Alex Sarama interviews Jamie Smith, an athletic performance coach and educator. They discuss the need for a new approach to athletic performance in basketball and how to…
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In this episode, Alex Sarama interviews Jamie Smith, an athletic performance coach and educator. They discuss the need for a new approach to athletic performance in basketball and how to integrate skill acquisition principles into training. Jamie emphasizes the importance of moving away from traditional methods and embracing creativity and variability in training. They share practical examples of how to apply these ideas in warm-ups, small-sided games, and the weight room. Jamie also discusses the concept of "rep without rep" and how it can enhance skill development and reduce the risk of injuries.
Need help with ideas for your next practice? Our FREE youth basketball practice book gives you 21 small-sided games which you can use instantly. Get your free copy here: https://transformingbball.com/21-ssgs-for-your-next-practice
هذا النص يتبع التسجيل الصوتي الأصلي باللغة الإنجليزية.
This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.
Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you.
Do you need help applying all the unique transforming ideas in your next practice? Our free youth basketball practice book provides you with 21 small-sided games which are perfect for all levels of youth basketball. Join thousands of coaches around the world coaching the transforming way and get your free copy by heading to the show notes.
Explore Transforming Basketball membership and continue your coach development.
George is joined by João Pacheco, a coach from Portugal who has been living and coaching in Germany for nearly 14 years.
George Vaz addresses the common challenges coaches face when transitioning from traditional pattern-based offenses to a conceptual offense using the Constraints-Led Approach…
George is joined by Coaches Jared, Tom, and Henry to reflect on their experiences at the Transforming Basketball Summer Camp.
Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. A good friend of mine, Jamie Smith, joining the podcast today. I had the pleasure to really get to know Jamie over the last year and a half, and we spent 10 days in Italy. last year working together.
Jamie came out to visit me, and we just had an incredible time on the court, you know, applying many of the ideas we are so passionate about. So Jamie, thanks so much for coming on.
Oh, it's my pleasure, and I, um, I'm looking forward to our conversation and the emergence of ideas. And my time in Italy, we can talk about— it was just, it was an unbelievable experience, you know, as a coach, as an educator. So I appreciate the opportunity then, and I appreciate the opportunity now.
Oh, thanks, man. So let's get straight into it. I've been enamored with the creativity in some, in many of your activities that you've been sharing over the years in the athletic performance realm. And a lot of what I see in the basketball world is, you know, we talk about traditional approaches to basketball coaching.
Well, we see the exact same things in athletic performance. For instance, you know, movement routines for warmups, dynamic stretches, agility ladders, foam rolling. the same kind of things in the weight room. So what's your vision, Jamie, for athletic performance of the future within the basketball world?
What I will say is we need to stop blindly following tradition. Just because I did— I was a basketball athlete for many years— just because I personally did something 10, 15, 20-plus years ago, it doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It means there's other tools out there.
And so the big thing I had is that, so yes, we can do our stuff in the weight room. Yes, you can do your stuff in the warmup. Yes, you can do, you know, your different conditioning drills. But I thought there was more to this.
There's a better way to serve, example, basketball, but I have the pleasure of working with every sport you can think of. There's gotta be more to than just getting stronger or getting faster or warming an athlete up. And so that's where, you know, some of these creative small-sided games or some of these kind of unorthodox activities you won't see, you know, in the traditional S&C setting.
That's what that stems from. It's like, how can I better serve the individuals that are in front of me to truly prepare their body and mind for sport, for practice, for life? Gus, that's where, you know, a lot of these different theories and concepts underpin these ideas.
It's just, I thought I could do more, you know, instead of just living in the weight room and And it's like, all right, I you know I got a kid's deadlift up, or I got an athlete's bench press up. That's great. But what does that mean?
It's like okay, the word strength, right? And and I apologize for going on a tangent, but this word strength is a weight room term. I want to be able to take that strength and turn that into a more robust or a forceful individual, not just being like all right, I got you from.
X amount of weight to you know whatever ten percent twenty percent increase. Okay, what does that mean? Because in my opinion, that's just one tool, and that doesn't correlate to a better basketball player. Doesn't correlate to a better lacrosse athlete, whatever. And so I just thought there was more to this whole athletic puzzle.
The stuff you will see that like what we did in Italy or the stuff in our workshop, those are the missing pieces. And that's where I think coaches, if they can just. you know, take one of these ideas and start applying it, it's just, it's gonna make a huge difference and it makes sense.
That's the great thing about this is that when you, yes, it kind of looks messy and chaotic and foreign, but when you understand the rationale and the reasoning, it's like, oh, okay, I get it. That makes actually a ton of sense.
I love that. So let's get to our workshop, which, you know, we've just released on transformingbball.com and We released this because we wanted to show how we can integrate basketball with athletic performance as opposed to these 2 fields existing in their independent silos, which is what we see at every level.
But I'd say actually the higher the level, the more you see it, and that even the greater the specialism, the greater the prevalence of these siloed departments. So, you know, could you explain just to the listeners, Jamie, what we mean by that and why we think it's so important?
That, you know, regardless of whether you're a high school coach or you're coaching in the NBA, we integrate these fields as opposed to working separately.
Absolutely. So the common thing you hear is stay in your lane. And so I got that a lot, especially early on when I was trying to share these ideas and trying to experiment and try to test out these non-traditional activities. It was like, all right, stay in your lane.
And I had the pleasure of working not only in the private sector, but at the high collegiate level here in the States. And the strength and conditioning, the athletic performance, sport performance, whatever you want to call us, we're always the low guy or girl on the totem pole.
And so what we are trying to do is we're trying to show that this is a collective synergy. This isn't one person is greater than another person. Everyone has their role, but these roles are interconnected. And me as an athletic performance coach, I need to appreciate what are the offensive and defensive tactics.
Yeah.
I need to understand the different nuances of basketball, of hockey, of you name the sport. I'm not saying I have to be, I have to have an understanding like the sport coach, but I need to have some awareness of what, not just from a physicality standpoint, you know, from a biomotor ability.
I need to understand, like I said, we have to understand, you know, what are gonna be the demands Physical, psychological, emotional, social. What are going to be the demands placed on you know these? It could be kids. It could be whatever level you're talking about.
But it's got to be more of this integrated approach. It's got to be this: we're on the same page where which you'll see in our workshop is that it should be a nice smooth transition from let's just say okay because this is tradition right?
You have the athletic performance coach. They do their things at the beginning of practice, and then the sport coach kind of. You know, takes over and does what they need to do, you know, from a sports specificity standpoint. And what we're trying to show is that these can be integrated.
And when we're looking at this from motor learning and motor performance, it can't be this siloed approach where there's no context or the individual trying to learn how to do— name the skill— where it's like, okay, I'm in the 4 walls of the athletic performance world, but then when I leave that world, now I'm in the basketball world.
Those things should just be one— that should be unified, right? And so we should be speaking the same language. We should be, you know, communicating the same type of information. And so that's just the big thing is showing how I'd call it the bridge where we're bridging, you know, these speed skills, these, you know, force production skills, all these different ideas.
We're trying to make it a seamless transition so that when the athlete is performing their task from a basketball standpoint, let's say with an actual implement like a basketball. they have some contextual, they have some understanding of, of using some different types of movement solutions or looking at different movement opportunities or affordances where the traditional way, it's just, it's not a seamless transition.
It's not. It's more of this stuff where it's more, it's robotic. It's more, you know, everything's done a certain way, everything. But then the minute that the athlete enters the, the basketball world, Everything acts, feels, behaves differently. And so all I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take some aspects, whether you want to call it representative of this or adding con— I like using the word context where I'm just giving them a feel.
We're trying to show that it can be a nice transition from the general side of things to the specific side of things.
Absolutely. I think, you know, a lot of athletic performance coaches, Jamie, have sent me messages over the last couple of years. And you know, they're interested in the stuff I'm doing on the court, and then they're often you know immediately I send them like a link to your Twitter or whatever, and I think they're shocked that you can actually play small-sided games as part of athletic performance.
And it's like a lot of coaches, especially when I was working in Italy, they had no clue that you could do things like that as part of athletic performance. They thought everything had to be you know this closed environment, repeating movements. Then we go to the weight room.
And it's just the complete opposite to what we're trying to get at here. And I think let's go back to the workshop, Jamie. I think what we've tried to do is, you know, of course it's going to appeal to basketball coaches, athletic performance coaches, and other practitioners.
But even for some type of, you know, a high school basketball coach, this stuff is easy to apply. You don't need to understand, you don't have to have a degree in athletic performance or strength and conditioning. It's super easy, right?
Absolutely. That was the coolest thing for me to be able to establish a distance relationship with you, then get the opportunity to take everything that I was trying to create and apply in a very small, you know, part of, uh, in Kingsborough, Massachusetts, United States, and then be able to hop on a flight, come over, introduce myself, and then start integrating and start applying these ideas.
In a completely foreign setting. And yes, was there a transition period? 100%. But after day 1, it was just really powerful to see that we don't need these, you know, traditional fancy gadgets and pieces of equipment and tools where if you understand movement, you understand sport, you understand learning, and then you look at the individuals in front of you as human beings, it's limitless.
It really is limitless with all of these different ideas that you can do. But the big thing is that the engagement, the shit, the production, you know, just the engagement, it's just because I see it, right? And so that's why I'm sharing all these ideas, whether I'm working with a 6-year-old or I'm working with a 30-year-old.
I'm seeing this in real time and I want to share it and I want to be able to apply this with all these different levels and getting that chance to do that with, you know, with your organization. It was really powerful. And it is, it's like, okay, you see these small-sided games, you see some of these plyometric environments, you see some of these, you know, kind of speed experiences.
And again, I'm not saying tradition isn't valuable. I'm not saying that we don't lift weights. I'm not saying we don't do closed environments. I'm just not limiting myself to just that, where I'm exposing using these different tools and these different pieces to the puzzle, where now it's like, all right, we can create this larger puzzle where now this athlete or this individual that's in front of me is gonna have more options.
And that's just the biggest thing. 'Cause you see, I'm sure you see this too, where, you know, everything is pre-planned, everything you're told what to do, everything is very rehearsed. And the minute they get into a situation where it's not rehearsed, it is uncertain, it is chaotic, which that's sport, that is the basketball.
They don't have access to that. And so all I'm trying to do is just give them the tools where just in case, if they need to get access to, you name the skill, you name the situation, that's what my process is about. Opening up, you know, this movement toolbox, you know, expanding this affordance landscape where now they just have more options.
And so if you as a coach want to change your defensive scheme or you want to change the way you run your offense or whatever it may be, your kids aren't going to be limited to just doing it one way. They're going to have the availability of all of these different movement options to be adaptable, to be robust, to be resilient.
And that is the purpose, right? It's not just strength and speed. It's actually getting these skills to be able to transcend training environments.
Absolutely. I want to shift the focus now, Jamie, to some of the kind of practical considerations as to what a constraints-led approach within the athletic performance world kind of looks like for basketball. And, you know, this is very much kind of a sample of what we've done in the workshop.
So I think the easiest place to start is the warmup. And I know we're both very similar in this regard where we believe that traditional warmups are just wasting time and it's really just not conducive to developing more skilled basketball players. So as opposed to these routines, you know, what could a coach be doing at any level from NBA to high school to prepare their players better?
Within the warmup.
Yeah, absolutely. And I've been on several podcasts and a lot of things on social media talks about, you know, me eliminating the dynamic warmup. What I am saying, I'm saying there is a warmup. All right. There is a, I call it pre-training, pre-practice.
There is a warmup element. All I am saying is that instead of doing your warmup lines where you have kids, you know, you have everything pre-planned, they do the same 8 to 10 movements. It's on the whistle or it's on one of the leaders of the team.
All I'm saying is that instead of focusing on just kind of getting through it, let's look at that 5 to 10 minute period as a learning window, as an opportunity to improve. And I've done it and I've gone through it where we're kind of doing the same thing over and over again.
And there's a lot of traditional coaches that will say that that's the athletes need. I would argue where it's, all right, if they're going to be thrown into practice, into a sport-specific, high-information, high-problem-solving situation, let's make sure we're really preparing them. Let's just not look through a physical lens.
Let's also look through a psychological lens. And so, the big thing is this idea of tapping into that kind of perceptual motor landscape or this idea of perception-action coupling. And understanding that the information around them, that's what we want to exploit. We want to maximize, we want to take advantage, you know, and it's not where it's not going to be something where the first thing in practice, I'm throwing them into a 5v5 small-sided game, but let's get them into a simple 1v1 situation, you know, and depending on what the emphasis is, or I follow a
low-high model where basically There's easy days and hard days. Let's just keep it simple like that. Where on, you know, on the easy days, it could be a simple 1v1, some sort of game, whether it's a tag type thing, whether it's some sort of invasion, but some sort of game that we're putting one individual in an offensive role, another individual in a defensive role where we're tapping in.
Yes, we're connecting the perception-action coupling, but we also have the behavior side of things. We have the intentions. Keep it simple on the podcast. Offense, you're trying to create space. Defense, you're trying to close down space. And so tag is a very simple way to, you know, to give kind of somewhat of a visual understanding of a simple 1v1 game.
But in our workshop, in my ebooks and everything I share, I have hundreds of examples of these kind of 1v1 situations where, you know, you can play around with different spacing. You can play around. With inside that space, you know, are there obstacles?
Is it open? And all of these different constraints, all right, which we talk about in our workshop, are going to influence these movement behaviors, are going to influence what, you know, the type of movement patterns, what type of movement patterns are going to potentially emerge.
And so say on an easy day, it's more game where we're focusing on a 1v1, which is an individual focus. But on the flip side, I also have team games where maybe we do a 2v2. Maybe we do a 3v3 where maybe we're implementing a ball in a bin.
It's still, it's still in a game-like environment where we're not, as a coach, we're not trying to micromanage everything. We're not trying to force the athletes into predictable patterns, but it's about fun. It's about interacting with teammates. It's about solving, you know, the problem as a collective.
But then on the hard days, all right, that's where we can get into more of my— I call them pre-training 1v1s, where maybe we're focusing on deceleration. All right, there's going to be more of a specific focus. Again, I'm not forcing it, and I'm allowing some fluctuations.
I'm allowing for these movement problems to emerge and be authentic. But maybe it's a focus on deceleration and working on some concepts. from a deceleration or a stopping perspective in this 1v1 environment. So it's a little bit more directed, or maybe it's more where I want to get that speed opportunity where we're going to be focusing on acceleration patterns, or maybe that kind of that curve speed pattern.
So that would be something on more of a hard session or what I call, you know, a high CNS day. And so it's kind of getting away from everything being closed, pre-planned, robotic, into, okay, we're going to get these small-sided games. All right, we're going to start to create, we're going to give a feel.
So the movement problems are going to feel, behave, act very similar to what they're going to do in sport. But we're going to just, we're going to manage that information. All right, is it a 1v1? Is it small spacing? All right, are we going to focus on the cognitive side?
All right, especially with the youth. All right, and I guess you could say the same thing as you kind of climb the ranks into the professional level. I don't see this. I don't see a focus on decision-making, you know, where that's absolutely vital to sporting performance.
All right. And success on a basketball court is being able to make quick and effective decisions, being able to anticipate, being able to recognize different patterns and trends. And so performing these small-sided games, whether it's more in a gameplay scenario or whether it's more directed in problem-solving environments or my pre-training 1v1s, that's where, you know, a— you going against another human being is going to provide way more opportunities for learning compared to just going to a static cone or stepping inside a small box like the agility ladder.
And so it's just changing our view of, okay, and you see this, right? The sport coach will then, all right, everyone line up. And then they'll take their strength and conditioning coach. He's got a whistle and everyone just kind of does the same thing.
And then the strength and conditioning coach steps off, the basketball coach comes on, and we just, we gotta make this more of an, you know, it's gotta be more of a collective process and it's gotta be more of this unified approach.
So I wanna talk about that, Jamie, and that's, you just kind of hinted at what we see in environments all over the world. So what could a basketball coach be doing as you're leading your athletic performance coaches, as opposed to just sitting on the side or maybe going to high-five some players.
And then the same thing is that maybe, like in Italy when I was running practices, you were actually very active. You were making observations. You were looking at how the athletes were interacting within their affordance landscape. And then you were thinking, all right, maybe the next small-sided game after this might adapt it.
Is that correct?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it has to— so there has to be preparation, right? There has to be, and you'll see this, you'll see coaches have their meetings, you'll see, you know, briefs and debriefs, et cetera. I just don't, as a sport performance or as an athletic performance coach, I just think we need to be asking different questions.
I think we need to change our lens instead of just, like I said, having that physical lens, whether it's through the powerlifting world, whether it's through the Olympic weightlifting world. And again, I'm not saying there isn't value there because there is. But it's one tool.
There needs to be that communication before and after, but also during. And I think while that practice is happening, like, that's where having that communication, having that open mind and understanding, you know, that's where all these ideas come from. And the beauty of what I'm trying to share and you're trying to share is this can be adapted for any situation.
And so many of my ideas come from in the moment. Of seeing, you know, what is actually happening, you know, during my actual training sessions or during an actual sporting practice. And that's where you're gonna create these activities. That's where you're gonna start to get some of these ideas and, and be okay with, you know, kind of going off script, so to speak.
There's so many coaches where they'll have their printout, right? Or they'll have their perfect Excel spreadsheet. And it's like, nope, we are sticking to it instead of having objectives, having principles, having, you know, an overarching emphasis, but being okay with whatever the means are.
So whatever the exercises, the movements, the activities, the practice situations, being okay to make changes, you know, in the moment. And I think having that interaction and asking the right questions and having an open mind, you know, that's what it should be about.
And so that's where so many of the things, you know, because I am not in the player's shoes, right? You're not in the player's shoes and kind of seeing what, what are the behaviors, what are the patterns, what are emerging. And because you could have an idea and it could be completely, it could be an awful, it could be completely, you know, I don't want to use profanity, but it could just, it could have gone a completely different direction.
And so being all right where it's like, hey, and that's a big thing with this is being transparent. Right? Having that trust and having that communication with, with the athletes being like, all right, we need to go off script, but being okay with that, being okay with making changes in the moment.
So the big thing is just not kind of, all right, I'm the role as the athletic performance coach, you're the role as a sport, you know, as the basketball coach, and that's it. It's like, you better have an understanding, you better have an appreciation, and that's on both sides.
It is. So You know, undoubtedly a big part of athletic performance at all levels is the weight room. And we've covered some of the on-court stuff. And obviously we both very much believe that we can't just be doing athletic performance things in the weight room.
There's so much benefit to getting on court, getting outside on the grass, you know, using different surfaces and creating these small-sided game environments to allow players to, you know, expand their movement solutions, which will enable them to be more skillful in a basketball setting.
But obviously the weight room, it still exists and it's still useful. And it's— we, we speak about how we still both, you know, believe in weightlifting, and we're not saying not to do it. However, what we're saying is it's a problem when, you know, the majority of a, a basketball player's kind of athletic performance is, you know, heavy lifts.
And when we— we've spoken a lot about the ability of a player to become skillful is, you know, being able to navigate their affordance landscape and being able to act on attractive affordances. But if we're just doing these heavy weights, actually what we don't realize is we're actually making it harder for a player to maybe act on some of these affordances because, yes, they're gonna be stronger, but we're really making, you know, problems in terms of we're not reducing muscle slack, but we're increasing it.
So it's gonna be harder for them to actually accelerate, move quickly. Could you speak a little bit about that, maybe, Jamie?
Yeah, absolutely. So I still believe in resistance training. I believe— I think there's a ton of value, you know, in lifting weights. But like I said earlier, it's one tool. And so instead of looking at it as the only way to get stronger is by lifting weights, I use different terminology where it's force, right?
And so we have Force potential, but we also have force expression. Think of force potential is, is the force production strategy. So that's your traditional concentric base where you're, you're squatting, you're going down and up and you're using a barbell. But you also have force transmission.
So that ability to take that energy in and be able to use that, you know, in a more dynamic way. So think of like plyometrics, but then you also have force acceptance. Where it's teaching how to yield, how to take that energy in to then be able to produce or transmit it.
And so that's different. I call it, you know, depth drop. So you're basically standing on elevated surface, you step off, you stick the landing. There's so many different variations, so many different tools with that. But all I'm trying to get at is that there are so many different ways to get an athlete stronger.
But we need to look at, instead of looking at it from a strength training standpoint, let's look at it from a force development. Because you have the potential side like I just discussed, but you also have the force expression. And that's where we need to be able to display force production.
All right? But we need to do it in a skillful way where we need to appreciate time constraints. We need to appreciate that we, we do not have an unlimited amount of time. Let's say like a powerlifter, right? Where they have time to go down and go up as long as they perform a squat and they break parallel or go to parallel.
And they stand up, there is no time limit. All right? And so, but in basketball or in any type of team sport, there are time constraints. There are limitations where you don't. All right? You need to have that ability or you need to have that opportunity to be able to whatever.
First step, you know, having effectiveness with your first step, being able to have that, you know, vertical output, being able to move laterally. Whatever. There's so many different situations, but instead of looking at it from a strength training perspective, let's look at it from force development because then that's gonna open up options for you, you know, from a force potential, which is still important cuz we still need to have access to these physical tools, but we need to tap into the force expression, which you will see small-sided games.
You will see that in how I use my medicine ball throws, how I use some of these plyometric environments, but it's looking at it from a force development standpoint, which is more practical than just looking at it from a strength training perspective.
Absolutely. I think the last part of this is the practical application of how you're actually doing this. And I think what I loved is just how creative you were in the weight room, applying the concept of repetition without repetition, just as I talk about from a basketball perspective.
You're doing that in the weight room too. And, you know, from what I saw, it could be, you know, how you— what you did with our guys, getting them in different stances, changing grip positions, different velocities, uh, different shapes, I think, as you call it.
Could you speak a little bit more about that, please, Jamie?
Yeah, so this idea of rep without rep, this is a dynamical systems theory. We are, you know, systems upon systems, right? The human body is complex, all right? We are creative adaptive organisms. And so looking at the weight room as, again, instead, like we talked about with the dynamic warmup, weight room is also an opportunity for learning, right?
And it's not just learning from a technical aspect of becoming a better squatter, but I look at the weight room as just, again, putting more tools. Because one thing I notice in today's landscape where early specialization, where kids are playing one sport Year-round, there's no in-season or off-season.
It's just go, go, go, go, go. Individuals are very comfortable with the same 2, 3 movement solutions. They're very comfortable creating the same shapes, the same techniques. And so this idea of rep without rep is allowing and encouraging, right, the athlete to explore different positions, which I call shapes, different force vectors.
So how they're interacting with the ground. Different velocities, you know, whether it's from a concentric standing up standpoint, whether it's from an eccentric or a yielding where they have to come down, whether it's the length of an isometric where they're holding specific positions and they're playing around with the location of that position or the duration of that position.
But the big thing here, it isn't random, right? So if I have a younger athlete, maybe we real simple, maybe I give them 3 options. Maybe they're doing a goblet squat pattern. Or maybe they're doing a deadlift pattern, but instead of it just having them do it a one perfect way, I teach them some basic concepts like creating a flat back shape or appreciating the tripod and keeping a flat foot on the ground.
But I might have them do 3 different stances. I might have them every rep as they're performing, you know, this goblet squat pattern. I might have them change their stance, change their base of support where they're learning. It's a new problem each rep.
But it's not just random. It's not just, okay, do whatever you want to do. I'm having them go wide, medium, narrow, and they have a new problem each time to try to solve with this goblet squat pattern. But then we can take this to a higher level athlete, right?
And so maybe I take— I have an individual performing a bench press where we're focusing on isometric positions where they need to hold on during their warmup sets where the weight isn't super heavy, so it's submaximal. But they're, as they're warming up, or I call them our prep sets, each rep they need to hold that isometric at a different position where they need to be able to generate enough force to again appreciate some principles and concepts with the bench press pattern.
And they have to generate enough force to respect those. But instead of telling them, okay, you can only pause on your chest, all right, you have the full up, down, and anywhere in between to kind of pause. So those are real basic examples.
I try to share a lot of these rep without rep ideas, whether it's with our youngest level, which I call our fundamentals level, or, you know, whether it's with our highest level or peak group, it's learning and it's in it again. It's not random.
It is, there is strategy behind it and it's very useful. And again, if we're looking at it from giving them more tools instead of them just trying to Master the squat pattern or master the bench press pattern. We want them to be able to take these tools or take these skills in the weight room and be able to apply that, you know, in a more skillful manner.
And so that's where the rep without rep is such a great idea. And again, it's not like I do this every time. There's a time and place for everything, but it's a great way again to allow the individual to take ownership. All right, to create new problems, to learn how to solve those problems, and then be able to take that and then be able to apply the same thing in a more skillful manner.
And that's where I see rep without rep as such a beneficial tool for the athletic performance world, because that's when we can start again to expand this movement toolbox.
So Jamie, I think one of the biggest things we hear is how athletic performance is so important for Quote unquote injury prevention, but that's probably a misnomer because we can't prevent injuries. But we both believe that through a CLA, we can reduce them.
And I think a lot of people, maybe when they first hear about what we're doing, they think, oh well, we're increasing the risk to the athletes because they're playing live more in you know these environments is probably more load. But we both believe that obviously, if you're doing this right and you're doing this in in the most effective dosages, that this can actually have the opposite effect because we're actually exposing players to what they're going to see in the game.
So, you know, do you think that there are big implications, injury reduction, using these ideas and applying a repetition without repetition approach as opposed to repetition after repetition as we see right now within the basketball world?
Yes, and I think that that's what the— one of the biggest changes You know, whatever, over the last 5 to 10 years, when I first got into the industry, variability was bad and there was always some sort of negativity, you know, placed on variability.
But that's not the case and that's not what I'm seeing. Variability helps with injury-reducing adaptability. And so you're allowing the different systems to work together like we're talking about as from a coaching and organizational staff. It's the same thing with our body. And we're allowing all of these different systems to work together to help take on the stressors of our small-sided games, the stressors of the weight room, the stressors of the academic life, the stressors, you name it.
But we're using all of these systems to work together instead of in isolation. And then the other big thing Is that the variability variability has always I want to be careful with how I say this, Alex. It's just it's always been it's always been when you do too much of different things, it's always especially in the strength conditioning world, it always leads to because I want to be very careful when we talk about these ideas.
The athletic performance world, they're so close to tradition. They're so close to all these ideas, and all we're trying to do is to show there's just another way to do it. And the big thing with this, with the variability, is that it's all like you said, it's about the dosage, right?
And so I follow a very, very low volume approach. And so that might sound very, very foreign to, you know, the, the traditional coach, but there might be situations where the athlete has one set. The athlete has one rep where we have this idea of quality versus quantity, this idea of minimal effective dose, which yes, because we have all these different aspects, all right, it's very, very difficult to measure everything.
But I monitor, I monitor moods, I monitor, we have, you know, subjective and objective data that we use to kind of monitor session to session. But I'm always looking To create, you know, when we're looking from a workload standpoint, I want to do the least amount of work to elicit a positive adaptation.
You know, whether that's jumping higher, whether that's solving a 1v1 problem in a different manner, the minimal effective dose is, is something that when we're doing all these different environments, this isn't something where, you know, we're spending 3 hours doing it. They honestly might be spending 4 to 6 minutes.
They might have one opportunity, they might have one top work set, whatever it may be. So it's just variability, all right, is so important, you know, from an injury-reducing standpoint, but then also appreciating the workload, the volumes, all right? And kind of having this minimal effective dose or quality over quantity.
It's been such a huge aspect to applying these ideas.
Great stuff. Coaches, you know, to really look at how everything that Jamie and I have spoken about today can be brought to life, well, head to transformingbasketball.com and you'll see one of our workshops. It's right there. And, you know, we've got just numerous examples of how we're applying a constraints-led approach, not just, you know, on the court, but also in athletic performance.
And, you know, transcending that, showing actually how we're integrating it. And I think that's one of the biggest messages. It's not just the small-sided games.
Yeah.
which of course are great alone, but it's talking about the methodology behind it, why we are doing these things, and critically, how we're actually integrating and how we're bouncing off each other in both fields. So Jamie, thanks again for joining the podcast, and obviously really excited to keep doing more through both our companies, the Year of Strength and Transforming Basketball.
Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the opportunity, and I'm excited to see what the future has for us.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.
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