Or even doing an rdl, you know, with, with both feet instead. Right there. There's ways to substitute this out if you don't know what you're doing with a deadlift. Two to three sets of six, 10 reps for rear foot elevated split squat. So if you don't know what this is, I, I'll put an example of. That's like a screenshot. But again, very easy to find out what this looks like if you just give it a quick search on YouTube. But we'll go for three sets of six, 10 reps of this. So again, working that, you know, single side strength with our lower body. And again we're getting our hinge movement and we're getting our push movement as well. Then we're going to get to our first superset. So we have three sets of eight to ten with barbell bench press. And, you know, again, we're just going barbell instead of dumbbell. But, you know, it's really up to you what you want to do. If you want to mess around with an incline on your bench press, like, you can do that, whatever. But we're getting our vertical push in and then we've got for that next part of our superset, three to three sets of eight to ten face pulls. So, you know, we have our next kind of horizontal poll right there. And then we have, you know, 30 to 60 seconds rest in between each right here. And again, for all the, all these exercises, guys, you'll be able to find them if you just search them, right? You'll be able to find great examples of people doing them, of people walking you through them, of how to do them. So you'll be able to find everything. Superset number two, you have three sets of eight to ten barbell overhead press right here. So get into that vertical press and. And then three sets of eight to ten lat pulldowns. There's a lot of variations. You can do with that, but we can keep it simple. Just go normal lat, pull down machine and then again, 36 seconds of rest in between each exercise right there. So what I would say in terms of frequency is you could do this like this is a full body workout, right? This is pretty taxing. You could probably do this about three times a week, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So workout one on Monday, workout two on Wednesday, workout back to workout one on Friday, and, and then, you know, take the weekend off Monday, back to workout two now, and then one on Wednesday, two on Friday, weekend off back to one on Monday. You guys see the, the, the, the, the continuity right there? Just a, a sample of how you can do this right there because we don't need to overdo it. We're getting a good amount of volume, but again, we're hitting strength in all four planes, which is going to make us that, that guarantee that we're going to get stronger as long as you continue to increase your weights over time. So what you can't do is, is on the first day, your weights can't be the same or the reps, they can't be the same as what you do, you know, two weeks later. Because if you're just going to do that, your body is not going to have to adapt and overcome a new stimulus which would be another, you know, more weight on the bar or more weight with the dumbbell or whatever the case may be. So make sure you're increasing your weight as often as you can to really challenge yourself. And if you keep on doing that, you're going to get stronger, right? And that's going to, like I said, that's going to lead to you being better in every single area of the game of basketball. Right? So just examples of two workouts you could do. Again, feel free to substitute stuff in, but if you don't know what you're doing, this is a great place for you to start. And like I said, guys, I feel like I've said this a million times, but when you do this, it will improve your ability in everything, every single, every single other thing that you do. So if you're working on becoming a better shooter, better ball handler, a better decision maker, whatever, all those things are going to be easier for you if you also have the strength and explosiveness factor as well. In the top link, my description below, get my free elite perimeter score program as well. So that'll give you a program you can do to lift and a program you can do for your skills as well. So I mean your your development is pretty much taken care of just with those two things, right? That's completely free. That's top link my description below. So hopefully you take those two things, take both these programs and you apply them and you get get after it like, you know, hope, you know, I think you're going to see some, some crazy progress. And, you know, this is a good time of year if you're watching this when it comes out, because the season's, you know, kind of around the corners. Now's the time to really dive in and focus on this stuff. So, again, top link in the description below. Get my free program as well. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Drop any questions for me down below. Drop a like, subscribe if you're new. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.