3 Things You Are Doing In The Weight Room That Are Killing Your Game
I love that more and more highschool hoopers are getting in the weight room. Traditionally, at least in my experience, hoopers used to be adverse to the weight room. This is a belief in the basketball culture that myself and many other coaches are constantly working to erase. This is because the weight room is a crucial tool to not only improve the physical performance part of your game, but also your durability so you can stay on the court and keep getting better.
That being said, there are 3 big mistakes I see young hoopers make in the weight room that definitely do not help their game and might even hurt it. Let's get into it.
Only training in the sagittal plane
The first mistake is only training in the sagittal plane. There are 3 planes of movement, and young athletes and inexperienced coaches love to spend most of their time and attention on the sagittal. Think of the sagittal plane as any movement that you can do where you move straight forward and back or up and down. If you want to test if a movement is sagittal just imagine two walls beside your shoulders. Any movement you can do without hitting the walls would be in the sagittal plane.
When you observe the game of basketball, you will realize it's a 3d game. Up to 31% of movements that occur in a basketball game are lateral. That means you need to spend time working in the other 2 planes of movements, the frontal and transverse planes.
For the frontal plane, think of those imaginary walls again but now in front and behind us, it's any movement we can do side to side. Like defensive shuffles or lateral shoulder raises.
For the transverse plane, if we take a line and cut our body in half, it's any movement we can do pivoting on that line. Essentially its rotation, like twisting your trunk, or extending to finish as you take contact at the rim.
Please understand that I'm not saying training in the sagittal plane is wrong. Honestly a lot of your time is still going to be dedicated to sagittal movements. Sagittal movements are where you can express the most force and velocity, like squats and sprints, which will help raise the tide of all ships especially when you are young and new to training. Just remember that your body is going to adapt to the specific demands you place on it so fill in some gaps in your training by adding in these things. Such as lateral squat and lunge variation, pallof presses, side plank options like Copenhagen and feet elevated side planks, change of direction drills where you are sprinting and cutting or lateral shuffling back and forth, and isolated leg abduction and adduction drills. Now moving on to our second mistake. Which is
Only training slow with moderate to heavy loads or said another way…Never training with velocity.
I think the root of these problems comes from the current state of the fitness industry. We are obsessed with looking good and the visual adaptations we can see from fitness. I know I can not judge, I like most people, started my fitness journey with the goal of simply looking better.
Due to this starting point for most athletes and coaches, usually the answer to all problems becomes more strength and more mass. More muscle becomes the solution to solve all problems, even for our performance on the court. This usually leads us on a road to chest and tris… back and bis….. shoulders and abs…. and the occasional leg day once in a while with each of these days consisting of high amounts of volume with slow movements.
And that's not a bad thing, especially if you are not a basketball player and your only goal is to look good and build muscle. Kudos to you and keep going. However if you want to maximize your physical performance on the court you're missing out on a lot of things the weight room can offer you.
As we talked about in the first mistake section, the game is 3d, it requires an athlete to be prepared for a variety of demands. You need to have enough size and strength to armor yourself and handle contact, but be fast to blow by a defender, get off the ground quickly to get a rebound, and stop on a dime to change direction. Not to mention do all this while being incredibly aerobically and anaerobically fit.
And while slow high rep strength training is amazing and can be a big portion of your training load, it needs to be supplemented with other types of training so we can be as prepared as possible.
From here it's easy to diverge into many rabbit holes in regards to the consequences of only training with only slow strength training movements, but let's just focus on 2.
The first we will spend no time on, but highlight that most slow strength training that I see youth tend to do are only sagittal in nature.
And the second, that basketball is a game of shallow joint angles and reactivity. Slow strength training can only address these demands to a certain extent.
The environment and rules of basketball require you, if you want to be good at least, to have to use shallow joint angles. If you go ass to grass trying to get a rebound, chances are you are not getting it or a put back is going to be on your head.
You simply do not have all the time in the world to generate force to accelerate or get off the ground. Meaning you better be explosive in shallow ranges to gain the advantage. This means improving the performance quality called rate of force development or RFD.
Heavy/ moderately heavy slow strength training does a great job of improving qualities like our peak force and strength endurance
The problem is, in basketball you do not have all the time in the world to generate force, and if you want that new muscle and strength to transfer you better start working on improving your RFD and adding velocity work into your training.
Adding in to your training days:
Different varieties of jump and plyometric training like bounds, depth jump, leaps, and hops
sprint variations that train acceleration and top end speed
heavy and light compound movements with the intent of moving the bar/weight fast
All are great tools for improving your RFD and helping your efforts translate to the court.
Please do not take this as one is better than the other. It's not fast vs slow. You need both as a basketball player, they are like peanut butter and jelly and given your individual needs and the timing of your competitive season you might need more peanut butter than jelly or vice versa. Really the point is, if your goal is to be faster you need to train faster, in most cases it really is that simple.
On one last note here, when I say train with velocity I'm not talking about squat jumps or sprinting till you want to puke. I'm talking about quality sets, usually short in duration, where you are challenging your max outputs and velocities with pristine movement quality. If you are tired and out of breath, you're not going to be able to generate the kind of force or technique needed to move the needle forward. This works out to be a nice segway in our last mistake which is….
Always Training To Failure and Fatigue.
In my opinion it's the most important to correct since the downstream consequences can be heavy for a hooper who is trying to go to the next level.
We need to understand that training is a stress to our body. Said another way, there is a price your body pays to train. You're not making improvements immediately in that session, and the more you go towards maximum fatigue or failure the heavier the price of recovery.
Let's look at the recovery consequences of training till failure first.
Training is stresser on our bodies, and our bodies respond to all types of stress in the same way. Whether it's a full body strength training session, a basketball game, life, or exam period these are all stressors that fill the same cup.
Stress is not bad or good, stress is simply just stress and you need the right dose. If you pour too much in the stress cup, it overflows and bad things happen like injuries and burn out. On the other hand, if you do not pour anything in the cup you do not have anything to drink, meaning you're not stimulating anything to adapt the way you want.
It's all about balancing the right mix of your life stressors to make sure you are always improving and moving in the right direction.
Let's say a grade 12 athlete is in a finals exam period. This usually means a lot of night studying and external pressure to do well. For this given time, school is filling the cup more than the start of a semester would.
Now add in intensive practices all week, we do not have much more room in the cup. If you add in some additional intensive weight room sessions that cup might overflow , injuries might now happen, burn out or other undesirable things will arise.
Now let's take back that failure training session. Let's say that athlete went to the gym, trained but went light, maybe staying 4-5 reps from failure. That cup most likely does not overflow, and most likely has a lot of positive mental effects for that athlete while maintaining performance qualities they are striving to improve. While this concept of stress, capacity and resilience may not be a direct result of failure training, what I want you to take away is there is a good chance you can not handle the same training loads as an advanced strength athlete. A lot of hoopers already have so much accumulated stress from playing year round basketball and other social, educational, and financial pressures that all play into the ability to recover.
The second consequence of training till failure and fatigue is your ability to acquire the skills you need as a hooper.
Basketball places a heavy demand on skill. The best way to acquire basketball skills is to play the game and work on those skills in specific workouts or games.
When you train till failure and maximal fatigue consistently, not only do you run the risk of annoying training injuries, but you are going to be extremely fatigued, sore and tired.
When we are in a fatigued state, we are going to be limited in our focus and ability to grow and acquire skill at an efficient rate.
It is a mind shift that you need to have. The goal of the weight room is not to simply just get stronger at any cost. The goal is to improve key physical qualities to enhance the skills you already have and help better acquire new skills
Your number 1 job is to also perform on the court and WIN games. If you are in a fatigued state you're not going to be able to perform and express what you are capable of.
The good news, you can still get stupid strong without training till failure. Give yourself 2-4 reps left in the tank at the end of each set. There is plenty of evidence that non-failure training can get you big and strong even when compared to failure training. Why beat yourself up when you can still get gains feeling good and maximizing that jump shot?
But eh, do you. Your choice if you want to lift like a jerk.
Conclusion
To summarize, if you want to stop killing your game
Make sure you start training in 3D. Hit some lateral lunges, jump laterally, practice changing direction and isolate those important muscles that help you move and decelerate in the frontal plane.
Start adding some velocity into your training. Most young hoopers I come across want to jump higher, have a quicker first step, and ultimately just want to be more explosive. If you want to be faster, train with some damn speed. Jump more, sprint more, do more things that you have to react fast too, and if you're ready for it have the intent to move heavy shit fast.
Stop training till failure. Do not be that dude that tries to max out every lift all the time, or brings every set till failure or does interval training until they want to pass out and puke. Don’t just be on that grind, be on that smart grind.
Appreciate you all, keep working and go build.
Coach Nate Out!