- As terrible as the situation is,
there is opportunity within the situation.
You know, these guys, they're gonna have
a bigger off-season than they've ever had.
They've never had an opportunity like this
to really slow down and take a long,
hard look at how they play, how they move,
and what the things they really need to improve on are.
[slow hip hop music]
Hi, I'm Brandon Payne,
I'm the founder and owner of Accelerate Basketball
in Charlotte, North Carolina,
and I am Stephen Curry's personal trainer,
personal skills coach, and performance coach.
I've been training Stephen now for 10 years,
and each year it's just gotten bigger and bigger.
As of today, April 10th, you know the league is still
non-committal on whether it's gonna come back this year
or just close up operations and move on to next year.
For us, at the NBA level, especially for players
like Stephen, that have played deep into the playoffs
for so many consecutive years,
we kinda have a rhythmic defined
work calendar that we operate from.
Right now, not knowing whether we're preparing
to play games in June and July,
or if we're preparing to play games
starting in November and December,
it kinda puts us in this position where, all right,
we're not sure if we should be resting,
and getting into our normal off-season
workout schedule after the rest period ends.
Because we typically would take off about four
to five weeks after the playoffs have concluded
to allow his body to rest, allow him to go
on vacation, spend family time.
Or, are we tryin' to stay in shape?
Get him back on the court within the next eight weeks.
I'm treating it as a four to six period that we would
normally take off at the end of the season.
My mental calendar has kinda flipped forward
to thinking you know, November and December
is when we're gonna start playin' basketball again.
I'm startin' to build out what would be our normal
off-season program, thinking that it would start
probably some time in the next three to four weeks.
[slow hip hop music]
Right now, I would say we're about three weeks away
from really kinda gettin' goin' to where
I'm gonna wanna be involved daily in what he's doin'.
He's a very responsible player,
so he has a really nice set up at his house,
to where he's able to get a lotta cardio and strength in.
So, I know he's doin' some things on his own.
But, in about three weeks, we'll definitely have
a defined direction that we're gonna go in
for this off-season that he'll need to get started on.
In a normal off-season we would be together
pretty much five, six days a week,
and we would have one completely off day.
But, right now, I'm preparing him to be able
to do a lot of things at home on his own.
I'm having a Shoot-A-Way shooting machine sent to his house.
He just got a basket up, so at least
he'll be able to get up a few shots.
I'm having our virtual reality,
our neuro trainer unit sent there so he can do all
of his mental skills training.
All of his neurocognitive work.
He's very fortunate to have that type of space
to do this type of work in.
Even though he didn't play the full
82 game schedule because of the hand injury,
he would still be taking about a four
to six week period off, and letting his body rest.
Even though he wasn't playing in those games,
he was goin' through two a day workouts.
He was goin' through hand rehab.
He was still in the facility every day,
so he needs a mental break just as much
as he needs a physical break.
So, we would still take some time
to let him kind of mentally recuperate,
and get away from it before we come back
and really get started.
During this four to six week period,
this is typically the time that I would be using
to really go back and watch film of this season.
Look at some of the ways that teams
took things away from him,
or look at some of the things that he did new
that allowed him to have success,
and kind of build that into a skill program.
At the same time, I would be looking back
at not only the big injuries like the hand,
but there's also little micro injuries and things
that happen throughout a basketball season.
Just bumps and bruises, or somethin' small
that they were able to play through.
You still have to build out that rehab process
within your strength conditioning program
to make sure those micro injuries
don't repeat themselves the following years.
This would be a period of time
where I'm really reflecting on the season.
Talking to the team trainers, talking to Stephen,
getting feedback, to make sure we're putting together
a comprehensive off-season program that pushes us forward
from this season to next season.
[slow hip hop music]
Once we get out of this four to six week period,
that initial 10 days to two week period
is gonna be focused on making sure
he has fluid movement skills,
making sure that we don't have any lingering
soft tissue issues from the season.
A lot of foam rolling, mobility at his shoulders,
mobility at his hips.
Stability at his knees and mobility at his ankles.
The way that I work with basketball players,
the most important thing is we need to do
from a movement standpoint, is starting at your feet.
Of course, we have to have some strength
and stability at the ankle, but we really have
to make sure we have the range of motion we need
to allow our knees and our hips to do their jobs.
If we have a joint disfunction at one place within our leg,
the issues are gonna show up at another joint.
So, if we have a lack of range of motion at our ankles,
we're gonna start to have some discomfort at our knee.
Or, if we have something going on from
a stiffness standpoint in our hips,
typically we're gonna have something goin' on in our knees.
So, we have to make sure from a joint by joint standpoint,
that we are moving with fluidity,
and that our joints are allowing
themselves to play their role.
You know, we build shooters from the ground up.
Making sure that from a soft tissue standpoint,
we're not having any knots of anything.
He gets really knotted up in his
quadriceps from time to time.
We're gonna spend a lot of time working
on that in that first 10 day period.
So, you see, I've got it broken down.
Day one, day three, day five.
Day two, day four, day six.
We're gonna get in the diaphragmatic activation first,
and that's basically breathing drills.
These are just different protocols in terms
of how we have the arms lifted, where the knees are bent.
So, we're gettin' very detailed about
how we're doing everything here,
because we've gotta make sure that
the diaphragm is the primary mover.
Then, we're gonna get into our floss activation.
Now, floss is somethin' that we're using the rubber floss
that you wrap the muscle to kinda trap the blood
in place for about a 60 to 90 second period.
We go through a few small movements,
then we unwrap it, and then the new blood flushes out,
the oxygenated blood flushes in.
And you see, we've got myofascial mobility ball uppers.
He tends to get a little bit tight in his pecs,
and a little bit tight in his traps.
And then, we have a shoulder mobility series
that we go through, and this is laying on a foam roller.
This is all the different stuff
that he goes through on that,
just to make sure his shoulders are moving
with great fluidity and with great range of motion.
If we feel like after the seven day period
that he's operating the way he needs to,
and that there's no issue, we may get into
our strength and stuff a little bit earlier.
But really, this period of time is designed
to get him working on his balance,
to get him working on joint by joint possibility.
And, getting him to deal with uncommon loading.
We use a product called ViPR.
Which is, they look like logs.
They're just designed for you to do flow movements with,
so not movements that are designed
to be point A to point B movements,
just movements that are designed
to load your body in an uncommon manner.
It translates directly to the court,
because all of our change of direction,
all of our step backs, and all of our quick stopping,
that's all about dealing with your
body moving in different ways.
We can't script anything on the court.
You can't script how the defender is playing.
You can't script what happens in front of you.
It's all reactionary, so when you're reactionary
with change of directions, your body's gonna have
to load in a lot of different ways.
By using these ViPRs, and using different ways
to load them in different bands,
we're allowing their bodies to remember
and improve at changing directions and reactionary times.
With Stephen, we've had such a long relationship,
and he's such a professional,
and he knows his body inside and out,
we don't ever wanna get into like an all out stretch.
We never wanna stretch as far as we can
to hold it for 30 seconds.
We get in to things like where we call it a 60% stretch,
like if it's a hamstring stretch.
But, we're gonna hold that slight stretch
for a long period of time.
The more difficult we get in the stretch,
so if we get into like a 70 or 75% stretch,
the less time we're gonna hold that stretch.
You think about it like it's one extended yoga session.
We're progressively loading him,
but we're not gonna get into these really,
really difficult positions in day one.
We're gonna probably get some difficult stretches
and difficult things probably by day six or seven.
We don't really want him working
much longer than 90 minutes.
You're gonna his the point of diminishing returns
where you're not getting the most out of every single rep.
We have to extract the most improvement
out of every single rep, because our body
can only go through so many.
That 90 minute marker is kinda your cut time.
[slow hip hop music]
Week three of our normal off-season program,
we would start introducing our basic movements,
our basic lifts in the weight room.
But, it would be done in conjunction
with the skill work that we are starting.
With Stephen, we'll be able to do pretty much everything
we normally do in the weight room,
just I'll be on the computer on the Zoom.
Whatever mode of communication we're using.
So, we would start to get on the floor
for probably about 30 to 40 minutes in that third week,
just to get shots up, to get a ball in our hands.
Just to start goin' back through a lot
of our mechanics maintenance, which is just basically
making sure that not only our movement mechanics are good
in terms of moving beneath our hips,
but also our shooting mechanics are solid.
So, hopefully that first 10 day period
have provided us the fluid movement that we need
at each joint to be able to shoot the ball smoothly.
We would pair up what we were doin' from a skill standpoint
with what we do in the weight room.
So, if on day one, if we were just primarily working
on just jumping with shots, not moving side to side,
not getting downhill, not escaping,
but we're just jumping and shooting,
then we would probably work on our
landing mechanics in the weight room that day.
We were doing vertical pressing,
so like a squat, or somethin' along those lines,
where we had a big focus on landing mechanics.
When we first get back on the court,
it's gonna be primarily really small mechanical stuff.
A lot more ball handling, tennis ball, two ball stuff
than we would have as the summer would go.
So, things like this right here.
The, like bounce catch, toss catch, or just toss and catch.
Again, I mean, we're gonna be talkin'
about these same bullet points.
Posture, tempo, making sure we're breathing.
So, the breathing that we talked about,
that diaphragmatic activation,
that carries through in drills like this as well.
So, we wanna take these drills,
like these stationary tennis ball drills,
and make them bigger in terms of their impact.
So, not only is there the ball handling element.
There's the overload element of the tennis ball being there.
There's the posture and strength element.
This is an example of vertical core strength as well.
But, there's also the element of breathing.
When we go through these drills,
as he's very detailed about how he goes through it,
he's gonna get a greater amount of improvement,
because all the things we were hitting on
in our strength movements
will come out in these drills as well.
We would treat this drill, this bounce catch,
toss catch, like a base drill.
From the base drill, we can expand off of it.
So, it would go from a bounce catch, toss catch.
Then we would go bounce catch, toss catch,
cross the basketball over and catch it with the other hand.
Three, four weeks without a ball in our hand
is a long time for a guy that, you know,
has played basketball his entire life.
But, he needs that.
He needs that mental break.
Gotta have it in order to be able
to refocus and prepare for the next season.
So, those are short bursts.
The tennis balls, that stuff is where he'll do two
or three drills for 30 seconds each,
and then we get away from it.
So, it's just a real quick 90 second, hit it,
and we'll put it down, and we'll probably go
to somethin' from a strength standpoint.
We'll use the tennis ball stuff
to provide some rest in his strength workouts right now
while we have the current set up.
And then, we'll use it to kind of break up
his shooting as well.
We'll never have somebody doin' that
for longer than about 90 seconds at a time, that's it.
If you get to the point where you're slowing down
or you get to the point where you're gettin' sloppy,
the benefit of the drill is lost.
So, you have to make sure you're short, quick, and sharp.
If you think about things that are ground based
that could help with vertical core strength,
we do a lot of planking.
We don't do many extension type core movements,
so whereas general population would do a lot of things
where they're either crunching,
or they're doin' some sort of a,
you know a static hold in that kinda crunch position,
we're doin' more contralateral stuff.
We would have a cone in front of him,
so he would have to reach his right hand out to tap the cone
while he's reaching his right hand out to tap the cone,
his left foot has to come off the ground.
So, we're getting glute activation on the left side,
and we're getting some shoulder activation
on the right side, but his core is havin'
to lock everything down so he's not falling side to side.
If I'm driving to the basket,
and I've got the basketball in my right hand,
and I'm receiving contact on my left shoulder,
my right leg is gonna be loaded more than my left leg,
because my right leg is the one that's gotta provide
the leverage for me to stay on the line that I'm drive.
So, you have to be able to be strong with your core
while your legs are producing different amounts of force,
and you have to be strong with your core
while your arms are completing different tasks.
Form for us is paramount, like we have to have perfect form.
His breathing has to be superior
while he's going through all this,
so while you think about it, if you're planking,
and you got one leg up and one hand up,
and you're tryin' to hold your body still,
the first thing your body does is it forgets to breathe.
'Cause you wanna hold your breath to try
to hold everything together, so we actually have
somebody watching his breathing while he's doin' all that.
Typically, we monitor pretty closely heart rates.
That's our biggest kind of tell on number one,
how well conditioned we are, and number two,
how hard we actually worked through that workout.
There's several manufacturers
that make different heart rate monitors,
and there's one or two that have some pretty good apps,
so he can actually screenshot his app
to show me what we call the peaks and valleys looks like,
and how close together they are, how far apart they are.
Our biggest focus when we're lookin' at heart rate
is how quickly the heart rate comes down.
The shorter that period of time is,
the better shape he's in.
[slow hip hop music]
Week four is where the cardiovascular work
will start to ramp up and where that comes
in to play is on our skill work.
Whereas in week three, we're probably only spending about
30 to 45 minutes on the court,
okay now we're actually gonna extend
that out to about an hour.
And, instead of the entire period being spent
on stationary catch and shoot stuff,
for about 15 minutes of that period,
we'll be actually moving.
We're playing a lot of what we call shooting games,
where he's gotta make a certain amount
of shots against a certain time limit,
but we're givin' him different spots he's gotta got to.
If we're doin' that for about 15 minutes in week four,
you know, week five, we'll kinda ramp that up
to about 30 minutes, so he'll be moving
for about half the time we're on the floor.
His cardiovascular challenges are getting greater
as we get deeper into the summer, but also his skill work
is getting better because we're getting into
more game like skill work, that's how.
We try to challenge him as much as we can through
the weeks 'til we kinda get to the peak.
We wanna peak about 10 days prior to training camp,
because what we wanna do is we wanna give him a few days
to go on vacation with his family,
which he typically does right before the season starts.
Then we'll come back right before training camp
with two or three really rigorous days,
and then the two days, three days before training camp,
we're simply just gettin' up shots,
makin' sure we're sharp, and then he's off to them.
Those rigorous days are what we call competition days.
Everything we do within the workout
is all competitive shooting.
We're gonna be changin' areas, changin' ends.
Givin' him different defensive assignments.
We do things that are called game simulations.
We call it four quarters.
He doesn't really like the drill,
but it's where we're simulating things
that he would have to do in a game on defense on one end,
then he has to change ends the floor,
and he has to make a few shots.
Then he's gotta go back and play defense again.
So, it's extremely challenging, extremely tiring.
But, it gives us a really good gauge on where he is.
The heart rate data that we get
from that is really important.
We're really looking closely at how quickly
that heart rate slope's coming back down.
We also wanna look at time out.
We simulate time outs, where he'll go for
a four, six, to eight possessions,
then we'll simulate takin' a time out,
where he actually goes and sits down.
Then again, we look at the heart rate.
What does it look like when it's comin' down.
How quickly is it comin' down,
because that's the information we need to know so we can,
you know, feel really good about
where he is from a cardio standpoint.
Very rarely do we shoot for just the sake of shooting.
Even on that 100 makes, we're tracking it,
so we know how many it takes him to make 100 shots.
You know, we wanna make sure if we're makin' 100 shots,
we gotta make it less than 110.
Because we're shooting against air.
Nobody's in front of us, nobody's around us.
The ball should go in.
We have tracking data that shows us how far left the ball
goes in the rim, how far right the ball goes in the rim.
We wanna make sure the ball's hitting the middle
of the rim on every shot, because in a game,
he's never gonna be standing still to catch and shoot.
So. if you woulda shot that same shot,
off the move, it would've been a miss.
If you're not looking at this information,
it's kinda like flyin' blind.
You're just kinda floating, you're just kinda
working for the sake of working.
We can't waste effort on the court.
We have to make sure that everything we're doin'
on the court and the weight room
takes us towards improvement to create
the proper workout loading form moving into the season.
[slow electronic music]
We're in obviously a tough situation as a country.
We're in a tough situation globally.
At some point, this is gonna end.
At some point, kids are gonna be playin' basketball again.
You know, I'm getting something called
Basketball Parent put together,
where it's gonna give parents an opportunity
to speak with me on a monthly basis
about putting their program together for their kids,
and it's gonna give parents an opportunity
to spend more time with their kids,
and help parents understand how their kid's learning.
Right now, probably the biggest thing we have
is we have a lot of kids playin' Xbox,
we have a lot of kids sitting on Zoom classrooms like this.
There's a lot of sitting goin' on.
So, their athletic skills will start to diminish
if they're not using them.
To just get them out, have them moving,
to keep it stimulating, to keep it interesting,
you can't stop getting better.
We have to get better,
and we have to approach every day as an opportunity.
Now, we have technology that allows us
to stay in touch with each other,
so coaches are able to still have coaches meetings.
Strength coaches are still able
to stay in contact with players.
Trainers like myself are still able
to stay in contact with players.
They can film themselves and send things back to us.
From the time all these guys have been playing,
from six, seven years old,
they've been playing basketball year round.
They've never had an opportunity like this
to really slow down and take a long,
hard look at how they play, at how they move,
and what the things they really need to improve on are.
All these guys now have an extended opportunity
to really examine, you know,
what do I need to do better to help my team?
And, they can sit down, they can put together a really
comprehensive player development program for themselves.
Where in the past, it's just been,
I gotta work out to get ready for the next year.
We have a little bit more time now,
so we have to make the best of this bad situation,
and we have to seize the opportunity in front of us,
and we have to try to work to get better.