- Michael said, "Kobe, I'm not using my guy anymore,
"why don't you give him a call?"
Kobe says, "Well tell me about Grover."
And he goes, "Man, Grover really, really knows his stuff,"
but he goes, "But he's the biggest asshole
"you will ever meet."
One of the nicest things Michael's ever said to me,
because he didn't call me a asshole,
he called me the asshole.
Well if you're gonna strive for something,
never strive to be a.
A is a part of a group, the, you stand out.
[upbeat music]
Tim Grover, company is Attack Athletics,
title is Sports Enhancement Specialist.
Kobe Bryant's trainer from 2007 to 2012.
I've always admired Kobe when I was training Michael.
Everyone said he's the next one,
so I've always kind of watched him,
and saw him coming in and out of the United Center,
and so forth.
But in 2007, he actually called Michael,
and said, "Hey listen, my knees are absolutely killing me."
Because Kobe had came into the league when he was 17,
so he had had a lot of miles on his legs already.
People forget about that, that he came in
at such a young age,
and was playing at a very young age.
So, he goes, "You think you could help me out?"
I said, "I don't think I can help you out,
"I know I can help you out."
And he goes, "I'll see you tomorrow."
[upbeat music]
Once I got the medical history,
I talked to a bunch of individuals
that had been doing work with Kobe,
kind of getting what his regimen was,
what he was doing, how often he'd workout,
so once I got the resources put together,
I flew out to LA, sat down with him.
We started to go through the regimen
and the problem with his knees were,
he was basically doing too much.
This is a common problem that's happened now.
You have so many experts involved.
You have your trainer, you have your massage therapist,
you have your muscle activation guy.
Everybody's pulling everybody
in all these different directions,
because everybody wants the credit for the client.
You gotta get everybody on the same page.
If I need an individual to shorten
a certain group of muscles, or leave them alone,
and lengthen others, and then you're seeing something,
and you're doing the complete opposite,
that's never gonna benefit the athlete,
so when I came in, I told Kobe, I said,
"If I'm gonna do this, I have to be the person in charge."
I said, "You can continue to work with everybody,"
but I said, "I have to be in charge,
"I have to know everything that's happening,"
and then once we got everybody on the same page,
we actually decreased the amount of workload he was doing,
and cause Kobe is another one of the persons
that his biggest obsession was
to have more championships than Michael.
You know, if you were to ask him
when he was gonna retire, he would say,
"After number seven."
He didn't say, he never bought it in years,
because Michael had won six, so his goal was seven.
One of the biggest differences
between the two is, Michael always knew when it was enough,
and he would listen to you.
You know, if you told him that's it, that's it.
With Kobe, to him, that's it meant,
that's it for that moment,
but three hours later I can start back up again,
and he never really got out of that mentality,
which I don't blame him,
because that's what made him successful.
It's hard to understand that sometimes you need
to do less to get more.
So I get everybody in the room.
We pool all the information together,
and I don't come in and say, "I'm right."
Let's everybody understand what's going on,
and figure out how to cure this ailment.
Just like basketball is a team sport,
getting an individual healthy is a team sport.
[upbeat music]
When I started with Kobe, what did I have to do?
We had to rebuild the whole foundation again.
We had this super athlete,
who had all the beautiful things,
had the expensive kitchen,
had all the great appliances, had the cars,
but the foundation of the house wasn't taken care of.
What is foundation?
Foundation is solid cement.
It's solid brick.
You build foundation by lifting weights.
The fastest, quickest way to get an athlete stronger,
is through moving metal.
How can you have a sport now,
when you have so much more technology,
you have so much more resources,
less contact, and the, more injuries.
It's mind boggling to me.
It's because everything is rubber bands,
everything is resistance, everything is cable.
There's teams now in the NBA
that don't even have a weight room.
You still have to move iron.
It's the one greatest form of injury prevention,
because you do a compound movement,
it sends the muscles, and the electric stimulus
that goes into the body,
that cannot be duplicated by cables,
it cannot be duplicated by body work,
it cannot be duplicated by medicine balls,
and there's all the studies that are out there to prove it.
But, everyone gets back into sport specific.
It doesn't look good.
All right, it's too simplistic.
It is very simplistic, but,
you're building the foundation.
And this is nothing new.
This goes back to when they built the pyramids.
If you start adding pulleys and cables,
it's not true resistance.
When you play basketball, you play football,
you play baseball, you play soccer,
whatever you play, when you get hit,
when you jump, when you land,
there's no pulleys, there's no cables.
Your body weight is the meta.
You have to learn how to explode with it,
and you also need to learn how to land with it,
and how to stop it, and that's what metal does.
It teaches you to lift it,
but it also teaches you to put it down.
Accelerate and de accelerate.
With Kobe, everything was acceleration.
He had a Ferrari and a Lamborghini acceleration,
and he had a sub car performance brakes in it.
Here everyone talks about, you know,
well how fast can a person go
from one end to the court to the other?
Well I wanna know how quickly a person can go
from one end to the other,
and stop on a certain particular point.
I need you to be able to de accelerate,
so what he had, he had a major imbalance
between the muscles that accelerated,
and the muscles that de accelerated,
and that was causing the issues on his knees.
So what we had to do was,
for all your years, you've been shortening muscles,
because that's what most training does.
It's a contraction of a muscle.
So we put a whole new regimen into his program,
where everything was lengthening of the muscle,
to lengthen, lengthen, lengthen.
So there's three types of contractions that you have.
You have the isometric contraction,
which is static, where the contraction doesn't move.
You have the concentric contraction,
which is a shortening of the muscle,
and you have the eccentric contraction,
which is the lengthening of the muscle.
We totally took the concentric phase
out of his training, totally.
Very difficult to do because the way
to overload a muscle through an eccentric phase,
you're stronger on a lengthening of a muscle
than you are on a shortening of a muscle.
Let's take a simple leg press movement.
Most people when they do it,
you have the weights setup, and you push out,
and you bring the weight back.
I wouldn't allow him to push out.
We would literally have two or three of us,
we would push the weight out,
have him place his feet on there,
and just have him come bring the weight back slowly.
We were able to create a more of a space
in between his knees, so there was less friction there,
so if you had less friction,
the chondromalacia, and the different,
the tendonitis and the stuff that was happening on his knees
was starting to get alleviated.
We were able to identify all that
with the rest of his team, and everybody started
to work on concentrating on lengthening everything,
and lengthening is so much more painful than shortening,
but the one thing you know about Kobe,
this guy's pain tolerance was off the charts.
[upbeat music]
People always say, you should have posted more
of Kobe's workouts on social media.
I said, "If I posted Kobe's workouts on social media,
"we'd literally be posting something four times a day."
That's how focused he was in his pursuit of excellence,
and his pursuit of championships.
Kobe was like, everyone said you won the championships
because of Shaq, but when Shaw was traded to Miami,
Kobe wanted to prove that he could win not one championship,
he could win multiple championships without Shaq,
and that's when I was there.
Kobe wanted that pressure,
so he knew he had to become more effective,
he had to get his teammates involved.
Kobe was as hard on his teammates as Michael was.
He was just as hard, and as competitive, in practice.
Everybody watched films of the current players.
Kobe would tell these guys to get film
of players going way back.
Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Pete Maravich.
He goes, "I wanna see what those guys did
"to be successful."
A lot of people don't know this,
is Kobe knew four or five languages very fluently.
I'm talking about fluently.
Obviously English, Italian, Spanish,
and I know he had started working on like Mandarin.
I mean those aren't easy languages.
I mean, I'm talking about fluent,
like he could have a conversation
with individuals in those languages.
Pau Gasol was one of his teammates, the Spaniard,
so they would communicate on the court in Spanish,
so the other team wouldn't know
what they were talking about.
And the reason he ended up learning Mandarin so well,
is because he saw the explosion in China basketball
before everybody else did.
So he goes, "How can I endear myself
"to this culture even more?"
He says, "Yeah okay, a lot of players just go over there,
"but what if I can give a press conference
"in their language?"
You know, the greats, they show up early, they stay late.
There's times where you'll see Kobe
and the athletic trainer throw a towel over the finger,
yank it back, and go right back in the game,
because Kobe doesn't wanna miss that time.
Same thing with his shoulder,
when he's had it dislocated shoulder.
They just, you pop it right back into place.
The last play when he tore his achilles,
every other player in the league,
you'd have had your teammates carry you off.
He not only gets up, walks to the free throw line,
makes two free throws,
then goes over to the bench,
and asks if you can pull it, and tape it down,
so I can finish the game.
[upbeat music]
It was the start of
the USA Basketball Olympic training in Vegas.
We had just stopped training,
because the season had just ended,
and then the Olympics were coming up,
and he goes, "I wanna implement cycling in my training."
I'm like, all right.
So I'm thinking, stationary biking,
in a health club or something.
He goes, "No, I wanna incorporate cycling."
So I said all right.
So we get into Vegas, so I'm like, okay,
so I'm looking at all the different paths
that we can go to, so,
because I knew I'm gonna have to get on the bike with him.
There's gonna be security, there's gonna be myself,
there'll be a Nike rep, and there'll be Kobe on the bike,
so I gotta figure out a path.
I'm thinking about basketball, change of speed,
slow, stop, so I gotta find the right hills
that go up and down.
I gotta know the path of when he's gonna accelerate
and de accelerate.
I didn't know anything about Vegas,
so talking to different people,
talking to the concierge at the hotel,
talking to the different rental car companies,
and saying, "What are the best roads to go for,
"where the desert is."
Then I'm like, okay, where am I gonna get four bicycles
in the next 48 hours that are gonna fit individuals
from six-five, six-six, all the way down
to somebody who's five-eight?
So I had Nike get in touch with some people
on their cycling team, and then said okay,
then they made arrangements to have bikes sent
to the hotel.
Miscalculated something.
I forgot to tell them to put the bikes together.
So, the night before, myself and the rest of Kobe's staff
were literally putting the bikes together,
because what time's the ride?
4:30 in the morning.
He wants to be out there before the sun comes up,
and then he wants to take a break,
and ride back when the sun's at its peak.
If I'm gonna do this, I wanna be
in the most uncomfortable temperature,
environment, out there.
If you're gonna ride, you're gonna ride.
A couple players had heard about this,
and the next day, they were like,
yeah, we wanna go with you.
I was like, "No you don't."
Said, "You do not wanna go."
And that was part of his regimen
while we were in Vegas the whole time.
Every other day we went on these, these rides.
When you have those clients that are that obsessed
with getting better, they're just not doing something
just to be doing it.
They're not going on a bike ride,
just to go on a bike ride.
There's a purpose behind it,
and you have to have a plan with that purpose.
You just had to be a little creative,
and you had to be able to have a client
that trusted in your abilities enough
to say, "Hey, this is going to work."
So, Mike Procopio, who worked with me,
he's one of the best basketball minds I have ever met,
he would breakdown film to like the microsecond.
He would be like, "Okay,"
he's playing any particular opponent,
he goes, "This person has a tendency
"for their performance to drop off after six minutes,"
so that would allow me to set the training program up,
so Kobe would peak, start to peak
at when this guy was coming down,
so he could take advantage
of that lack two minute time in there.
I could incorporate it into Kobe's training,
where without even having to think about it,
he would automatically know that,
I see this player starting to lag a little bit,
and all of a sudden, this is when he would start taking off.
There's certain training methods
that you can do, where you could maximize
a person's oxygen capacity,
so you can deprive oxygen to a certain point,
and this was way before,
you know when people have the masks,
they had the training masks?
I used to have individuals sprint back and forth
with snorkels in their mouth.
You can't get as much oxygen through a snorkel,
and then during the time where you need it the most,
take a snorkel off, more oxygen,
more red blood cells are recruited,
and now all the sudden you have that burst of energy.
You know, you can't always train in altitude,
but there's way of creating the same effect.
People always say, like, I lack the tools.
You don't lack the tools, you lack the creativity.
[upbeat music]
There's a great story about him.
At age 17 he gets drafted,
and people know that when you get drafted
in whatever sport, somebody usually throws
this big draft party for you.
Kobe gets drafted, no draft party, no celebration.
He goes and works out.
He goes to the gym, and works out.
After he got drafted.
He did his little interviews and so forth.
Go to the gym.
Kobe was always fascinated with animals
that were like known to be aggressive,
and a snake, the mentality of the venom.
The things people feared were more
of allies to him.
The mamba mentality is the black mamba,
which is the most dangerous snake out there,
so it's not like, you know,
he's not gonna think of a garden snake.
If he's gonna put a mentality together,
it's gonna be with the most venomous,
most dangerous individual out there.
The one thing about him I learned,
he was so gracious to the young guys
coming into the league,
and a lot of people don't know that about Kobe.
He would talk to them.
He would give them answers
that they just weren't ready for.
They didn't have that mamba mentality at that age,
and some of them never had it,
but he was trying to tell them,
"If you understand this now,
"it's the difference between an eight year career,
"and a 15 year career."
These guys, they set their records to be broken.
They wanna see the next generation excel,
they wanna see the next generation get better.
I have an expression, I have saying that,
when you shake the commissioner's hand,
congratulations, that's the end of your career.
It's not the beginning of your career.
That's the end of your career,
because now you finally exhale.
You're like, man all that, all those AAU teams,
all the high schools, now college, some college,
I made it.
Okay, and those are the individuals
that have the shortest careers.
The ones that are like, "I'm here now, what's next?"
And to see a 17 year old to have the mentality to say,
"No draft party for me.
"I'm gonna go workout."
That was the Black Mamba.