Basketball Players Need to Work the Squat

After working with and taking the basketball players of the Albany Legends and the Siena Saints through the Functional Movement Screen, I've become aware of a common theme: basketball players have horrible hips.

This isn't surprising to me, as I had hip issues my entire career and still deal with my hips lacking flexibility and mobility.

It becomes a real problem when half of the players on a team complain of sore, tight or strained hip flexors. So here is the first few steps to opening up the hips, which should result in better movement and mobility in a crucial joint for any athlete.

Foam/PVC/Lax ball roll your hips. This is the best thing you can do for the tissues surrounding the hip. It will likely be very painful at first, but thats a good thing. It means there is restrictions in the muscle that can get better with work. Do this for a few minutes per side before you stretch.

Stretch your hip flexors. After rolling them out, stretch the hips by dropping into a lunge position, keeping an upright torso, and pushing forward on the front foot. Squeeze the glute on the leg that is back and then turn the torso to the side of the leg that is forward. To make this an even better stretch, put the shin and foot of the back leg flat on a wall, or if that is too much put the foot on a chair or bench. What we are looking for here is to get the back leg into actual extension. When you see athletes doing more of a shuffle down the court and not flexing and extending the leg at the hip, its likely that the hip flexors are the cause.

Get comfortable sitting in the squat position. This means finding something to hang on to, whether its a door frame, or anything to stop you from falling backwards while you sit in a full squat position. The key to this is to make sure you are keeping a flat back, upright torso and really trying to push your hips forward. Also, make sure you are sitting in between your knees, not over top of them (thank you Dan John for that great coaching cue).

Next, you will want to use a counterweight to help you sit in this position. Start with a dumbbell or kettlebell of about 20-30 lbs and as you squat, push the weight out in front of you. Work on bringing the weight into your body so that eventually you can sit down with the weight at your chest comfortably.

All of this is to get you to the point where you can sit in a squat position by yourself, no weight, no assistance, with a flat back, without feeling a crazy stretch.

Let me make this one point. Once you get to this range of motion, it doesn't mean you should be squatting with weight to full depth. Mark Rippetoe made a great point that at a certain depth your lower back has to relax to get this low. The last thing we want is for your lower back to relax with a heavy load compressing it. Squat depth is another blog for another time.

Even after a week or so of working on your tissue quality and in this new range of motion, you should feel like you are able to move better in the squat and when running.

The next blog will be about the corrective exercises I have used to get the sequencing of the body back to how it should be (activate the core first, then everything else can contract or relax).

Leave any questions or comments on the fb page. Thanks for reading!

4-Days a Week Strength Training Program

A few friends, both athletes and former athletes, have asked for a training program. Their goals are pretty much the same - some strength and some size. So here is a 4 day/week program using an upper/lower split. You can also do it as a 3 day/week program, cycling through the 4 days. This is very similar to what I have personally used in the past.

10 minute warm-up - a variety of foam rolling, calisthenics, stretching and mobility work

Day 1
A. Squat - 5x5 (for crying out loud, break parallel)
B. Lunge variation - 3x8/leg
C1. KB swing/Cable pull thru - 3x12-15
C2. core exercise of your choice - I like hanging from a pull up bar and doing knee or leg raises
D. High rep KB swings or short sprints

Day 2
A1. Bench press - 5x5
A2. pull up variation - 5xAMPRAP (As many perfect reps as possible, perfect being full range of motion and not reaching a point where you have to swing your legs to get higher)
B1. DB push press - 3x10
B2. Inverted/TRX rows - 3x12
C1. Face pulls - 3x15
C2. elbow flexion - 3x10-12
C3. elbow extension - 3x10-12
(your choice on C2 and C3)
D. push or pull a sled or run some hills for 15-30 minutes

Day 3
A. Deadlift - work up to a 5 rep max - 1 or 2 back down sets of 6-8 are ok too
B. DB step ups - 3x10/leg
C1. DB RDL - 3x12
C2. core exercise - Stability ball knee tucks/pikes or plank variation
D. High rep KB swings or short sprints

Day 4
A1. Low incline DB bench - 4x10
A2. 1 arm DB rows - 4x12
B1. BB military press - 3x8
B2. pull up variation - 3xAMPRAP
C1. Rear delt flyes w/ low cables or db's - 3x12
C2. dips - 3x12
C3. elbow flexion - 3x10-12
D. push or pull a sled or run some hills

You can also push or pull a sled on off days. Whatever works best for you. Personally, I like doing high rep kb snatches at the end of lower body days and hills or prowler pushes on off days or at the end of upper body days.

Any questions or comments, please leave them on my facebook wall. Thanks for reading!

Albany Legends Off-Court Training

I recently became the strength and conditioning coach for the Albany Legends, a pro basketball team in the International Basketball League. I started the first couple weeks just doing some PNF stretching prior to games, but this week I've had the chance to work with them on some other stuff in the weight room. Here is what there week will look like.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday night games and Monday, Tuesday, Thursday practice

Monday - Lots of foam rolling, mobility, stretching, corrective exercise and core work.

Tuesday - Full body strength training.

Wednesday - Pool training.

Thursday - Upper body focused strength training with some light bodyweight stuff for the lower body, mostly forms of corrective exercise.

Today I had 4 of them go through 2 strength circuits. Because this was our first time working together and because they haven't done much as far as strength training in a while, we kept it pretty light, but they still worked hard.

We started with about 20 minutes of foam rolling, stretching, mobility and corrective work.
Here are the 2 circuits - we did both for 3 sets of 10-12 reps per set
A1. pullups
A2. goblet squats
A3. Wtd push ups with legs elevated
B1. TRX rows
B2. pump lunge with 25lb plate overhead
B3. Med ball alternating push up

We finished with this core circuit - went through it 2 times for 30 seconds at each position
front plank
right side plank
left side plank
on back, right knee to chest, left leg 6 inches over floor
on back, left knee to chest, right leg 6 inches over floor

(Thank you to Coach Cantor at UMBC for that core circuit)

I'll continue posting what these guys are doing. If you have any questions or comments, post them on fb. Thanks for reading!