Articles & Resources

by Brijesh Patel

I was recently speaking to my good friend, Art Horne (athletic trainer and strength and conditioning coach at Northeastern University) at a pre-season basketball scrimmage about warming up.  Most basketball teams typically warm-up and stretch on the court.  Art wondered where we did ours, because our guys came out at 45 on the clock already to go with their specific warm-up with their coaches.  I explained that we conducted our warm-up in the weight room and he thought it would be a great idea if I presented what we do in an article.  I didn’t think it was earth shattering but thought it would be a good idea to explain what we do to prepare ourselves for a game.

 
Here at Quinnipiac, we typically play doubleheader basketball games.  Our women play first and as soon as their game is over, there is 30 minutes on the clock before the men’s game.  We used to do a traditional warm-up and dynamic stretch on the court 60 minutes prior to the game.  The court isn’t available during a double header so we decided to take the warm-up to the weight room.  What started out as a necessity turned out to be our norm now for home games as our guys preferred going to the weight room over the court. 
Our on court warm-up tended to be a distraction for some guys as they were looking around in the stands seeing if their friends and family were there yet;  What the other team was doing would also distract them.  By moving to the weight room, we could really focus on “us” and “what we do”.  We could crank up the music, get some good energy going and really get prepared to be successful for the following competition.  Our guys now prefer and look forward to “stretching” in the weight room.  They’ve made a playlist on their ipod and know that warming up in the weight room is part of their pre-game routine.

The order of warm-up is the following:
1. Warm-up
2. Loosen-up
3. Turn-On
4. Build-up

This is the general warm-up as it leads to the specific warm-up that the coaches will conduct after they are done with me.  In the specific warm-up the guards and bigs will split up and work on shooting, post moves, coming off screens, etc.

Here are the goals and examples of what we do for each category:
1. Warm-up – our goal is to increase the core temperature and break a sweat.  We start off with agility ladder work for about 3-4 minutes.
2. Loosen-up – our goal is to work on dynamic mobility of the entire body (ankles, hips, t-spine) in all 3 planes of motion.  We will start with various types of arm circles, progressing to isolated dynamic flexibility drills for the lower body (knee hugs, hamstring kicks, etc) and then progressing to lunge variations with arm drivers.  This takes about 6-8 minutes.

3. Turn-on – our goal is to activate the nervous system and get the glutes firing.  We incorporate glute bridges, single leg balance work, as well as low intensity reactive plyometrics (foot fire, line hops, etc.)  This takes about 1 minute.

4. Build-up – our goal is to incorporate movements that they will perform during their activity.  We incorporate sprinting, backpeddling and lateral shuffling as well as some change of direction work.  This takes about 2 minutes.
The total warm-up time is about 13-15 minutes and really gets our athletes ready for their specific warm-up.
I hope this article gets you thinking about how you get your athletes ready to compete and may give you some other ideas and options.

Notes collected by Art Horne

Early - Loud -Continuous Talk

We all want our teams to talk on defense, but do we really get them to understand how important it is and what it does for us and to the opponent?  Defensive communication is so important because it:

•     Intimidates: especially when the opponent knows that you know everything they're running because your players are calling out the plays and coverages as soon as they hear the call!
•     Gives your defense a head start: alerting a teammate of the action before it happens is critical to successful defense.
•     Gives the man on the ball more confidence: if he knows he has help and protection behind him he'll be much more confident and aggressive.
•     Wakes up a disengaged defender: talking to a player who's not paying attention on defense can alert him to get back and re-engaged.
•    Catches a mistake before it happens: so many times we have alerted a player to an offensive action before it caught him and that kept us from dealing with a mistake
•    Energizes your teammates: talking teams always seem to play with more energy – it’s a fact of basketball!

Click HERE to view this article.

Check out Brian as he speaks at the BSMPG Basketball Specific Training Symposium this coming June 3/4 in Boston.

When working with basketball athletes there is one thing that is certain and that's knee pain. See why Mike Reinhold thinks McConnell Patellar Taping my work by clicking HERE.

by Brian McCormick

Josh Waitzkin wrote a great book titled The Art of Learning in which he chronicles his experience as a chess prodigy and push-Judo World Champion. He attributes his success to his ability to learn.

In the lead-up to UFC 124, Kevin Iole wrote about the transformation of Josh Koscheck and Georges St. Pierre since their first fight. About GSP, he writes:

“He literally traveled the world seeking knowledge. While he’s one of the greatest athletes in the sport, his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach, John Danaher, said it’s St. Pierre’s ability to absorb coaching that makes him so unique.

‘He’s mastered the art of learning,’ said Danaher... ‘His ability to learn is what has helped him to continue to make progress over time. Most professional mixed martial artists have a certain skill set that is associated with them, and they use that and sustain themselves throughout their careers with that. But he’s one of the few who continues to change, modify and adapt and bring in new techniques over time.’

He’s meticulous when it comes to doing things correctly. And so, even though he had routed the hard-punching Dan Hardy at UFC 111, the first thing he did when he returned to the locker room was get onto the floor and question Danaher about mistakes he made when going for an arm bar submission in the first round.”

I wrote an article recently about automaticity (http://learntocoachbasketball.com/automaticity-skill-development-and-expert-performance) and cited a study titled “Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports.” Yarrow, Brown and Krakauer (2009) wrote:

It is not automaticity per se that is indicative of high proficiency but rather the level of skill at which automaticity is attained.

Learning is a relatively permanent change in performance that occurs through practice. To continue improving, one must acquire a new skill, as is often indicative of mixed martial artists who start in one discipline (wrestling) and learn new disciplines (boxing) as a way to improve. Another way to improve is to push past one’s current level in terms of the speed-accuracy trade-off. For GSP, that might mean improving the speed of his punches or the speed with which he reads his opponent to decide when, where and how to punch without sacrificing accuracy; or, he could become a more accurate puncher without sacrificing speed, maybe by throwing more straight punches as opposed to looping punches.

In basketball, young players often improve by acquiring new skills. As players gain experience, many automate these skills at an early age and their improvement plateaus. I have noticed that many female players essentially peak around their junior year of high school. Rather than settle into a performance level when one reaches automaticity, to improve, one must continue learning. If the player has learned all the basic skills, improvement requires pushing past her current threshold in terms of speed or accuracy. This is why many coaches push players to practice at the edge of their performance level. This is also why improvement often starts with a dip in performance.

To continue learning, the player must learn to make her moves quicker with the same level of accuracy. Imagine a player learning to dribble. Initially, the player improves by eliminating gross mistakes - essentially, the players learns to control the ball with her fingers. As her control improves, she furthers her learning by adding new moves: in-n-out, crossover, behind-the-back, etc. When she learns a new move, her performance declines because learning is an error-filled process. When she learns a crossover for the first time, she makes more mistakes than she had been making when dribbling the ball in straight lines. As she reduces errors and automates her crossover dribble, she automates the skill at a certain speed of execution. At that speed, she rarely makes a mistake - she has has supreme ball control at that speed or great accuracy with her dribbling.

To continue learning, she has to make the move faster. Learning the crossover dribble at a faster speed requires concentration, a specific goal and numerous repetitions - deliberate practice. The player must move outside of her comfort zone (the speed at which she controls the ball with great accuracy) and practice at a faster speed. At this faster speed - the edge of her performance level - she is likely to make more mistakes. However, as her learning continues, she makes fewer and fewer errors at this speed, which signifies her learning which we see as improvement. At that point, she must push to a new performance edge and make more mistakes in an effort to learn and improve.

This is an exhaustive task, especially as players gain experience and reach higher and higher levels of performance. It is easy to improve when learning a new skill. It is very hard to continue one’s learning on an automated skill.

The elite performers manage to push through their comfort zone and practice on the edges to continue learning and improving. GSP’s post-fight behavior is indicative of the dedication and concentration needed for learning to continue. In essence, his mistake in the fight set the conditions for deliberate practice, as he sought an expert for immediate feedback, and one imagines that he trained to improve that specific skill with numerous repetitions over the next few weeks. In that way, he learned something new, either because it was a new skill or because he was able to perform an old skill faster, more accurately or in different situations.

Many players lack this ability or desire to further their learning once they reach an acceptable level of performance. Their skill automaticity does not signify their expertise, but places a ceiling on their performance. Those who continue their learning and push past their comfort zone tend to be the ones who excel at higher and higher levels of competition.