My Strength and Conditioning Philosphy

Basically, I think strength & conditioning for college basketball players should be about two things: injury prevention and increased performance.

Injury prevention ensures that athletes stay playing the game they love and that they aren't compromising their long-term health by doing so.

Increased performance will give us a competitive advantage over our competitors and help us achieve our goals.

Focusing on injury prevention and increased performance helps us to avoid spending time on useless or counter-productive exercises and to maximize the time we spend doing the exercises that matter.

Value Toughness and Stay in the Stretch Zone.

Toughness is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. If you truly want to achieve what you want to achieve, then you will need toughness to do what you need to do to get there.

However, we do not want our athletes to be so "tough" that they are negligent about their injuries or about becoming injured.

As stated in a previous section, we believe that there is a Complacency Zone, a Stretch Zone, and a Danger Zone. For strength and conditioning, we want our athletes to be in the Stretch Zone.

In the Complacency Zone, athletes aren't getting better. In the Danger Zone, they are at risk of injury. The Stretch Zone is where the tough athlete will be - pushing themselves to get better in a safe and healthy manner.

The Stretch Zone is where it's at.

Core Competencies

Squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, and carry: these are the fundamental movement patterns we want our athletes to master.

We also want our athletes to develop power, which means being able to move weight quickly.

In addition, we want our athletes to change direction and to jump and land well. We do this through speed & agility as well as plyo workouts.

In addition, we like to incorporate ankle stability, shoulder stability, hip mobility, and ACL-injury prevention routines to help prevent injuries.

These are the core competencies we care about most.

Build Athletes, Not Weight-Room Warriors

Sometimes strength & conditioning practitioners lose sight of the actual goal - building better basketball players.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to increase your "max" bench press or your "max" squat. That just shouldn't be the end goal.

Using periodization makes sure that the s&c program makes sense within the context of the basketball season.

Using gamification helps keep things fun and interesting for athletes.

Put it all together, and a good strength and conditioning program won't just build weight-room warrios. It will build better athletes.

Further reading:

My complete strength and conditioning philosophy can be found here. The progressions I use for core exercises can be found here. A sample, year-long lifting regimen can be found here.

That's it, that's my strength and conditioning philosophy! Thoughts and feedback welcome! Get after it!!