Individualizing off-season basketball training over multiple seasons

Summer training for the men’s basketball team at Furman University consists of eight weeks of on court practices plus resistance training in the weight room. The sport coach and the strength & conditioning coach each gets four hours a week to work with the team. The summer is the second longest uninterrupted block of training in the annual macrocycle of a Division I college basketball team, with the five month in-season training period being the longest.

Our main S&C goal for the summer is body transformation: gaining muscle, losing fat and reducing body fat percentage. While performance improvements are always a focus, the summer is a time of intense training to get the players’ bodies in the best shape they’ve ever been.

We currently have 13 scholarship athletes, and while they are all part of the same team and play the same sport, the similarities stop there.

• Our tallest player is 6’11″, our shortest is 5’9″.
• Our heaviest player is 245 lbs, our lightest is 178 lbs.
• Five different positions on the court, with distinct physical archetypes and training needs.
• Playing time during a game ranges from 5 – 35 minutes with a rotation of 10 players.

Our head coach’s style of play is fast, so our players need to be lean, mobile, and able to play at a high intensity for the entirety of 32 games over five months, which works out to two games each week. These demands require more conditioning than what they would get simply from playing the game in practice and in competition.

Within this global framework there are more specific demands for position groups: the bigs, guards and wings.

“Bigs” represent, as the name suggests, the taller, heavier, muscle dominant, endo- and mesomorph type bodies. They are usually at least 6’8″ with 10-15% body fat. Guards are typically smaller in height and stature; meso- and ectomorph type bodies; more fascial system dominant; and have to be the fastest, best conditioned players on the court due to their primary ball handling responsibility and running the offense for a team. They are much leaner than the bigs, and we aim to have them all under 10% body fat.

The third position group is the wings. They are essentially a combination of a big and guard, so they as a group have the most variation in height, size and physical characteristics. For example, we currently have one wing with less than 7% body fat and one who is at 12%.

Buckets for buckets: Where does each player fit?

We run seven different training programs across the current 13 athletes. This breakdown is informed by the position groups from above plus the following factors.

What’s their training age?

How many years has the athlete lifted weights? High school experiences range from one athlete having had a full time S&C coach at his school to another doing zero lifting during high school. We’ve had 17 year olds arrive with no S&C training exposure, while others were in the gym three times a week for their senior year of high school, plus six weeks of the foundation plan I send them for their summer before arriving on campus.

This is the biggest factor when programming for incoming players. If an athlete’s training age is <1 year, results from your program should be excellent, as every stimulus that athlete is exposed to in the weight room is new!

How many years have they been with the program?

Tied into the first point, are they a first year athlete with the team or are they a fifth year athlete transferring into the team? The detail and level of their program will strongly reflect this. Older athletes need more specialized and varied programs.

It’s imperative to look at what worked for each athlete during their previous training programs and what goals they achieved, and build off that.

I will text or call players who are returning after multiple seasons to get their inputs while I’m writing their off-season programs. What did they feel worked best last summer? What methods did we use in spring training that they most enjoyed? While we are the subject matter experts, there’s no greater feedback than athlete feedback, especially when you’ve been working with them for multiple years.

Head coach’s goal for the player

What does the head coach want from each player for the summer? Given the length and continuity of this phase, it is a key physical development period before we enter preseason. The coach’s needs analysis for the players is imperative – there’s no point to me doing just what I think they need. The performance staff works to prepare athletes for the head coach’s technical model. We – and that includes the player himself! – should be collaborating on each player’s goals, build alignment and hold everyone accountable to their summer training.

Player’s off-season goal

As mentioned above, giving the athletes a say in their development is crucial to ensure they buy in to their programs. If they have expressed their feelings and goals and it aligns with the head coach’s goals, we now have a clear path to go down. Then it’s up to the S&C staff to create the right program to lead them down that path.

What position is the player? What position are they being trained to become?

Bigs are just that: big! Their needs analysis shows high physical contact, less cutting and sprinting, more fighting for space in the paint, and ability to vertically express force for rebounds. Guards, on the other hand, are generally smaller, have a lower body fat percentage, need more speed and change in direction ability, along with a higher level of aerobic fitness as the main ball carriers on the court.

Historical game data

What was their role last season and what is their projected role for the next season? How many games did they previously play? Is the coach expecting a player to go from averaging five minutes a game to 20 minutes a game?

Performance data

Force plates, loading volume and distance covered are some of the key metrics that let us effectively reverse engineer game performance from a conditioning and robustness point of view. This takes out all the guessing and gives us hard numbers to compare game to game and season to season of an athlete’s career at Furman.

Progressively individualizing the programs

Let’s outline some ways we progressed the program each summer, with a particular focus on the summer of 2021-22 and a case study to show how everything fits together.

Year 1: Strength and body composition groups

Everyone started with the same exercise progressions and general prep work, and my aim was to introduce my style of training to establish a common reference point.

The players were divided into those who needed strength and those who needed to improve body comp.

The strength group performed different hypertrophy oriented methods to achieve this goal. The body comp players did a circuit based program designed to get them sweating and keep their heart rate up for the entire lift, with the end goals of losing body fat and adding lean mass, thereby reducing body fat percentage. On the table below, the subsequent week had the same reps and sets with increased load.

Year 2: Mass gainers, foundation, and outlier groups

Some players lost a lot of weight in-season the previous year, so the aim for them was to significantly increase their body weight during off-season. These were the mass gainers. Foundation focused on structural balance, and was for incoming freshman and some returning players. The outlier was for our best player, a shooting guard who needed his own program based off his need to maintain his low body fat percentage while also capitalizing on his unique body shape, size and strength.

Year 3: COVID summer, athletes not on campus

Year 4: Foundation, speed, strength, and hybrid groups

Foundation became the name for the incoming freshman programs focussing on structural balance. Strength remained the mass gainer plan with a variety of hypertrophy methods. Hybrid was a mixture of hypertrophy, work development and power development. We’ll do a deep dive into the speed group shortly.

This was the first time we bucketed athletes using force plate data and could really individualize training really started to come together. The data from various jumps and isometric mid-thigh pulls over the summer became the main feedback to assess whether the bucketed programs improved each group’s KPIs.

Year 5: Foundation, hybrid, strength, body composition, rehab, outliers

The outliers’ program was another new addition to the training groups, as two players’ potential to move on to the professional level resulted in them having some off season workouts with NBA teams. The physical testing and observational feedback they received went into their individual S&C programs for that summer.

Lateral quickness is highly valued by many NBA scouts. The ability to create space on offense and take space on defense are well known concepts in sport. These older athletes and their outlier programs focused on more fascial based training rather than the traditional resistance training of the other groups. These athletes are strong enough, but they need to move better in order to combine movement patterns with balance and power.

Both outlier programs focused on improving their fascial system with more variety within exercises, pairing exercises together, and placing more focus on unilateral and unstable exercises to elicit greater sensorimotor requirements.

Case study: Training speed in a point guard

The “speed group” heading into the 2021/22 season were point guards who did not need to increase lean mass and were already fast, so the goal was to make them even faster. The head coach wanted to increase our tempo in transition and the overall speed of play, so he specifically requested we work during the off season on increasing the speed of our primary ball handlers (point guards and shooting guards).

“Athlete A” was a point guard who had been at Furman for four years and was entering his fifth summer of training with the team (and his fourth with me).

The combination of his force plate data, the head coach’s goal for him and my own experience with him indicated that he needed a new stimulus. The same relative strength rep ranges, max strength clusters and, at times, circuit based training (to improve his conditioning) wouldn’t move the needle and get him to his next peak. He needed speed work, accommodating resistance work (bands, chains), prowler exercises, and intensive plyometrics.

A great addition to the program that summer was altitude drops to work on braking rate of force development. The ability to decelerate with efficiency, balance, force and speed are crucial in the game of basketball. I recommend Danny Lum’s article on box landings and understanding his guidelines before attempting altitude drops over 30 inches, as landing with stiffness from those heights requires a large braking force.

The speed group was the perfect group to evaluate this new exercise.

Due to the high braking forces in these jumps, they had to go at the front end of the lift. The A series centered on power development, with various dumbbell and barbell loaded jumps, raptor movements, altitude drops, medicine ball work, prowler pushes and box jumps. Both the A series and B series for the speed group became focused on exactly that, speed!

We added a stimulus to conventional exercises in order to maximize the speed group’s focus on speed. For example, the intent for a rear foot elevated lunge was to perform the reps as quickly as possible, rather than with the traditional tempo of three seconds in the eccentric portion of the lift.

The emphasis of upper body exercises shifted from hypertrophy to more total body work, as shown in the C series. Both are primary upper body exercises but with a significant core stabilization demand and a focus on movement quality and fluidity rather than maximizing the load.

To better see if it was working, I made individual player needs analysis sheets to keep me aligned with their summer goals and highlight specific things that I needed to keep track of throughout the year.

The results of the summer for the speed group and Athlete A specifically were great. He improved in various jump metrics and, importantly, he felt more powerful. This reinforced that we were on the right track with the bucketing and individual approach to training.

New additions for summer 2023

While transfer of training is a hotly debated topic, in a sport such as basketball, especially at the university level where physical development is such a focus, there is absolutely a place for traditional bodybuilding methods when trying to increase muscle mass. This is even more so the case when you’ve been training athletes for multiple seasons and they need new stimuli  in order to keep improving body composition and performance.

A great addition to our strength program, and a new stimulus for the players, was manual eccentric overload sets (MEOs). MEOs are ideally performed with machines. An athlete completes the concentric part of the rep, then during the eccentric phase of the rep a partner forcefully pulls / pushes against the athlete. This forces the athlete to increase contraction in the eccentric portion of the lift against the added resistance to prevent the weight from just crashing into the machine.

Our preference is training in small groups during the morning block, fitting these sessions around the players’ class schedule. This increases one-on-one coaching time with each of the players, ensuring – among other things – maximal intent for each set and force plate testing.

With 3-5 athletes all on different plans in the same training group, they can see first hand the differences and individual attention that comes with their programs. If we do a full team lift, which is sometimes the case due to class and court availability, the players will pair up in their respective groups and have sections of the weight room set up for them to effectively and efficiently perform their daily plan.

With 3-5 athletes all on different plans in the same training group, they can see first hand the differences and individual attention that comes with their programs. If we do a full team lift, which is sometimes the case due to class and court availability, the players will pair up in their respective groups and have sections of the weight room set up for them to effectively and efficiently perform their daily plan.