michael reid

Working with the Pro's

Back in August of this year, I had the opportunity to do some work with a pro basket team from Cyprus.  They were in Sweden for a pre-season tournament being hosted by Gothia Basket which I am the current physical trainer.

The head coach of the team asked if I could do some flexibility work with his guys at the beginning of their practice.  I had 15 minutes on the court to work with the athletes and he wanted his players "loose" and warmed up.  There are many things you can do in 15 minutes to get a team warm and "loose" but considering that I was going to be working with some of the players in the next few days in the weight room I decided to use the time to do some weightlifting technique using only the wood pole.   This may seem like an odd choice, but other then the fact I was going to be working with some of the guys in the weight room here are three other reasons I have for just doing weightlifting technique.

1. Dynamic Flexibility - I got see what kind of flexibility these guys have and I covered all the major areas of concern in just three exercises.
2. Weight Lifting Technique & Experience - are these guys seasoned pro's in the weight room, with years of training the "right" way or have they been spending to much time benching, curling and sitting on machines?
3. Medical History - I knew literally nothing about these athletes medical history, but they must have been healthy because the teamed signed them ... right???   Not really.  You can find out many things by doing some simple screening using the below exercises.  If you are healthy you should have no problem in moving in different positions with only a wood pole!  But even if you are not healthy you can still pass a common medical exam that most professional teams use but perform miserably on the below exercises.

Here are the exercises I used:

• Over Head Squat - test flexibility of shoulder, back, hips, knees and ankles.  No one did it extremely well, some were satisfactory, many needed improvement.
• "Romanian" Dead Lift - I am looking for the ability to disassociate the hips from the lower back.  Flexibility of the hamstrings, glutes and to a lesser extent the gastroc.
• Over Head Split Squat - flexibility of the hip flexors on the back leg, hip extensors on the front leg and ability to have good knee tracking on the front leg.  I also pick up on some other items but these are the key areas I am looking at.

With all the exercises, I first demonstrated, then had the players try for a set amount of time or reps which then gave me an opportunity to walk around to see what the players were doing.

That is me in the red shirt demonstrating and coaching the players through these three exercises.  It was very interesting to see not even one of these professional athletes being able to perform all three of the exercises with a passing grade.  This means that that they have some serious limitations in there movement capacity.  The thing is if you only watch them play basketball, you would say most of them have good to great movements.  So what does this mean?  Well for one, the athletes are able to compensate on the court and hide or disguise their limitations but with doing some simple evaluations there is no hiding and it becomes obvious to the coaches and the athlete.

Be Well,
Mike Reid

Basketball Conditioning with out Running!

This past week I had a couple of players who were injured from the professional team I work for and they had to get some conditioning in since they were unable to participate in most of the practices.  So, while the rest of the team was training on the court with the basketball coaches going through their drills I took these two players and we did a body weight only leg circuit on the side of the court.

Below is what we did:

10 x (20 walking lunges + 10 squats - lightly touching a low box) on 90 second interval

This means that you would do 20 walking lunges (10/side), then right away do 10 squats and then rest.  Every 90 seconds you would start another round.  The total time of this session is only 15 min, but it is a killer.  You end up completing 200 lunges and 100 squats in that time.  This also works nicely with the scientific basketball training, because it ends up being a work:rest ratio of 1:1 to 1:2.

These two players would complete each round in ~35-40 seconds, with the fastest time being 32 seconds and the slowest being 50 seconds.  To progress the training session, a small load can be added in the form of dumbbells, medicine ball or barbell starting in the 10-20kg range.  For the purpose of basketball conditioning, I want the exercises to be performed quickly so I would not go to heavy because the movement will slow down to much.  Starting with  just bodyweight is more then enough.

These kind of training sessions are a great way of getting your legs back with out doing any sprints or running.  You could also incorporate something like this at the end of a typical strength session.

Have fun,
Mike Reid