FEED THE CATS - How to Train Smarter with Tony Holler

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.

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If you're ready to Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Delighted to be joined today by Tony Holler. Tony and I met 2 summers ago. We were introduced by our mutual friend, Jamie Monroe, one of the leaders in the lacrosse world. Tony and I, we ended up having a fantastic American breakfast just outside Chicago.

And the work Tony does is incredibly interesting, shares a lot of parallels of what we're doing at Transforming Basketball, and it's just a pleasure to have him on the podcast today. So Tony, a big welcome.

Yeah, it's kind of strange that the basketball world and the track and field world and the lacrosse world all got together and kind of had breakfast together.

It's the way it goes, hey? And I think it's really funny because the 3 of us, you know, yourself, myself, and Jamie, I think we're all pioneering a very different approach. And that's what we're going to get into. We're going to look at the really interesting work you've done over the last several years with Feed the Cats, et cetera.

But I wanted to start with this because offline a moment ago, Tony, we were talking about how a lot of traditional things are done in the whole sporting world and coaches are simply doing things in practice that are not helping their teams to win.

And this goes to any sport. Could you speak a little bit to that and just some of the things you've observed as an industry leader over the last decade or so?

What I've observed, and I've read this before, is that change is seldom, if ever, top-down. That it usually is bottom-up, whether it's political or coaching or education. And what happens is the leaders of industry, whether it's basketball, NBA, or college track and field, they hire assistant coaches who need to be vertically aligned Which means they all have to be on the same page, and they all have to buy in and believe in the program.

So basically, you have this year after year after year brainwashing of young talent who basically is they're just parroting the head coach. And so what happens is that what we were doing 50 years ago not only are we repeating the problems and the bad things that we do?

But in my opinion, maybe we've even gotten worse because we're reading from some ancient script that should have been thrown out a long time ago.

That's so well put. It's fascinating because obviously, yes, you're in track and field, but the work you've done, you've actually done a lot of work in multiple sports and all of it applies to basketball. And I think what I wanted to start at is maybe the the lowest hanging fruit, which is conditioning.

And it's unfortunately something we see, still see a lot in basketball, especially early season, where coaches, you know, will really run their teams into the ground and do a lot of conditioning drills which actually have no relevance to basketball. And obviously your approach is the opposite to that.

And I think, could you touch on, you know, why some of these practices are so harmful and actually not conducive to good player development?

Well, I say that everything I talk about seems to be counterintuitive. I understand Steph Curry, you know, he, he runs 2.7 miles in every game. And so intuitively you would think we need to run him maybe 3 miles a day or 6 miles a day even in the offseason.

But we don't want basketball players to resemble marathon runners. We want them to be athletic. And conditioning, I'm talking about traditional conditioning, miserable fatigue-seeking, highly aerobic stuff, detrains athleticism. And I always want to define athleticism. That's sprint fast, lift heavy, jump high, jump far, and bounce.

And if, if we start running 6 miles a day, we will lose those qualities. And so people say, well, how, how can he play 34 minutes in a game without doing all this conditioning? And what I have found is that good athletes really don't tire very quickly, that you want to be athletic and fresh and rested and recovered, and that tired is the enemy.

Always, always, always. I've actually witnessed basketball practices that began with conditioning, thinking that somehow that doing fundamentals in a fatigued state would help them in the 4th quarter. And I don't know if there's anything dumber in the world than pre-fatiguing practice. And then I go back, my dad was a basketball coach, and the one thing that he really got right was they did not shoot free throws tired.

They learn skills when fresh, and that's because the brain does not learn when it's sluggish. It does not learn when it's jet-lagged. It does not learn when it's tired. So truly, you know, Feed the Cats program, you do away with all traditional conditioning and you prioritize athleticism and you do things in practice that wins games.

Yeah, that's it. And I think for me, Tony, the biggest thing which I've taken from you over the last 2 years, and I've been saying it a lot ever since that breakfast, is tired is the enemy. That's a slogan I've been using a lot because it's still something the basketball world doesn't understand.

I mean, I want to come back to Feed the Cats in a moment. I'm going to go into the specifics of what it actually is and your ideas there. But let's take this in the context, because a lot of NCAA coaches, for instance, would still be doing mile runs and all of that stuff.

But I'd say even now in the present day in Europe European basketball, where, you know, professional basketball is the highest level outside the NBA, it's common to still see coaches doing 2 practices a day. So very common. And it's really surprising with all the advancements and everything we know in sports science.

So why is that actually a problem? And, and what can we do to maybe get coaches understanding the importance of this message?

Yeah, my mind goes back to track and field. One of the most aggressive things in track and field are the hurdles. And if we have a hurdler that had a tough workout in the morning or the day before, he is fatigued, he went through a fatiguing warmup, he has to take off after 8 steps to clear the first hurdle.

And it's not easy. He also needs to be able to take off 7 feet before the first hurdle. That's like 2 meters. So in order to cover 2 meters in the air, you have to be at a very high speed. Well, if there's anything that is causing you to have poor fundamentals or not be fast to that first hurdle, your only other option is to maybe take 9 steps to the first hurdle, which will just get you beat every single time.

So when you're learning a skill like shooting, passing, dribbling, playing defense, all those things need to be done as fresh as possible. And one of the things I think that basketball coaches get wrong, and my father got it wrong, was that he said that practices need to be so hard that the games become easy.

And so I am counterintuitive. I say the opposite. If every traditional coach knows that the day after a game, you probably should give the guys a day off, but what happens if the 4 practices before that game were harder than the game itself and you didn't give them time off?

That's an endless spiral towards fatigue and detraining athleticism. And so I'm a huge believer in a 4-day work week. I'm a huge believer, of course, in no conditioning. I, I'm a huge believer that anytime we reduce practice time, we make practice better.

Yeah.

That quality will automatically go up. I still— it was 50 years ago, but I can still remember as a player, coasting in the first half of practice and being tired in the second half because practice was so brutal. I mean, practice was 3 times the volume of a game.

And I think that practice volumes need to never exceed 50% to 60% of game volume.

That's great. Thanks for sharing that, Tony. I think it's really interesting because obviously a lot of the stuff, when we first spoke about this, it really resonated because obviously everything I'm doing, looking at how we can practice with decisions using the constraints-led approach, and it just aligns perfectly because it's You know, within the practice, it doesn't mean that we can't have a really efficient, effective practice, but it's less is more.

And it's a lot of times, I mean, working at different levels, even last year with Paris Basketball, we were playing in the Eurocup, second highest level of European basketball. Sometimes we would do practice, it would be like an hour or an hour 10, and it's if you get everything in that you need and you've done it, you don't need to keep doing more.

And that's why it makes so much sense. This goes into the next question, and I think this is the perfect segment to get specifically into Feed the Cats. And I mean, this is a multi-part question, but I think the first thing is, what actually is Feed the Cats for the listeners listening to this?

And secondly, how did you come up with it? Because I love the whole idea. Even the name itself is, is so catchy.

Well, what it is, cats are athletes. I used to say they're fast twitch, talented athletes. that are often perceived as being lazy. Kind of the opposite of, you know, the typical coach was never a cat. The typical coach was a try-hard grinder, come early, stay late, love their coach.

He was a try-hard guy that dove on the floor for loose balls, but was never as good as the really talented players. And that's why he developed coach-like skills. So I, I think that's how it started for me, is that I wanted to get cats to want to run track and field.

And the best way to do that was to not put a leash on them and run them mileage. The best way to do that is to do cat-like things, which is sprint fast in 5 seconds or less, do explosive things, accept the laziness of great athletes, which is Basically the idea that cats sleep 20 hours a day, but at a, a flip of a switch, they become an assassin.

And so I've evolved a little bit though, that I think we need to take the dogs of the world, the try-hard people, and make them more cat-like. That instead of just running the dog's mileage and, you know, just fatiguing them, let's start treating them more like a cat.

Let's start doing shorter bursts of high intensity. And keep them from getting tired. So the reason I came up with the whole idea of FEED is I heard a guy speak one time and said that track and field teams are unique. You know, they got the big throwers, they got the distance runners, but then they got the cats.

The cats are the sprinters. And something just went off in my head. Like, I want to feed those cats. It was never meant to be a brand, but I think there's something cool about the word FEED. It's like, as a coach, I want to nourish my athletes.

I want to help them. And it's just a totally different way to think than like when I was a young basketball coach in my 20s, I was an authoritarian. I said dumb things like practices are not meant for your enjoyment, that this is a business.

We're here to win. I'm not here to make practice fun. And now I say, That we are really good at things we love. And so I'm going to make practice the best part of a kid's day. And as soon as you start thinking like that, your players will like you more.

You will get more out of them. We are— you say, well, you're not making them tough. You're not making them tough. And love makes us tough. We are willing to suffer for things we love. And if your players love practice, they will go crazy for you.

And it's just a different way to think, and it just kind of works.

Tony, that's so, so good, and it, it really resonates with everything we're talking about here at Transforming. And I think it's, it's not easy though, because it's this idea in transformational coaching, everything you're just speaking about, it is so different. And I think one of the questions we get the most from coaches is, how could I explain this to a more traditional coach?

Maybe I'm the assistant coach And I believe in all of this, but the head coach is, you know, still very much grind, grind, grind, like all this fake toughness, because that's what I think it is. And it's difficult, right? Because it is so different.

I don't know if you've got any advice because you've spoken with way more coaches than me. You've been doing this for a long time now, and you've been doing this in lots of different settings. So I think you'd have some good words of wisdom here.

One way is to bring me in. Because I'm a professional arguer on this subject. I'm not religious, but people say I'm like an evangelical preacher at a tent revival. And in a way I am, because I'm trying to convert people. I'm trying— and as you know, tradition is a religion.

I mean, it is. People say, oh, well, it's not really the Bible. No, tradition is a religion. We respect our elders by buying into tradition. And we go back to that vertical alignment thing. Assistants don't change head coaches' minds. I mean, they seldom, if ever, do.

It's— I wish it was the case, but a head coach really does not want to be challenged. They say they do, and, and I say I do, but I'm sensitive just like everybody else. If somebody challenges me, my first reaction is to push back.

But I think that One of the things that changed me was having my own sons go through sports and seeing the joy of sports stolen from them, seeing them broken by authoritarian coaches. I say often that I wish coaches could have their own kids go through their program.

Maybe it would change the way they perceive their athletes. But the reason why you ask is because it's almost impossible. to change the tradition of coaching. It is— I say that even though what I propose gives every coach a competitive advantage, we will never be the majority, ever.

But as Mark Twain says, you know, if you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect, because obviously the majority is wrong so often.

Yeah.

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This is such compelling stuff, Tony. So let's dive into this 4-day work week because I think basketball coaches might be wondering how they could apply this, and I think they can regardless of their level. So could you speak a little bit more about that and what it looks like, even if it's in a track and field context, because it's similar?

Well, we— last year, my tracks— I'm a high school track coach and we have a 19-week season. And including competitions, I color code workouts where yellow are caution, don't burn the steak. Red are, we're gonna burn the steak a little bit, and so we're gonna take the next day off.

By the way, games are red.

Yeah.

I'm not so sure that any basketball practice should ever be red. I'm not sure of that.

Sure.

But if you do go red, you better go green the next day. So it's, it's yellow caution, red danger. Green, off. So in my 19 weeks, every week had 3 green days. That means, that means days where we did not go to practice or a meet, where people literally went home and slept.

And what happens is that kids start looking forward. They miss practice instead of this 7-day grind where they have to say, wake up and grind, rise and grind, you know, like worship the grind type of crap that we feed them.

Yeah.

They almost like have the Stockholm syndrome, you know, like, like we're the coaches or the captors and they're the captives and they start liking their coach because that's just what people do. But man, if when kids have 2 days off, they come back and practice like crazy.

And the great thing about my sport, unlike basketball, is that it's data-driven. I have times, I have jump numbers. We perform in practice, which is unique. Most time you practice in practice. We perform. The way we perform is by timing sprints basically, or measuring how high you jump, how far you jump.

And I think that training is testing and testing is training. And so I have the numbers that prove that doing less produces more, that a 4-day work week creates faster times. And higher jumpers and farther jumpers. And it's like, of course it does.

To me, it's like we should have known this. This was in front of us all along, and we knew this deep down, but somehow we just kept on, you know, pushing kids to their boundaries, past their boundaries, all that crap. And a lot of it's in the name of masculinity and toughness, which I think is another problem in, in sports.

Yeah.

I see that. And what I'm thinking of, Tony, is this might actually make coaches better, because I think maybe one of the reasons why basketball is so traditional is because coaches have so much time in practice that they just get used to doing the same old drills, and that's literally all they know.

Whereas maybe if you had like 3, 4 practices a week, like even in an elite academy, I'm thinking I could easily get everything we needed to do in 4 practices a week. And obviously some of those, like, 2 of those would be like lower intensity.

And it's, I think if you're really specific and you have that constraint, maybe it will force you to actually prioritize and create different activities. So I don't know if you've had that experience just in all the coach education you've done.

Yeah, 100%. You know, I, I look at American football and I think that so many coaches say, okay, we're going to practice 2 and a half hours, which is way too long. And then they start filling those 2 and a half hours. And it's very similar to a— I, I was a chemistry teacher for 38 years and we had 55-minute classes.

Well, in education, you have to fill that 55 minutes. And as soon as you start filling, you start adding filler.

Mm-hmm.

You start adding things that do not pass the test that Bobby Knight told me a long time ago. Which every single thing we do in practice needs to be analyzed and put under the filter of, does this help us to win games? Back in the '60s, I don't know if they still do it, my dad would do something called the star drill where 5 guys made like a star and there's a line behind each person and they'd— each guy would catch and pass and the final guy would shoot a layup and then begin all over

again. And it was— it looked kind of nifty, it filled time, but it did absolutely nothing to win games. So we have all this crap, you know, the great basketball coaches have 100 drills and probably 98 of them are worthless.

Completely agree. It's, it's completely accurate. So do you ever get problems, Tony, with athletes who— because this is part of the problem, this grind culture which you mentioned, and you You know, all this social media rubbish. So for instance, one of my best players last year in Italy at my academy, he— we actually did this, and this was when I was influenced with you.

We had like the— we called it the low, moderate, high intensity. So same as what you just described a few moments ago. And then, but then the problem I had is this, this player always wanted to get in the gym on off days and all of this, being like, oh, if I'm not working, someone else is getting better.

And it was actually quite difficult.

Yeah.

to get this message across as to why we're doing this and why it's going to make them better. And I, I always say, like, you get better doing nothing. But I don't know if, if you'd have any advice there for, for the coaches listening to this.

Yeah, I, I, I'm big on championship sleep, which is 9 hours a night, which— talk about things being hard— that's the hardest thing a young person will ever do, ever. That's hard work. And I tell my athletes, there's only The sleep's the only time when we heal and the only time when we grow.

And if you're not healing and growing, you're not a very good athlete. And I think that it's really hard in today's world when good athletes buy into the grind. And I think it's important to understand why they do. And that's because we've been taught ever since we were born that the team that wins worked twice as hard as the team that lost.

So the team that lost would work twice as hard the next week and lose again. And then they'd work 4 times as hard. It was the starting of a losing streak. It always, the default thing was we got outworked and that ain't going to happen again.

Well, one of the things that great athletes do is that they want to claim that all of their success came from their hard work. So they create mythological characters out of themselves. I remote train an elite soccer player from Sweden, and he started watching Kobe Bryant videos about, you know, the Mamba mentality and waking up at, in the middle of the night to practice.

And, you know, he barely had time to eat and that he worked 10 times harder than any other NBA player. And so this guy started doing that with soccer and he got slower and eventually he got broken, literally broken physically. Because he bought into the mythology of success.

And what we need to do is somehow convince kids that the opposite is true, that smart work is the key. And, and I think the best way to teach these kids, man, if you have data, data is so important, like time.

Yeah.

How high are you jumping? If you're slow and can't jump, you're not healthy. So you need to always know how fast you are and how explosive you are. But I think we learn best from stories, that all great coaches are master storytellers. You know, like they talk about something that's true, but they say it in a story-like way.

And I think we humans really connect to that.

I definitely see that. And I think it's, that's where it's interesting where the numbers, it's like the empirical evidence, it's really useful. And, you know, we believe in a lot of that, but then it's, especially with players, I think it's the ability to tell that story.

Like you said, that's what resonates. That's what they respect in many instances. So kind of on this topic of rest, something I see a lot, and it's in both Europe and the States, is basketball has become a year-round sport. So even a decade ago, I don't think we had that where kids would play more multi-sports.

And that's, I think, the biggest advantage of the American sporting system compared to Europe. But now I think it's negated a little bit because of things like AAU. And then in Europe, the club model, it often means that it's year-round because then in the summers they end up doing national teams and there's not much rest.

And I think it can be quite dangerous. A lot of the work I'm doing here in London, Tony, is with just the London Lions Academy. And we have kids from like 11 to 18, and we're looking at trying to completely reframe what is considered normal in the industry.

So even things like kids doing different sports, like 1 or 2 months off in the summer. What would your advice be for coaches who have, you know, good access to their players in terms of maybe being wary of, you know, keeping the same schedule the whole year round and just doing basketball?

I think that time off and time outdoors, I think that's huge in basketball. I think that indoor living creates health problems. Mental and physical health problems. And basketball's an indoor sport now. It didn't used to be. I mean, the summers, the playgrounds were hot, sweaty, sunny, all-day-long things.

And I think that was so good. But to be indoors and to play basketball 12 months a year is— will break you mentally or physically or both. And you're right, basketball players like myself benefited from playing quarterback in football and And then running track in the spring and playing baseball because they were different skills.

And I think we were able to become a more rounded athlete. And one of the things I like to tell coaches is that this may hurt your feelings, but your sport does not create a better athlete. Now, your sport will— in basketball, let's say, yeah, you'd be a better shooter, dribbler.

But when I'm talking about an athlete, I go back to that thing: sprint fast, lift heavy, jump high, jump far, bounce. That even if basketball was a kids-only sport, you must separate athletic training from the game. Let the game train the game. I say you need to be general in the weight room, extreme in speed training, and then specific in practice.

That specific in practice, I think, is so important. That means stop conditioning, only do stuff that helps you win games, work on the fundamentals of shooting, those things. But away from the game, stop reverse engineering the game. Instead, train kind of like a sprinter in track who also long jumps and triple jumps and who also hurdles.

I think that track might be the only sport that, done right, would create a better athlete. But I go back to that thing. It's about those qualities, those qualities of movement that are so essential to the game. And of course, as you know, a lot of coaches say, yeah, we do work away from basketball.

But then when you look at it, it's all like aerobic conditioning and the hard stuff. Exactly. Repeat sprints are not sprinting. Sprinting is sprinting as fast as you can, being timed 5 seconds, whatever, taking 5 minutes off and doing it again. That is sprint training and nobody does it.

Instead, their coaches are too busy doing like the punishments and All these runs to losing just, just wastes time. That's all it does.

It wastes time and detrains athleticism. I mean, not only does your sport, if you do it a traditional way, not only does your sport fail to create a better athlete, it probably detrains that athlete, which is so scary. You're like, what? They can't jump as high?

They can't sprint as fast? They get weaker physically? I think that's what happens.

Agree. And I see it too, even with all the long practices. Like, for me, a pro team should never be practicing more than 90 minutes. I think it would be ludicrous. And we see it in practice. Like, a lot of practices in Europe will be 2, 2 and a half hours.

College will be 3 or more hours. And it's— I just can't believe in 2024 we're still seeing that.

And I would say not only 90 minutes, but there needs to be tons of downtime.

Absolutely. Yep.

I call it my wave theory. We live a wave theory. Sleep, awake, sleep, awake. There needs to be a wave theory in practice planning where you go high, low, high, low. And inside those high practices, there needs to be like a halftime. There needs to be— you cannot ever, as you know, every coach wants to be high the entire week, the entire practice.

And all there is is that There's going to be a decline because you can't be high all the time. So you must constantly have this wave-like thing in practice where every 5 minutes of intensity is followed by a drink and some coaching them up, stuff like that.

And then go into another 5 minutes of intensity. And you say, well, games are continuous though. No, they aren't. Basketball games are, you know, like Steph Curry plays 34 minutes. in a 2.5-hour game. It is not continuous.

It's so true. You just got me thinking about this, Tony. I think what happens a lot is coaches go in, especially professionally, and they think they're going to do a low practice, and it ends up completely not being low. Because even if they're doing things maybe without defense, even if there's no defense, they're doing the load and just the amount of time that it ends up actually being moderate.

Would you— would you see that?

Yeah. Yes. And coaches are just— I mean, I've been that guy where if my guys weren't constantly moving for a 2-hour practice or a 3-hour practice or whatever, if they weren't constantly moving and there was downtime, it's like, oh my God, if somebody walked in right now, they would think less of me because my guys are all standing around.

But that creates busywork and fatigue. And you never— we don't win games by doing moderate prep. We win games by practicing at a high level, and you can't practice at a high level for 3 consecutive hours twice a day.

It's impossible. I'd say even, even one 3-hour practice, I just— it's just why? Like 90 minutes, boom, you're good.

Yeah.

Yep. So true. So Tony, what is the best way for coaches listening to this to check out some of the work you've done? And learn more?

I'm on Twitter. You can look up my name.

We'll include that in the show notes and obviously on the— Yeah.

Yeah.

And then my— I have 2 sons that are coaches and my non-coaching son runs my everything except for my Twitter. So I have a huge presence on YouTube now and a lot of free videos. I have courses on CoachTube, which is a really good, neat thing.

And then I'm on Insta. Through my son Troy as well. And so, I mean, if you, if you just type in my name, I'm probably the only guy that publishes his cell phone number. You know, being a retired chemistry teacher, I have time to answer calls and do stuff like that.

Amazing. Tony, big thanks. I mean, I think this was an excellent episode, really just practical and just excellent practical common sense messages, which I think coaches of any sport, especially basketball, need to hear. So big thanks.

Well, it's been fun and, uh, good luck in Portland.

Thank you, Tony.

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