In the last few years, I have become a huge fan of strength training outside of a weight room. In fact, it has changed my whole philosophy on strength training for basketball. This is not to say that I do not believe in working out in a gym, but being inside a gym can get monotonous and annoying with some of the nonsense that goes on around those places (you know what I am talking about, people texting mid rep, the crappy bubble gum music that is blaring, etc.). It is downright annoying. Getting outside of these places can free you from all of this and it forces the athlete or the trainer to dig deep into their creative minds and come up with an intense workout without the benefits of shiny new equipment. This was just the case last night as I headed over to the old St. Peter’s High School gym to train a girls’ AAU basketball team. Armed with some jump ropes, hurdles, and a few medicine balls we put together a workout that blew away your average weight room workout.
Because we were training for basketball, we kep moving throughout the entire workout and limited our breaks to a minute at the most. We started out with an excellent dynamic warmup and then got into our acceleration and agility drills. Acceleration and agility are such an important part of the game of basketball that I would be remiss if I did not include them in every workout. The drills we used were what I call, “find it and get it drills.” These are partner drills where one player stands on the sideline facing the court and their partner stands behind them with a basketball. The partner with the ball tosses the ball over their partner’s head and they have to chase it down before it bounces twice. When they catch the ball, they must pivot properly and pass the ball back to their partner. The next step was to add two basketballs and throw the second one in a different direction than the first and have the player defensive slide to it and get it. Finally, the last portion of this is what I call “Two Ball Dance.” This has the same premise as the second phase of the “Find it and Get it” drill but the player continuously moves side to side, backwards, and forwards, chasing after basketballs and passing them back to their partner for 30 seconds.
Having completed the agility and acceleration drills, we moved on to our strength drills which consisted of overhead med ball walking lunges supersetted with pushups on the basketball. Then we got into some plyometric work which included lateral hurdle hops supersetted with 30 seconds of jumping rope. Then the last of these drills was a combination agility and plyometric drill. The players had to slide to one end of the lane to pick up a medicine ball, slide back to the other side to put it down and then slide back to the other side where their partner would bounce a basketball up high for the player to jump up, grab it, and finish at the rim. The process was then repeated two more times and then the players switched. During this drill, we worked on going after the basketball and finishing in different ways (straight up or with a head fake or a step through).
The final portion of the workout was dedicated to core development and a finisher. The core training consisted of planks with our hands on the basketball, planks with our feet on the ball, toe touches with the basketball, Russian Twists with the basketball, and finally, figure eights with the basketball. We completed two rounds of this and then moved on to our finisher.
Yes, after all of that, we still needed a finisher. Remember, this is Elite Basketball Training where the workouts are not only meant to be functional, but designed to be harder than the game itself. So our finisher consisted of a four line suicide with three squat jumps at each line. This was a great way to end an excellend strength and conditioning workout, but these girls were not done. As I was leaving, they began to work on their skill development and team concepts. That is dedication! That is what is going to make these girls Elite Basketball Players.
