Rethinking Basketball Vitamins

The Spurs famously coined the term “vitamins” many years ago. This now refers to the delivery of short sessions of on-court player development. We love the concept of vitamins at Transforming Basketball, but we believe the way vitamins are delivered could be tweaked to benefit from contemporary skill acquisition research which is now available.

One of the limitations with how vitamins workouts are commonly delivered is how the vitamins activities do not align with contemporary skill acquisition research. This research informs us of how players may more effectively improve within the game environment, as well as how vitamins sessions could be delivered in a contemporary manner to enhance the likelihood of practice to game transfer. 

Many vitamins workouts are completely unopposed. As such, the optimal challenge point is extremely low. It is not uncommon for professional players to make 95%+ of all their reps within traditional vitamin drills. This shows that the level of difficulty is far from desirable, and any intended impact of the workout in improving skill is minimal. If a player is performing at such a high success rate, they are simply not solving or overcoming the problems they are confronted with in the game. 

At Transforming Basketball, our vision of vitamins is to make use of the CLA to ensure that even a 15 minute session could make a tangible difference on a player’s development. This would involve players working in small groups as opposed to being 1-on-1 with a coach, competing with scripted, guided and/or live forms of defense. This would of course be subject to the relevant structural constraints such as the time in season, minutes of the players(s) within the practice etc. 

We do not believe that players should be doing the same thing week-in, week-out within vitamins sessions. For us, this simply indicates a lack of creativity and the failure to have a robust player development plan in-place to appropriately target rate limiters. In skill acquisition terms, a rate limiter is simply a factor(s) shrinking the affordance landscape within a particular context. For example, a lack of finishing adaptability, failing to consistently attune to the location of taggers in a pick and roll etc. 

Unless there is a major rate limiter within a player’s game, we believe that vitamins sessions should be changing frequently based on how the player is developing over various timeframes. There is simply so much that could be done within basketball through the CLA, that there is rarely a need to repeat the same tasks. Even one small change in constraints can lead to new solutions emerging. Our video library at Transforming Basketball now consists of over 3000+ unique practice activities (some of which are available here, with MANY hundreds in our Transforming Basketball Membership Community). The reason for this is because we are constantly creating new tasks based on the rate limiters relevant within each specific player. Many organisations in the basketball world work in a similar manner: find a drill, then impose it on the player(s). Instead, we believe cutting edge player development is the complete opposite. The players should inform the coaching team of the practice activities that we create, which should be highly specific and pertinent to every player’s PDP (player development plan). 

Furthermore, vitamins should be used as a means for solving a problem. Is it just a random drill the coach has used for years with multiple players, or is it actually something highly specific that will be of enormous help for the player(s) in question?

This means that we consider it impossible to give everyone the same vitamins or identical goals, because of how every individual is different and has different developmental needs. Within a small-group, a creative coach can easily individualise the workout for players based on their own unique rate limiters by being creative with the application of constraints.

Our intention with this article was to help coaches consider the need to deliver vitamins in more ‘representative’ and ‘alive’ practice environments. Our player development course is the ultimate resource for learning about how we do this at Transforming Basketball.

See an example of what contemporary player development looks like: