Basic Weights #1

  Basketball mite be classed as a non contact sport but if you go into a competitive game thinking you dont have to be strong you will soon learn your incorrect, so some work in the weight room will help. For some basic upper body exercise to give you a good base to work from you should work on you'r; chest, shoulders, arms and abs. These groups of muscle come in handy during basketball games helping you to fight threw screens, box out, go threw contact and of course to shoot, pass and dribble the ball.
 Chest. For the chest you should do some bech, incline bench, Dumbell press, push ups and work some on the cables. Cables are my favorite machine as the list of things you can use them for seems endless.
 Shoulders. Shoulders are a key aspect in basketball and any sport as the shoulders connect alot of muscles together. For this you should do some kind of shoulder press, forward and lateral raises, and again make it on the cables. The amount of exercises you can look up for just the sholders on a cable should be enough to keep you busy for a while.
 Arms.  With dumbells do standard bicep curls, hammer curls, you can also to 21's with a straight bar or Z bar, you can also do over hand curls which will work other parts of the bicep. Start by doing a few pull-ups at first and build them up as working your own body weight is excellant conditioning. Dont forget the Triceps as when you are shooting, passing the arms are extending with the force of the triceps so make them strong too with; Dips, tricep curls infront and behind the head, push downs on the cables and even skull push-ups at first on the floor then build it up onto a ball.

All of these basic weight training exercises will be easy to find online for full video and step by step adive on how to do them correctly. In the next Weights blog i shall be posting some pictures and videos to show for the more complicated exercises i will be talking about.

Step 1: Basic Conditioning. Miles and Quarters

  Basketball is a high intensity and quick recovery sport, so you have to condition yourself for this. To save injury and to perform the skills drills, shooting drills conditioning drills performed on the hard wood. You must put some time in to pre-condition your body for all these demands. One way i suggest you prepare is by doing a little times endurance running so you can monitor your improvement over a period of runs. For someone wishing to play College basketball or Professional basketball, no matter your size or position you should be able to run a mile in under 6minutes. Im not saying the first time you run it needs to be under 6minutes but you should be working to achieve this goal within a few weeks of running miles. In the top european leagues they have some 6'11 guys playing the small forward position so size is not an excuse. The bigs have to be able to run the floor just as good as the guards. For the smaller guys on the court you should be running miles in the mid to low 5minutes area, and remember point guards lead from the from.
  On top of the timed miles as i said basketball is a quick recovery sport so you have to develope this ability. Running the timed mile is to help build up your endurance and mental strength to push threw the pain barrier. This next conditioning drill to work on the bodies recovery period and again to help with mental toughness and push threw the pain. This exercise is called Quarters. Find a 400m track or measure it out. You will be running this 400m four times each time you do this drill. to start off you need to be aiming to run these quarters at a consistant speed so lets say one lap in 78seconds all four times then between each run you will have double the allocated time to rest before going again. You must be strict with the recovery time as this is to help the body speed up its recovery time. every 2weeks drop the time by 2seconds until you are running 74 or 72 a lap. This means you also drop the recovery time by 4seconds every 2 weeks. Once you hit the 74-72 times you need to drop the recovery down to a minute flat...yes 60seconds.
  Doing both of these conditioning exercises during preseason will certainly put you in good stead to get ready for the season. Maybe do the mile on mondays and the quarters on the the wednesdays so you have time to recover from each exercise.