“I tell my athletes, don’t pay me to train you. You pay me to help you get better. So I’m never gonna train you for a set time. I’m never gonna, some weeks we might train twice. And you pay me the same amount if I train you seven times. Because my job isn’t to train you. My job is to help you be the best basketball player.”
“When I first got on the court, I was dunking. I mean, I had I want to say as close to 40 inch verticals… Didn’t make a difference. I was like, dude, I don’t need any of this. I need enough to play defense. I need enough to make a shot off the move. I’m not gonna go in the paint and dunk on a seven footer. If I did, it’d be two points one time.”
“How difficult it was physically actually to play basketball. Like, it is really difficult physically, taxation-wise. You don’t have any time to lift and play basketball. It is horrifying.”
“I actually started way more aggressive with myself… I’d go like three times a day in the gym lifting this and that. I got shredded and I looked great, but the wheels were falling off. Like I hurt, like things were not good. And skill wise was lacking in a lot of areas.”
“With my athletes, I start really small and go large. ⁓ Indirectly kind of like Mike Mentzer… just the idea of doing enough to stimulate and then getting out of there.”
Deceleration: “If you learn the skill, you start to learn to dissipate the deceleration better. So I think a lot of people when they first learn a skill are mechanically inefficient. So you can think about if have a force plate, I’m sure you’ve seen it used it before, if you just stomp on that thing, you’ll see spikes all over the place, this huge oscillation, like a reverb. that’s typically, and you’ve probably felt that you go for a jump and you misstep, you’re like, ⁓ my back, or like my hip, what the heck was that? Right, you get this reverb. What we’re trying to do is can I properly transition that deceleration? Because a lot of the herky-jerky movements aren’t as herky-jerky as you think in sport. A lot of it is actually prepped with a really good setting of your mass center of base to accept that movement. So a lot of people learn to step back jumper. They make a really big mistake or they point either toe straight at you like a split squat. My gosh, you are so weak in that position. So there’s tons of quad overload. If you turn your hip a little bit and you actually turn your shoulders, it becomes way more glute. So you just do a little bit of a turn and you turn and pivot your foot, you start to sit in your hip way more and you have way more power. You would never want to change direction if you’re doing a lateral shuffle. You’d rather plant on the inside of your foot and push laterally to stop, almost like setting that hip and structure with your ankle and knee and then to go the other way. But if you stop, just run and stop straight ahead with your knee point straight forward, there’s like no tensegrity of that area.”
“Those good positions that allow for your glute to be truly loaded, it takes a lot off of the knee. It really does. ⁓ And so when you learn this skill, it’s not just preparing the tissues to constant, that’s why I just running forward and stopping, it’s not preparation. You have to prepare to do this skill because what you’ll realize if you haven’t played basketball in a while is like my oblique sling is so sore the first time I play again. Or like my hips are so sore because those are allowing the, those are the stabilizers on the canoe that allows the cannon to be shot, right? If there’s the cannon on canoe, you’re just gonna shoot the cannon and your canoe is gonna tip over. The same thing with position. So strength is weird because strength isn’t necessarily, did I produce a lot of force? It’s like positionally was I able to produce the force I need to and you can get a lot of strength out of people just by being in the right position.”
“A of times we teach in deceleration way too much of like, sit down into your knees. And it’s like, that’s gonna hurt. That hurts me just watching it. But I can go shoot 90 step backs right now and be totally fine tomorrow. So that’s not the same deceleration in my opinion.”
“You don’t see runners tearing their Achilles. You don’t see tennis players really doing it. And it seems to be athletes who are high volume. People who are doing high locomotion seem to be prepared in that area. It could be a weight issue. We’re talking about basically if you are able to get stronger, which more times than not comes with some added weight, right? Maybe two pounds, four pounds. You’re now responsible for that weight and you’re responsible for that force. And so if I’m going to not in conjunction train locomotion during it, I’m gonna be in trouble.”
“The other thing with basketball is the schedules are diabolical. Like the travel schedules are ridiculous, but also the sheer volume of how many times they warm up. Like, my gosh, they have shoot arounds, like second shoot arounds and they have pregame and then like they’re on their feet for like five hours. I wonder just what the hydration status of the fluid dynamics in that area is versus you don’t warm up for nine hours… Like, I’d be so stiff. And I think that’s part of the issue is the sheer, I don’t know what the fluid dynamics would be, but I’m sure you’re causing some level of edema in the area. Just the sheer volume of just, like, standing on your feet. And the fact you’re stopping and going, stopping and going. We know from a physiological standpoint that we do get pooling because of gravity lower. And that area doesn’t have much wiggle room to move with? ⁓ Is there something going on there? Because no one gets hurt in practice. Have you noticed that? There’s no Achilles injuries in warm-ups. Or there’s no Achilles injuries during their skill sessions, during the last eventful thing. And people say, well, because it’s the last thing, because they got hurt. Yeah, but if it’s really that likely to get hurt, these guys go game speed before the game. You know I mean? Maybe it’s because they’ve just been on their feet for four hours before this. And as a human, if you’ve ever been on your foot for four hours, like I work basketball camps, and in the day, I can barely move.”
Like I kick my feet up, we used to play pickup, and then at like basketball camps, we’d coach from like 7 a.m. to 4. It was horrible. You’d be so stiff, you’d spend the first 10 minutes hobbling around. I wonder if they just do way too much on their feet. That’s kind of a different thing we didn’t talk about. So there’s the horsepower part where we get stronger, and we get bigger.
“You’re hurt, it’s end of season, everyone gets hurt, when would you likely have the higher doses of painkillers? That time of year, okay, you’re not gonna sit out a playoff game because you’re hurting, everyone’s getting hurt end of the year. You wonder why. Is someone just toughing through something? Is it someone who took a painkiller?… Like maybe the pain is a thing telling you you shouldn’t do this.”
“Force has to come from muscles. It’s a contractile force, that is. There’s no real other area that you can really lean on that doesn’t somehow initiate with contraction. could argue tendons recoil and preserve force, or fascia might transmit force, but nothing else is contractile.”
“There’s research that shows when you hit the ground, you will remain at a semi-isometric length while the tendon actually lengthens.”
“This is the tricky part with elasticity is people go and they watch track athletes jump over hurdles. And they go, wow, how elastic that person is. And the question is, do you even want that skill of elasticity as a basketball player? Because that is so unbelievably upright. It’s like if someone booped you and you just go flying off in another direction because it is not a firm base to accept an external perturbation. It’s just like, boing, boing, boing, really springy, but it maybe isn’t the best position to actually play a sport from.”
“It’s not like somehow the fascia is operating tension outside of the muscle. It is not somehow the tendon is operating tension outside of the muscle. The muscle is operating tension. That’s why we have innervated muscle fibers. The tonus of our nervous system is expressed through the innervation of our muscle fibers.”
“Everyone’s so obsessed with the soleus, the gastroc. Maybe these other muscles that do exist get so wildly neglected because you go and play basketball, the biggest thing I hear from athletes is post-tib and peroneals, post-tib and peroneals, post-tib and peroneals. Amount of soleus or knee pain I hear is minimal. Post-tib, tear and peroneals. Me, myself, post-tib, peroneals. Arch control and ⁓ inversion-evertion control. Like, that’s the biggest one. The number of hop, step, dunks you do in a game? No, you don’t do any. The amount of rotary plants where I’m coiling off of that foot with a gluten-med stabilizing and my foot having to be bracing, either stopping or rotating is every jump shot I take.”
“When we talk about the stretch-shorting cycle. My frustration is educationally, it’s easy to teach it off of a drop jump in the depth. It’s so easy to understand visually. It’s easy to see a run. It’s easy to see a hurdle… There’s way more court and field and sport athletes than track athletes. It just is. And when you understand, OK, how do we take that concept and then propagate it to other areas and apply it there? What areas can we begin to look at and then give us the definition of, OK, well, that’s force transmission. That’s force production. The IT band is a massive elastic structure. ⁓ That’s why people get such IT band tightness when they play basketball. Go do lateral shuffles. Go play basketball. You’ll get running down your Vastus lateralis and your IT band your glutes are gonna be tight as hell. It just apparently has that whole I have more lateral pain symptoms of people than you could imagine. Me, I have lateral pain all the time.”
“You look at these athletes man They got like ropes on their backs like they look a certain type and some of them don’t lift But they look like they got erector spinae that like you could it’s a steel bar in their back.”
“You stick your heel in the ground and you stomp it really hard. It’s gonna hurt really bad, right? Because you’re gonna have osteokinetic loading, right? You have your bone of the heel transmitting that up the shin, up your butt, and where’s the last solid piece really? It’s your back. So a lot of this seems to propagate up to your low back. You can hurt shins. I think a lot of shin splints at times can come from this. think a lot of people misunderstand you actually might be irritating the bone quite a bit. Sometimes there’s shin splints because I think people are just running like goofuses and they haven’t maybe ran in a while or they’re slapping the floor really hard. ⁓ I’ve had people who’ve had low back issues going on because they get stuck in hyperextension, which is slightly different.”
“Lighter people have to run faster and have to occur more velocity to stretch their muscles. Heavier people, when they run faster, they are just too heavy. If you watch Shaq on a fast break, he’s not gonna go one foot and dunk it. He’s gonna slow down to then dunk it. Because he has just too much inertia. Versus John Morant, doesn’t really weigh much, so he can just run super duper fast and then plant his foot and go wee and dunk a basketball. Because the inertia of his shoulders is, his whole upper body is probably Shaq’s arm.”
“Alan Bishop does a great job because he gets the freakiest athletes and makes them monsters, right? They play in a sport that requires physicality. They need to be buff. They need to gain weight. The guys he gets are freaky athletes. And then he just puts on all the physical mass that allows them to express that really well in the system that Houston runs.”
“But the reality is you went to school for four years to make sure you didn’t do the wrong program. That’s why I encourage the coaches I’ve worked with, I tell your athletes, really, like, you don’t, don’t pay 30 minutes. Why? It could be 10. You pay me to help you. You don’t pay me to, I don’t go to the doctor and be like, you got 40 minutes, doc. I know you gave me my prescriptions, you did the e-val, the MRI, but I got 40 more minutes, can you poke around a little more? It’s a set rate, whether I’m there for an hour and a half, or it’s 10 minutes, same deal. I wanna get helped. I don’t care, I’d rather have it be short and right than long and wrong.”
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