Michael Snowden, Author at stack

Basketball Medicine Ball Tempo Training

Michael Snowden — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Enhancing overall fitness and an athlete’s general work capacity should be a year-round goal of any athlete. One way for an athlete to build up this ability to do work or play longer is by performing low-intensity medicine ball tempo exercises paired with an athletic movement and followed by a sport skill.

Below we have laid out a sample medicine ball circuit with examples and a 3-week progression for athletes working their way into shape. Simple and effective, these circuits will give you enough of a foundation of conditioning to layer strength and power training without pounding your legs from excessive running. To perform the circuits, athletes will need a 6-10lb. rubber medicine ball, cones marking a 15-20 yard distance, and a wall to throw the medicine ball against.

Sample Circuit for Basketball

(Using half court distance for movement & skill component)

Chest Pass x 20 reps + Forward & Backwards Skip + Between The Legs Dribbling
Overhead Throw x 20 reps + Side Shuffle + Behind The Back Dribbling
Overhead Slam x 20 reps + Carioca + In & Out Dribbling
Facing Side Throw x 10 reps/side + Sprint & Backpedal + Side Dribbling
Cyclone Slam x 10 reps/side + Single Leg Hop + 2 Dribble Crossover Dribbling
Scoop Throw x 20 reps + Lateral Skip + Reverse Between The Leg Dribbling

Week 1: 15 Minutes Continuous Rounds -> 3 Minute Rest -> 15 Minutes Continuous Rounds

Week 2: 20 Minutes Continuous Rounds -> 3 Minute Rest -> 20 Minutes Continuous Rounds

Week 3: 20 Minutes Continuous Rounds -> 90 Second Rest -> 20 Minutes Continuous Rounds

Based on the sample circuit the athlete would perform 20 medicine ball chest passes, skips out to half court and back, and between the legs dribbling out to half court and back continuously without any rest period before moving onto the next block of exercises and completing that block in the same fashion. One round would be the completion of all 6 combination blocks. One important factor to be aware of is that all lateral movements (carioca, side dribbling, etc. from above) are done facing the same direction as the athlete travels down and back to ensure they are training both sides.

A benefit of using this template is that it gives you plenty of options to manipulate to make the training session easier or harder, depending on your starting point. The first change could be increasing or decreasing the weight of the medicine ball you are using. The accessibility and versatility of the medicine ball will make this a great method to build athletic performance while maintaining sport skills.

5 Exercises Every High School Athlete Should Be Doing Year Round

Michael Snowden — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 20:00:00 +0000

If you’re a team sport athlete looking to increase your strength, power, and speed today, there are many exercises, programs, and formulas to choose from. It is often overlooked that many of these options likely have more similarities than differences in how you should be training. Here we’ve laid out 5 exercises that you can count on year-round no matter what sport you compete in to help you make gains in strength and durability to stay in the game.

Skater Squat

With the number of starts, stops, cuts jumps, and turns in team sports, many of which are happening on one leg, this only makes sense as a means to improve performance and reduce the likelihood of injury. Oftentimes this exercise is skipped because it can be challenging and humbling when starting, but if you train them consistently, you will find yourself progressing in no time. Skater squats require plenty of single-leg strength, coordination, mobility, and balance so it checks many of the necessary boxes for athletes looking to enhance their overall athleticism and even out imbalances. The movement can also be progressed and regressed in almost any way you can imagine to fit your starting point. Once mastered this exercise offers a variety of loading options to add challenge. The movement can be loaded from the torso while wearing a weighted vest or bag, front-loaded holding a medicine ball at your chest, or loaded at an angle using a landmine.

To get started, take a stack of airex pads to mid-shin height as a starting target and aim to progress them to just the pad on the floor. Once you’re standing on both feet in front of your pads, it’s time to reach one leg back behind you, both knees bent. At this time, you reach your hands in front of you to counterbalance while tapping your back knee on the pad before rising and returning to the starting position with both feet down.

Farmers Walk

The Farmers Walk is a phenomenal exercise for athletes looking to enhance their strength and conditioning. This exercise, famous for its roots in competitive strongman competitions, engages every muscle throughout your body with every step you take, including grip and forearm muscles, traps and shoulders, and deep stabilizer muscles that help to protect the core, hips, and spine. For the benefits it offers, the exercise also does not have a steep learning curve or offer many risks, although while performing, attention should be paid to keeping the core tight and ensuring the shoulder blades are pulled back and down. The farmer’s carry can be performed for distance or for time with varying loads of light, moderate, or heavy. Team sport athletes will also find that loaded carries are a meaningful way to enhance conditioning as well without putting excess stress on your body by running long distances.

Pull-Ups

Athletes spend a lot of their time pressing weights when working out and times when hitting, swinging, passing within their sports it is important to balance to workload on the front of the shoulders as all of these pressing movements can create imbalances.

Pull-ups work the shoulders, biceps, and lat muscles, and because this is a very functional movement and requires the athletes to be able to move their own bodyweight via skill and a baseline level of strength the movement may need to be regressed to just an eccentric pull up where the athlete lowers their body weight slowly and under control and has a partner help them return to the top of the bar. Once the regular pull-ups become easy, a progression would be to add an external load such as a weight vest or weighted backpack.

Nordics Leg Curls

The glutes and hamstring are the engines of your body when it comes to playing sports, and its nordic leg curls that fortify these muscles, one of the most injury-prone muscles in the body, for high-speed running and jumping. Two of the most common flaws must be avoided here if you want to maximize your results on this exercise. The first one would be leaning forward at the hips as you descend on the movement, reducing the tension on the hamstrings. This typically happens because the athlete lacks appropriate hamstring strength. The other common flaw is rushing to the ground instead of lowering smoothly and under control. This also takes tension off the hamstrings and limits strength development.

Pull Aparts

These are an important exercise for anyone who finds themselves with poor posture from sitting all day. Pull Aparts strengthen the back and shoulders to help athletes maintain shoulder stability, mobility, and integrity while competing and training.

Perform the exercise by holding a lighter resistance band in front of your chest. With the arms straight, retract the shoulder blades and pull the band apart until it reaches your chest. On the way out, it is important to bring the band back together under control and avoid letting the band snap you back to the starting position. As you get better with this exercise, you can progress it by changing the exercise’s tempo, meaning you change the speed you pull the band apart or bring it together with. Another option would be to alter the grip you use to perform the movement. If you typically do pull apart with your palms facing the ground, try a supinated grip where you have your palms facing the ceiling.

Strength Training For Rebounding In Basketball

Michael Snowden — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 23:00:00 +0000

Multiple components must align to become an elite basketball player. One of the hardest skills in basketball occurs after each missed shot. Successful players such as Dennis Rodman and Russell Westbrook were able to separate themselves from scoring with rebounding. Being a great rebounder is challenging and takes sound technique on the box out, toughness, strength, and endurance to endure such an energy-demanding role throughout the entire game. Basketball is predominately a non-contact sport. When you are in the paint jockeying for position during a shot, the sport is anything but non-contact with people pushing, pulling, and grabbing at you. Having a foundation of strength will help anyone in this position.

Four Key Strength Training Movements To Help With Rebounding

Squats
Squats are a foundational strength movement for all athletes, but the importance of grooving a proper and strong squat pattern cannot be overlooked for rebounders and basketball as it strengthens the entire lower body. The squat allows basketball players to be strong and maintain their positioning when the ball goes up and provides the strength needed to move opposing players when necessary. Use the squat to build a solid base to own your positioning on the court and decrease your likelihood of injury. When you view the squat as a movement rather than an exercise, you can understand that this doesn’t have to be a barbell back squat. A front squat, gobble squat, overhead squat, or any other variation that works with the equipment you have available to train with and your experience level. The primary consideration of training the squat should be using sound technique and training a full range of motion to avoid injury. A heel lift can also be used for flexibility restrictions to achieve a better position throughout the movement.

Pull-Ups
Pull-ups are a foundational exercise for the upper body training of basketball players. They are especially useful for rebounders because of the vertical pulling motion mimicking the action involved in pulling in a rebound. Pull-ups and chin-ups are responsible for strengthening the arms’ musculature and back to varying degrees depending upon which grip the athlete uses to perform the movement. While training the pull-up the focus should be working through a full range of motion similar to the squat. The arms go from being fully flexed to completely extended to get full results. The exercise’s tempo should be controlled and executed without excess kicking or swinging by the athlete to gain momentum. Accessibility is a benefit with these exercises because a pull-up bar can be found almost anywhere you go. The movements can also be adjusted to fit various strength levels. Whether that’s someone who can already string together multiple pull-ups or a beginner who may need to start with partner-assisted or iso-hold chin-ups. This exercise offers numerous options for athletes to scale up or down their training, including performing reps with palms facing towards or away from you, pausing reps at the top or bottom of the rep, or changing the exercise’s tempo of the pulling or lowering portion of the movement.

Resisted Plyometrics
Plyometrics are a vital piece of the puzzle for improving timing, jumping power, and muscular reaction timing to help you wreak havoc on the glass. Properly trained plyometrics are also an effective means to improve a person’s vertical jumping ability. All things being equal among two athletes going for a rebound, the athlete who can generate their jumping force faster will get to the ball every time. In the athletic performance world, we call this the Rate of Force Development. Many are describing what they talk about being explosive and powerful and these exercises and the ones used to train this quality. More of a family of exercises similar to the squat movement, where multiple exercise options fall into this category. This could include box jumps, loaded and unloaded, weighted squat jumps, resisted broad jumps, continuous broad jumps, and certain types of medicine ball throws. This family of exercises shares a common trait with the pull-up because they can be performed virtually anywhere. However, special attention should be paid to the surface being jumped on. Surfaces like grass or turf can be more forgiving than harder surfaces than concrete or wood basketball courts.

Core Work
Having a strong core is a responsibility to all basketball players. The amount of contact one receives trying to pull in boards makes it paramount in the paint. The core is the root of the body from which all movement occurs and allows you to transmit force from the lower body to the upper body and vice versa. It also allows you to remain solid and own your space while being boxed out or performing the other exercises listed above. Two misconceptions in the core training world need to be addressed before going in-depth with specific exercises. The first is the core musculature’s idea solely being the abdominal muscles on the front of your body. The core actually is a system of overlapping layers wrapping your body and running from roughly the top of your knees to mid-chest height. The majority of core training programs you see many high repetition movements. These movements are created at the spine, yet in sport, the emphasis of training the core should be coming from exercises that resist movement. This directly translates to how the core is used in a sport where you are primarily resisting movement or bracing. An example of this is being bumped midair while going for a ball.

Reacting, reaching, securing the ball, and land without losing any positioning or holding off an opposing player performing a swim move during a box out. When you look at training through this lens, the most appropriate core training means up as plank variations, crawling patterns, bracing holds, and pall of or anti-rotation pressing and loaded carries exercises.

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Re-Thinking Strength work for Pitchers

Michael Snowden — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 22:30:00 +0000

Check out any baseball facility that does strength and conditioning work, and you’ll most likely see some of the same exercises when comparing them. Some of these exercises will most likely be the trap bar deadlift, safety bar squats, reverse lunge, split squats, Bulgarian split squats, etc. I want to start by saying that these are not bad exercises, but I will try to explain why they may not be the best.

For years, I have been training the baseball population. I have been using your traditional general preparation work in the strength and conditioning world for these specific athletes, as mentioned above.

But why? Because that’s what I was taught and have not put much thought into why they’re being used. Partly true, Partly because I saw people who are smarter than me doing them with their athletes and thought, “this must be the right exercise to use.”

While all of these exercises listed above are great tools for developing foundational strength in which you can transfer over to rotational power, I think they can also negatively impact programmed as main strength builders 3-4 months out from the season starting. It’s time to rethink how we could develop better transfer from our GPP work (general physical preparation).

The Movement Of Pitching

I spoke to coaches and learned more about the common mistakes these athletes make while performing the movement. Until then, I’ve mainly done my education through strength and conditioning coaches who train these athletes, but I hadn’t taken enough time to learn from the coaches how to teach the sport’s actual skill.

It got me thinking and asking myself, is what I’m having my athletes do from a biomechanical standpoint helping them to not only have better power in rotation but is it promoting better mechanics as well? Can they see the similarities between what their pitching coach wants them to do and what I tell them to do in the gym? I realized that I could do a better job of using exercise selection as a tool to enhance their biomechanics on the mound. As a strength coach, I am not usually the one that handles teaching them how to pitch, but I can help them feel stronger in the positions they need to be in.

What I learned was that most of them become too quad-dominate on the back leg. They need to be able to sit back more into the hip vs. the knee. This looks like a vertical shin angle. I realized then that this looks more like a lateral lunge than your traditional split squat, reverse lunge, or Bulgarian. Not only that, the lateral lunge is the only lunge that is in the same plane of motion and is hip dominant when performed correctly.

Lateral Lunge To Box