Take Control of Your Own Development
To be the best player you can be requires more than just team practices and scheduled sessions. It requires you to take control of your own development with extra individual development on your own, that compliments your team practices. Below is an article asking 3 NBA greats what a day looked like during their off season. They all worked out HARD for multiple hours 5 days a week, pushing themselves outside their comfort zone. They worked on skills such as ball handling, shooting, post game, and their weak hand. They all knew WHAT they wanted to work on.
For young players this can be a challenging question. What skills should I be working on during my personal skill development? Each player may be slightly different based on their strengths, weaknesses, and skill set, but generally speaking each workout should consist of some ball handling, shooting and then development on an aspect of your game. This may be working on adding a pull up jump shot to your game, or tightening up a jump hook in the post. Your workout should also try and include both development of skills that you are consistently getting in game situations, and also development of skills that you want to ADD to your game.
At Split Second we believe learning how to train on your own is a huge factor in becoming the best player you can be. This starts with a mindset of taking control of your own development. Don’t wait for a coach to tell you to find a court to play, or what skills to work on. Instead, if you want to get better, you must be proactive.
While these NBA players may have coaches and trainers on hand to help determine their workouts, this is not necessary for most young players and can even be detrimental in the long term if players are overcoached without any implicit learning.
However, we know that thinking of drills and manipulating them to work on the skills that you are trying to develop can be difficult. Because of this we have developed an Online Training Program that helps guide young players through skill development workouts to develop their skill set, add dimensions to their game that makes it easier for players to be proactive in their training.
Read below to learn what Amare Stoudemire, Andre Iguadala and Deron Williams work on in their off season and how they approach their individual skill development.
https://www.usab.com/youth/news/2011/04/3nba-players-share-their-offseason-schedule.aspx