With basketball season around the corner, now is the time for budding and returning athletes to start pre-season conditioning. Effective conditioning workouts are designed to increase a player’s speed, power, and strength with age-appropriate training and weightlifting practices.
Players as young as middle and high school can benefit from enlisting the services of experienced athletic trainers to ensure maximum return on their training investment. D1 Training Holly Springs is enrolling students in its basketball pre-season class to help athletes reach their peak performance.
“We’re here to help athletes — and basically anyone looking to have a healthy lifestyle — reach their full potential,” said D1 Training Holly Springs trainer Kevin Wills, a longtime athletic coach.
Young athletes benefit from professional training
D1 trainers are known for being highly credentialed as well as having a competitive athletic experience. This enables them to develop customized training programs with proven methods that allow athletes young and old to reach their potential.
Wills played college basketball for four years and has been teaching and coaching for more than 16 years. In addition to his role as recruiter and basketball trainer at D1 Training Holly Springs, Wills coaches baseball and teaches healthful living — a class that combines elements of health and physical education — at a local middle school.
“My son who just graduated played on varsity basketball last year,” he said. “Eight of the players and all five of the varsity starters took my pre-season class.”
Drawing on his years of collegiate training and coaching, Wills has designed a performance-boosting program that is realistic for busy lifestyles.
“Performance training is about movements that are going to make you a better athlete,” he said. “Then we do the weight room for 25 minutes specific to basketball movements.”
The hour-long training sessions are on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Each includes a dynamic warmup, performance movements, weightlifting, conditioning, and stretching.
Plyometric training helps basketball players
Another component of Wills’ training system is plyometric training. This involves using jumps, hops, and skips in a rapid cyclical muscle action called the stretch-shortening cycle, which improves athleticism, according to Science for Sport.
Almost every form of human motion that involves changing direction uses the stretch-shortening cycle, from taking a jump shot to sprinting on a track. Plyometric training improves strength, speed, power, balance, jumping, throwing, and bone density in both youth and adult populations, according to Science for Sport.
“Yesterday we did lower body, which is legs, and we did linear movement plyometric training with jumping and a medicine ball,” Wills said. “This was in addition to some resistance training, incorporating drills that basketball coaches do on the turf.”
The combination of varied exercises, days of rest and techniques to help flexibility help both the muscles and tendons get in the best shape to set the athlete up for a better chance at a successful and injury-free season.
But, that’s not enough. In addition to exercise, Wills recommends athletes maintain other healthy habits. In the class he teaches for middle-school students, he focuses on sleep habits, nutrition, hydration and more. And when the advice comes from a coach, instead of a parent, for the driven athletes, it may tend to hit home more.
“Rest and nutrition are key,” he said. “You are what you eat, and if you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not recovering properly.”
In addition to the pre-season basketball sessions, D1 Training Holly Springs offers personal and group classes for athletes of every ability and age, from 7-77.
For more information about training or to sign up for a free session, visit D1 Training Holly Springs.