What Should I Do In The Basketball Off Season

I have been playing basketball since I was around 7 but I started training with a team when I was 1o years old. Since then I have been playing basketball all the time whether it was the season, pre-season, off season, vacation time.......you name it, I played ball. The reason is not hard - I loved it (and still do)!

Once I got to college I still played the whole time over the summer. I would also lift weights and do my strength and conditioning and by the time I came for pre-season to train with the college basketball team I was a mile ahead of everybody else when it came to conditioning and strength and my shot felt great, everything was the way I wanted it to be. It felt good to say the least but I wasn't ready for what happened after that.......as the season was starting I started getting tired and my shot wasn't falling like it was supposed to, bottom line, my performance was not anywhere near optimal. It was hard but I had admit it to myself that I was doing too much all the time and the bod needed a rest sometime and it just happened to be the beginning of the basketball season!

It is 2 years after my college playing days and I have two professional basketball seasons behind me and I so much more knowledge about preparing for an upcoming season, especially when it comes to strength, conditioning, skill work.
Even though there has been so much progress in the strength and conditioning field there are still so many players, and even more disturbingly - teams, that are using outdated methods that do not help them in the long run. I will talk about some of the problems I see and things that can be done to improve them.

- Training full speed after the season is over. After the season is over the athlete should take time to recuperate and not think about their sport, take a vacation and most importantly fix any injury or problem they had during the season. When players keep going after the season is over it is a sure way to overtrain.

- Not enough corrective exercise and strength training. Every athlete has imbalances ( in some sports more than other) which they need to address because imbalances nearly always lead to injuries and decrease performance in the long run. Every basketball player should strength train, whether to get stronger faster or put on some functional muscle mass. From my experience most players should just focus on getting stronger, which will bring up their other athletic abilities (and also help fix their imbalances when the right exercises are used).
- Too much conditioning work in the early off-season. Most of the players I know that do train when they have a break, do too much conditioning early in the off-season and just keep going with it all the way in to pre-season. They focus on running and other aerobic work and do very little strength, speed or agility training.
- Playing basketball games, tournaments, summer leagues the whole summer. When trying to get exposure there is nothing wrong with playing a tournament or a summer league but I see many players doing that the whole summer while they should be improving in the gym, on the track or doing more skill work. When you play basketball year round, you do not have time to fix your imbalances, take a mental break, and work on the things that will make you a better player. Just playing by itself is not gonna automatically make you better, many times it will reinforce the things you are doing wrong (pick and choose the most important games and tournaments).
- Doing nothing and waiting for team pre-season. I know a lot of guys that relax a whole lot the whole off-season and expect to get in great shape and improve in the team's pre-season. Let me give you a hint - it's not happening!!! Pre-season is geared towards sport specific conditioning and even more so team offesnse, defense, etc. You are not going to improve in the 4-6 weeks of pre-season (especially if you were doing very little the whole summer) and you will be very very lucky if you will be where you were last year (who doesn't want to improve every year? If that's you, then stop playing!)
- Letting yourself get out of shape. There is nothing wrong with taking time off and letting your mind and body take a brake. This is done for the reason that you can come back mentally strong and ready to go and improve in the off season. What you should not do is just be careless and do things that are not good for your body such as excess drinking, too much unhealthy eating, laying around for long periods of time, smoking, etc. Such things will make sure you get overweight and really out of shape so that when you start training it will take a lot of hard work to just get where you used to be (it is a lot easier to get out of shape then to get in shape!). If you live a healthy lifestyle in general then it will be much easier for you......
- When the time comes doing too much aerobic training. It still seems to be the trend that to get in basketball shape we need to run for miles and miles of steady state cardio. At least it seems like that since I still see the majority of the coaches doing it which carries down to the players doing it in their off season. If you can run 10 miles at a slow pace, it doesn't mean you will be able to run 20 full out basketball court sprints with short breaks! The energy systems used in basketball are 80% ATP-PC, 10% glycolysis, 10% aerobic..............you might be asking what that means? It means you should cut down the long slow running workouts and start doing more interval training, circuits, etc...

Those are just some of things that should and should not be done in the basketball off-season according to me. There are quite a few more but I will leave that for another post since there is already enough to think about in this one.
If you can take at least a couple of points and implement them into your off-season to boost your results, performance, get you in a good team, or anything other for that matter, then great!
If not, then you will soon figure out that you should......