- It's a tough job because I'm the guy
that has to tell the best shooter
that ever lived that it's not good enough.
This is Brandon Payne, I am Stephen Curry's
personal performance and skill coach.
And I've been working with him for almost a decade now.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
When I looked at the landscape of players in the NBA
there was only one player that I wanted
to work with and that was Stephen Curry.
When Steph and I first got together
he was actually coming of an ankle surgery,
the first big ankle surgery that he had in the NBA.
And at that time it was all about modifying drills,
modifying movements to make sure we were doing it safely,
and trying to build that back up.
I'm not the reason he's gotten better.
Stephen is the talent, I'm the guy
that just throws a little bit on top,
you know, a little seasoning on top of the steak
is what I like to say just to help him out.
I started coaching at the college level
when I was still in college.
And one of the things that I had to do
was not only the strength conditioning part,
because at that level of basketball
you don't have a very big budget,
but I also had to handle a lot of our skill work.
So figuring that out then kinda led me
to experimenting with different drills.
And then it got me wanting to learn more
about how the body learns, how your brain
and muscles communicate, how to activate things.
Just basically how to create more efficient workouts
to get the biggest bang for our buck.
So, strength conditioning, it used to be
kind of a general term that we used
for lifting weights and getting stronger.
But now strength conditioning involves so much more,
including just the ability to be mobile
in your joints, flexible in your muscles,
that's such a big part of what we do.
Because if we don't have fluid movement
it's really hard for players to take the things
that we're showing them from a skill standpoint
and actually put it into games.
Like right now in our offseason with Steph
we're not even really to a point where we're lifting.
We're still working on mobility,
we're still working on corrective actions
from little injuries that happened during the last season.
Because we don't want things we do on the floor
to be done at the incorrect time
because we're actually building incorrect movement patterns.
We actually do have some technology that will let us know
each day what the optimal training window
will be based off of central nervous system feedback.
So we do use that to tell us what time of day to train.
It can tell you like your window
from three to five is your strongest window today.
I'm trying to get him in and out in 90 minutes,
90 minutes in two hours, and he'll workout
three consecutive days, he'll take on day off.
As we start to ramp up his movement in terms
of how much he's running each day in our drills
we'll probably switch and go to a two day on, one day off.
And that one day off won't be completely off.
It'll be a strictly recovery day.
And then as you get closer to the season
we'll probably take about four or five days
consecutively off, give him another mini vacation.
Then we'll go for about five straight days
prior to training camp, and then he's with the Warriors.
And we'll looking for as many ways
as we can to have him improve without putting
any additional miles on his body.
So, you know, virtual reality is something
we've started adding in on days
where he's strictly recovery.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
Now we're gonna talk about some of the tennis ball
and basketball drills we go through with Steph
and with some of our other NBA players.
We start with some basic tennis ball stuff,
and then we progressively overload it.
What we're looking for here is we're looking
at breathing patterns, we're looking at his posture.
We're looking at the tempo and speed of the basketball.
And we're making sure that the basketball
and tennis ball are operating independently,
so that the speed of the tennis ball
doesn't dictate the speed of the basketball,
and the speed of the basketball
doesn't dictate the speed of the tennis ball.
Once we see that they can do that
we'll then progress them to the next levels.
Now we're gonna go with a bounce catch/toss catch.
To give you an idea of how detailed we are
with this, we're even very specific
about the path the ball takes under Stephen's legs.
We don't want the ball to go
under your glute, we don't want it
under your butt, we want it under your knee.
We do so much lateral spacing, so if you watch Stephen play
during games he does a lot of spacing side to side.
He's either going between his legs or behind his back.
The path the ball takes affects his shooting mechanics.
So if he doesn't get the ball cleanly from one side
of his body to the other it will affect his shot.
The process of acquiring new skills really is no different
than when you learn something at school,
so we have to train our brains to learn and absorb.
So we have to be strategic about how we stimulate the brain,
make sure we understand how long maximal stimulation lasts.
Kinda like watching the same television
show over and over again.
You know, if you watch one episode
of a show that's really funny,
the third time you see it it's not as funny.
The fourth time you see it you can recite every word.
The fifth time you see it there's no stimulation whatsoever.
We watch heart rate, we watch just body mechanics.
We watch all those things to make sure
we're in a optimal learning environment at all times.
Once we notice that his breathing pattern
is normal, and he's not compensating,
or he's not holding his breath,
because that's the first place
that we see neuromuscular overload occur is with holding
his breath, we then will progress to the next drill.
We're going from controlling the toss,
controlling the bounce ourselves,
to now we have to react to things off the wall.
We're using a tennis ball in the overload
to judge how well he's processing information.
Having the wall there also allows us the ability
to take the difficulty level up a little bit higher.
With Stephen we don't do a whole
lot of single moves like that.
We want him to do a lot of things
where it's challenging his speed,
challenging his hand-eye coordination,
making sure he's coordinated through all the movements.
So what we're gonna do now
is what we call a toss-cross-cross.
He's gonna toss a tennis ball,
cross it twice, and catch it with the same hand.
So you gotta have very quick hands,
very sharp ball handling, and you gotta make sure
you're processing information.
Because it's very easy to get overloaded here.
Now, the way we progress this because footwork
is so very, very important to Stephen,
we now add a footwork element to it.
We call this is a scissor foot.
This is probably in terms
of difficulty kinda top of the line.
Now we're gonna have one player,
one open hand, two tennis balls.
So it's almost like juggling with one hand
while you're dribbling with the other hand.
This is the ultimate in terms
of being able to process information
and handle the basketball at the same time.
This is a decision-making drill,
the ability to handle the basketball,
have all this external stimulus going on,
and execute is no different than making decisions
late in games when he's in tight situations.
He's a little bit fatigued,
there's other really good players
on the floor, guys trying to guard him.
And he's gotta make the right decision,
either pass the ball or take a shot.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
The overload of the tennis ball,
the overload of a second basketball,
all of those things are overloading
what would be easier with one basketball.
So if you took the crossover,
you take the tennis ball away, all of a sudden
the basketball feels faster, it feels easier.
The first place we look for the overload
is with the mouth and the breathing.
Sometimes you'll see them, they'll lick
their lips, or they'll clench their jaws
really tight, or they'll close their mouth.
The next place you kinda look is you'll see them start
to bounce and you see them start to rock back and forth.
Then you can look at their hips.
Their hips start to do funny things.
Or their knees start to go what we call valgus.
The hard part with Stephen is he's so intelligent,
he's so good with all these drills
I'm constantly having to come up with new things
to try to challenge him and stimulate him.
One of the things that we still battle
with Stephen on is on the two ball dribbling.
He likes to get into what we call a hinge position
where he gets his nose out in front of his toes.
That's something where I see it sometimes
on TV or when I'm out at games
it kinda drives me crazy because he knows better.
But a lot of trainers are really maybe falling short
in that category of understanding
how important paying attention to mechanics
and little things on stationary drills,
how that really affects things on the floor.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
Continuing with our activation
and now blending ball handling with footwork.
So important to our players, especially Stephen,
to have very clean and efficient footwork.
So one of the ways we work on
that is with the footwork ladder.
Traditional agility ladder stuff is done
without a basketball, but since we're dealing
with point guards and we're dealing with ball skills
we want to mix the basketball into our footwork ladder.
We're looking at breathing patterns
to make sure that the player is not
so overloaded that they're not breathing.
We're also looking for fluidity.
Just movement of the hands,
movement of the feet, making sure that everything
is moving together and moving quickly, okay?
The next one we're gonna go to is called a shuffle hop.
A shuffle hop is where we really have to focus
and we really have to concentrate.
This is where we're gonna look at the foot patterns.
Because we want to be quick, but we want to be efficient.
Probably the biggest mistake we see players make
on the ladder is they take extra steps or extra tap steps.
And that essentially slows you down
because every extra step we take is another step
a defender gets opportunity to get in front of us.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
The way the Warriors play they're very spread out,
and there's a lot of movement involved.
And you can't really turn your head from side to side
to see what's going on with both sides.
So he's gotta be able to see
all that in one field of vision.
So having the ability to help and train that
with the virtual reality has become very important
to us because it gives us another way to improve
without having him move too much.
There's several different types of drills or games
that he plays, and those games last 10 to 15 minutes.
Sometimes there's objects that are moving towards him,
and he has multiple objects,
he's gotta select a specific one.
Sometimes there's multiple objects,
and he has to multitask within this.
Basically, it's just a way to where
we're training decision-making.
I think what he's improved with the most
is his ability to create space.
And the one thing that he's done over the last
really six or seven years is he has now become a master
of controlling his defender, putting them
in the position that he wants them to be in,
or to get to the space where he knows the shot is.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
For Stephen to create space and for Stephen
to keep the ball safe when he's driving
to the basket we have to make sure that our shoulders
are getting to the inside of our defender's chest.
So we call it the chest battle.
If I can get my shoulder to the middle
of my defender's chest the ball's protected
and I'm playing with leverage.
So with this drill we want to make sure
that he's twisting and turning his shoulders
as the ball is going between his legs.
All of these drills we could add footwork,
we add numbers, we add reactionary elements.
You have to be able to handle the ball.
You have to be able to make decisions.
You gotta to be able to make shots off of it.
Okay, one of the training tools that we use
and it is highly effective with Steph is the VertiMax.
And what the VertiMax does for us is it allows us
to add a little bit of external resistance to each movement.
So not only does it help us with our movement
in terms of our acceleration and our deceleration,
but it also helps us learn things in a quicker manner.
So adding light loading to a movement really aids
in muscle memory, and it helps us absorb what we're doing.
Again, it's very important for a guy like Stephen
that stops, and starts, and changes direction a lot,
we really have to train his decelerating patterns
just as much, if not more than his accelerating patterns.
Because we have to be able to change directions
efficiently and mechanically sound.
[squeaking]
[clapping]
Just like with the other drills,
any time we're trying to get Stephen
to learn something quick,
we're trying to add something new to his game,
a quick way for us to help him learn it
is to hook him up to the VertiMax and have him go
through that move specifically four or five times.
Then we'll take him off of it,
we'll go right into the court, go right into that drill.
And he'll be able to execute it smoothly a lot more fluidly
than he could if we didn't use this machine.
[rhythmic instrumental music]
He was the first guy to really recognize that, well,
if I can't get by the guy in front of me
there's always space behind me.
I think that he's kind of
revolutionized basketball in that way.
You know, my 11-year-old son doesn't really think
a whole lot about taking a 22-foot jumper in a game.
And, you know, maybe 10 years ago
we would've never let a kid that age take that shot.
But basketball is now evolving to that point.
And it's all because Stephen has changed it.
[rhythmic instrumental music]