In-Season Training for Basketball
Anyone that knows our beliefs here at F2P, knows the importance that we place on our in-season program. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is for injury prevention and of course performance. Here is a little breakdown of what we look at when it comes to in-season training specifically for our basketball players.
We first look at what are the season demands of the schedule. Typically, the length of the season is going to run from mid-November until the beginning to the end of March depending on the depth of a playoff run our athlete’s teams make, so quite long. In an average week, once games begin, the athlete will have 2-3 games a week and be playing in a tournament during the holidays. As you can see the season can be pretty demanding which causes some people to think training will cause more stress and should not be done. You should let the body recover.
In our minds, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, because of the demanding season, it makes it more important to train in order to stay fresh, injury free, and perform better on the court. If all you do is play basketball your body is only going to be exposed to that stress, resulting in the muscles creating a different length-tension relationship in them. This is one reason injuries and fatigue (dead leg feeling at the end of the season) can happen. That’s why our in-season basketball programs are centered on making sure the athlete doesn’t development any overuse compensations in their movement patterns. Which at times means we are training the muscles completely opposite than the way they perform on the court, which keeps the tightness and fatigue away.
Don’t mistake this maintenance is our goal for the season. As with any time of the year, the goal is development. There is no reason why an athlete can’t improve their athletic ability throughout the season with a correctly designed program in place. If the athlete’s movement patterns are correctly aligned, then you can move on to the next step, monitoring fatigue level.
There are a couple of ways that we monitor fatigue level. The first is simply the body language of the athlete. A few things to look at are: Are they moping around? Do they have poorer posture compare to normal? Are they more or less interacting with you and others? Some of these can quickly change with just a change in music or anything else that changes the mindset. This is one reason that at times I say “tired is just a mindset, so change it.” Other times that is just how fatigued the athlete is. The other way we monitor fatigue is tracking the athlete’s Reactive Strength Index, RSI, throughout the entire season. Basically, RSI is a measurement of an athlete’s athletic potential. In order to get this measurement, we use our 4-Jump Reactive Test. We have the athlete jump 4 consecutive times trying to jump as high as they can and keep as minimal of ground contact as possible. We measure their average jump height and average ground contact of those 4 jumps. If you take the average height and divide it by the average ground contact time you get the athletes RSI. Any drop in an athlete’s RSI could be a detector of fatigue.
Once we have found that the athletes basic movement patterns have correct alignment and their fatigue level allows for more stress, it’s all systems go as with any of our performance programs. This means designing a program to increases their athleticism for the actions they will have to produce on the court. Do they need more eccentric ability, rate a force development, yielding strength, or reactive strength? How are their specific movement actions looking on the court (shuffle, shuffle to sprint, jab to first step down the lane)? Can they be cleaned up? Can the brain process when/ how to perform these actions correctly? The only thing that changes is we will decrease the volume so that they remain fresh throughout the season since we know they are putting more stress on their bodies outside of F2P during the season compared to out of season.
