Margin of Victory

There's no pressure on you right now, but I think that chest, then the pass, I think it's too long.

Yes, why, Kel?

Great decision.

Athletes live in a world that is highly objective. Success means the thing happened. Failure, the thing didn't happen. The championship wasn't won. That's why they spend so much time pushing the boundaries, looking for small ways to improve. To be able to express oneself at the highest standards when the stakes are high is not just about mastery. It's about the capacity, the physical capacity to go the distance.

Oh.

Yeah, that is definitely still there. It's not painful, but it's not numb either. It just zings.

Do you see your doc again beginning of February to be totally clear, or that's just—

I actually need to set that appointment up.

Okay.

With my ankle, I feel like I'm finally getting back to where I was before I got injured. Yesterday was the first time I felt like, put on my boots and go. World Cup comes every 4 years. You train your whole life for June 7th through July 7th. This time around, I'm in a much different place than I have been in years past. I probably won't feel 100% for a couple more months. I want to be able to execute. I'm not there yet.

Ball, Cal! He's gonna drop.

He's gonna drop. He's gonna drop 39 tonight.

That's my vote.

You heard it here first.

39. Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Go. Come here. Daddy!

Daddy! When I'm at home, I'm just Dad and trying to be present as much as I can. That is a very important time for me to be able to refresh and recharge.

Have a great day.

Play for Jesus.

Get buckets.

Bye, Daddy, love you.

Love you too, girls.

Basketball has a certain place in my life, but there are other things that are important to me. That's helped me keep my juice for the game. You know, there's a balance to everything.

Love you.

Love you too.

When I look at where I am going into year 10, totally different than what it was 5, 6 years ago. This will be our 5th straight year really having championship aspirations. You wanna make sure your body can hold up and last. Most intensive games come April, May, and June. I wanna be at my peak for those games that matter.

Boxing is all based around winning. It only has time for winners.

Ready?

Yeah.

What's next?

I spent the first 10 years building a foundation.

That's why it's really good. The only thing is, is that that needs to be your finishing move.

I listened, I followed rules. I fought so hard to get to this level. That's why you're so scared to go back to the ball. I can't lose. A loss will stay on your record for life.

Life.

When we're talking about elite athletics, Athlete A versus Athlete B, the margins and the separations between the two are razor thin. Athletes appreciate how finely tuned their competitors are, so it draws them back to the laboratory.

Athletes are looking for what we would call a marginal gain, like these tiny, tiny incremental advantages. It's 24/7 for the athlete. When they sleep, when they travel, when they recover, and when they perform and compete. This isn't just a physical game. There's a huge mental component.

I think every athlete is kind of in pursuit of what level can they get to, not only physically but technically. Okay, so just eccentric. That was a 3-second eccentric on the way down. You're here, and if you want to get a little bit more, it's these little tweaks that you have to add into your regimen.

What you put in your body is part of your lifestyle. How you sleep is your lifestyle. Everything I've done for the last 15 years of my life, I'm trying to do it differently.

Athletes are taking so many proactive steps now. Compression sleeves to squeeze the blood back up to the heart so it can pick up fresh oxygen, fresh nutrients. Sleep pods use light, use sound to take all the stress away. People actually travel with their own light bulbs. Working tirelessly to biohack their body clock. Once you start to add those small marginal gains up, it becomes real.

The hardest thing in the NBA talent-wise, you know, everybody's kind of up here. There's little things that can separate you from the next guy out there. What up, Doc? I try everything, to be honest. If there's science behind it, I give it a try.

So the goal today is that we're gonna just capture a couple of the movements that we think are kind of key to your game. All right, you wanna do that T-pose with us? And then you can just kind of do a twist. So if we can have you just start over here, 90-degree cut on the plates. We combine 3D motion analysis cameras with force plates. We're going to use infrared lights to bounce off our reflective markers. So we'll do 3 movements. One's going to be simulating coming off of a ball screen.

My team looks at athletes and how they perform. We need to understand what his competitive advantage is, and we want to give him even more of that.

So that Z, that's going to be the vertical force. It's going to be that gather step before your shot, and it's going to be that breaking step before your pull-up.

That's pretty crazy.

I want you to go for speed now. This is fast. Go. Come on, nice and quick.

Good.

Good. So we're going to have a look at 7 different movements, and we're just going to move through joint by joint. Toes at 12 o'clock.

Can we get a read on his tibial rotation?

Yeah.

5, 1, 2, 3. Perfect, job done. Come and have a look. What we're measuring is how high you can jump, how much power you can output, how much time you spend on the ground. And then piecing it together. I've seen a difference from right to left already.

So his contact time on the right side is higher.

Yes.

So when your right leg hits, there's more time for your shoulders to turn going right than there is going left. That's why you miss left.

It always takes the participation of an athlete to make them better. I think it starts with the athlete to have that desire and that need to improve and have that mindset of openness. Because when they walk in through this door, they'll see things and experience things they've never done before. Hands out in front.

Once we kind of figured out how we can get bigger and stronger, we then started to say, how do we help them recover? The importance of oxygen is huge. All of our energy is supplied through oxygen and through blood flow. And the more we can increase blood flow, the better the impact on the athlete.

Recovery. Up to 20.

Yeah.

Up to 23.

Perfect. So we started to ask, is anything out there that can improve blood flow?

3, 2—

As we exercise, our body emits heat. We all know that. We get hot. We sweat when we work out.

Perfect.

We're finally understanding it's not just about building materials that wick sweat away. Our research led us to this bioceramic material that takes that heat, it absorbs it, and it pushes it back into the body. We realized that we have potentially a technology that can increase this peripheral blood flow.

Athletes are more consumed with performance standards than the rest of us. A fraction of an inch, one more punch at the end of a round, those can be the deciding factors.

It's a difference between the guy that crosses the line first and wins an Olympic gold and the guy that doesn't even make the final.

I've been really proud of myself because I've gotten on a really good pre-lift and training stretch regimen. Have you?

Yes.

Look at you. I know.

And I feel like my flexibility has gotten a lot better.

That's good.

That's really good. I think most people play sports to see how far they can push themselves and what level can they get to. I'm just chasing the best that I can possibly be. I feel great about the World Cup. I'm excited. But I don't feel like I have reached my peak.

I feel comfortable. I feel confident. I've learned so much about who I am and what I have to do.

Ha ha ha!

Now moving forward is gonna be me expressing everything I've learnt. So 1, 2, roll the hook.

Yeah. Bah!

Good. I've done my apprenticeship, and now I'm ready to make a masterpiece.

Ah.

Basketball's gonna end one day. You're gonna have to, you know, hang the sneakers up at some point. I feed off of that for sure. How much can I go after? How much can I accomplish until my body says I can't do it anymore?

Mastery is a path. It's not X number of rings or X money in the bank account. It is a pursuit of fulfillment. One of the things that we learn from people who are world-class is that They are searching for something. And they're saying, "There's more inside of me. I need to know how to unlock that." They make those around them better because they are forcing the boundaries of human potential. This is a human endeavor. This is not something that is reserved just for athletes. This is for all of us.

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