Inside the Atlanta Hawks: Zay West & CLA Ideas in the NBA

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Hello and welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's episode, we have Zay West. Zay is an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Atlanta Hawks, bringing a global perspective to athlete development. Before joining the Hawks in the '23-'24 season, he spent 3 years leading performance training at NBA Academy Africa in Senegal.

His work focuses on maximizing player performance through innovative and evidence-based methods. Zay, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

So Zay, I'm curious, what made you want to use evidence-based ideas? How did you come across the CLA?

This came about in 2018. I was interning at Cresci Sports Performance in Massachusetts. We were working with a lot of guys on change of direction and speed and agility. And I began asking myself, what other elements of athleticism are we kind of leaving on the table?

How do we teach athletes how to perceive and understand timing, spacing, pattern recognition? And around this time, I was introduced to Jamie Smith from the U of Strength. Because I was already in Massachusetts interning at Cressy, on my off days, I would just go to Jamie's facility and I would watch him work with kids as young as 5 years old, all the way up to elite-level athletes.

And we would have conversations that centered around the questions that I was having. He introduced me to dynamic systems theory, skill acquisition, constraints-led approach. And he became kind of a mentor for me in this space for a few years to come. And after I finished my internships, I Started working in the private sector and I started applying these ideas with a lot of athletes I was working with.

And at the time they were more middle school, high school age lacrosse players. But I wanted to figure out how could I get these athletes to be more skilled and try to give them a competitive advantage when they went out and played and make the sessions more fun.

From that first conversation you had, or those first few conversations with Jamie, is there anything you remember taking and applying straight away into your practice environments?

I liked how he gave room for exploration and autonomy. The first session I watched him coach was with 5-year-old kids, and the session wasn't about lining them up and getting them to be compliant and follow orders. It was, how are you going to be a guide and like an architect of the space to facilitate learning?

And as long as they are engaged, they're thinking, they're making decisions, they're having fun. Shape the session organically. It doesn't necessarily have to follow a linear approach of drill A to drill B. The first thing that I applied was I could incorporate this in some of the warmups that I do with clients in the private sector.

You don't have to follow 10 warmup exercises. How about we take one position like a bear crawl and make a game out of it and see where things progress from there? I would allow that to flow into my sessions. That was the first thing I started to apply.

And as I got more confident, I I was able to scale that to other things within the weight room, within the warmups, and make our speed and agility sessions a bit more competitive. And I was starting to see results from parents and from players when they would come back and tell me how things were translated for them.

Oh, that's amazing. You spoke about competitiveness and making it a game in the warmups. I think that's great, but I'm curious if you were to do it with one person or one player, one athlete, how would you— because, and the reason I ask this is like sometimes I'll be in the gym just working out.

And I'm like, how can I have a fun warm-up and kind of like make— so for example, something I'll do is like I'll drop a basketball and then I'll try and go underneath it right before it hits the floor twice, basically. So that's kind of like my way to add some variability to like movement laterally.

But how would you go about doing that?

I looked at it as if I'm going to be like an architect of the environment and help facilitate learning, I also need to be involved in it. It can't be me just observing the session. I need to be able to be involved in it and then step away to observe.

So some of my warmups, I was right there with the athletes, especially if it was a 1-on-0 session. Maybe we were doing some reactive sprinting drills and some of the constraints were, how are we going to start? Where am I going to stand?

Who's chasing? Who's leading? And I did every rep with them to try to make sure that they understood what I wanted to coach and so that they could feel the rep as well. If I were in it, then I was able to understand how I needed to coach it better the next time.

No, I love that. So moving on, how do you balance the structure and the variability in the weight room and, you know, aligning your sessions so that it has the CLA in it? So for example, adding instability and unpredictability into lifting sessions where maybe you want players to have the correct form or technique so they don't risk injury.

How do you kind of balance, you know, making sure that athletes, if they're in the weight room lifting heavy, have variability? Or do you, or do you just lower the weight? Like, how do you, how do you do all that?

I think in today's age, we reap the benefit of like so many of these athletes come in having been exposed to elite-level training already with privatized trainers, colleges, private schools, what have you. And so a lot of the basics A lot of these athletes already know, and it makes coaching a bit more expedited in my experience.

What I try to do is show them these are the ideal shapes I'd like you to hit. These are the principles about this movement. It's less about a perfect technique or what a perfect repetition looks like. This is the intent. This is the focus.

And then I want to step back and see how they execute it. Once I feel like they're pretty competent in it, I can coach them to say, hey, I would like You know, on this next set of 5 reps, I want every rep to look different, or I want you to play with the speed and find out what feels comfortable.

I want you to alter your stance, or, hey, we don't necessarily have to be married to doing each rep with your feet parallel. Try them wide, try a narrow stance, try split stance, maybe a split jerk on the landmine press. And then we would kind of go through that exploration together.

Hey, what did you notice? How does this apply to some of the other things that we've been trying to work on? How well does this fit what our goals are? And then sometimes I would have them be creative just for the sake of being creative, just to make it fun.

These things are long seasons, lots of travel, and a lot of times we're doing the same exercises in different cities and different hotels. So when you can add variability to it, it allows athletes to stay a bit more engaged. But I would say the other thing too, the other thing about structure is the NBA tends to be very structured because you have game days, non-game days, practice days, travel days.

And so the structure often dictates the level of influence you could have over a session. For example, certain athletes like doing this, the same exact routine every game day. But within that routine, once you establish the relationship with the player, you could figure out where to implement different things that incorporate more variability.

Maybe an athlete likes to do some single leg balance catching before the end of their activation. And that could be something that's very structured, but you could incorporate variability of what objects are they catching? How hard are you throwing them? From what distance are you throwing them at?

How many catches will you do? How many can you get in a row? Are you going to do them with your ankle braces on or off? And so there's different constraints you could add. Are you standing on a slack block versus an Airex pad?

And all of those things provide different contexts and different constraints that an athlete has to adapt to. So We've been able to have the two coexist with examples like that.

That's amazing. Just hearing you talk about, you know, different distances, throwing different objects of different weights, just kind of like helps me get an idea of exactly how you're helping these athletes and how you're training, how you're adding variability to those sessions. So my next question is return to play progressions.

How do you return designing return to play progressions? That go just beyond like hitting physical benchmarks. So you also want to reconnect perceptual action coupling and decision-making demands of basketball. So it's like, it's one thing for a player, you know, if they twist an ankle, you know, it's one thing for them to come back and they can run in a straight line or they can maybe run around the 3-point line.

But it's another thing that they're having to change directions, you know, off a catch, off a dribble. And then maybe they lose the ball and they got to turn around and sprint back on defense. So how do you balance all of that with the return to play progressions?

The first thing I think about, I try to begin with the end in mind. Who does this player need to be as a basketball player? By the time that they return, what's the role that they're coming back to? What does success look like for this person if everything goes well?

Oftentimes what that looks like is, let's see if we can get some feedback from someone in the front office, someone on the coaching staff, maybe it's their player development coach that they work closely with. And let me hear the things that you want them to focus on.

Let me hear what the North Star is for this player. And then when we're able to think holistically, right, these are the skills that they want them to exhibit. So let's figure out the physical things that underpin that and work backwards from it.

So we know our starting point. We know the things that we have to assess and test. And then along this continuum of going from a very controlled, very controlled, like objective return to play standpoint and building it out to more of a chaotic representative game-like environment.

But the thing that we always want to keep in mind is like they're athletes at the end of the day. And so within the CLA model of like, how do you apply constraints so that they're able to stay included in the sport as much as possible?

How do you design the environment where they could still train in a representative setting, even if they can't necessarily move or can't necessarily run and allow that to scale over time. Maybe that is they're doing stationary passing, but there is defense involved or there's people occluding their vision spaces so that it's more representative than just passing on air.

Begin with the end in mind, work backwards. The other thing I think about is like a 3-tiered model of what's their current injury? What other injuries do we need to be aware of if Our program isn't super robust. And the third thing is, how do we want to make sure that they're continuing to improve?

So from a perception-action coupling standpoint, from a conditioning to a strength-power standpoint, I look at all of those factors and then design a plan, try to include other stakeholders within that, like a player development coach, a video coordinator, a physiotherapist. And that way you're able to get different feedback and then present that to the athlete of Hey, here's how we're going to scale your return to play over the next X amount of weeks so that you can come back not just having the physical skills, but they've been incorporated and ingrained with the skill that you

need to exhibit on court. For sure.

How much of it is actually on the court and not just a return to play, but just, you know, the S&C in general, like actually with a basketball and doing, you know, S&C work on the actual basketball court? You spoke about the passing.

I think it depends on the injury. And like one example that I can give is there was a player that I had the opportunity to work with during their return to play. And part of when I said begin with the end in mind, part of what this player needed to work on was how do they absorb contact?

And we know that they're strong. We know that they've gained weight, but for some reason when they're attacking the basket, they're not necessarily creating advantages. They get knocked off their driving line, which makes it harder for them to see the right read or spaces close really quickly.

How do we make sure that they feel comfortable to to take a bump on both sides of the ball and then be able to maintain the advantage once they create it. Part of what we did is design contact drills. All right. So what do we need to see within the training room, within the weight room to feel comfortable with them doing a contact drill in a more representative environment?

How do we expose them to that first as practitioners? So we know there's like a safe uncertainty. And then from there, How do we work with the basketball coaches to say, hey, these are the things we're looking for. Can this be included in when he's going over a screen or he's getting top locked and he needs to understand how to, how to get the defender off of him?

Or if he's driving to the basket and a help defender comes over and he has to take a bump at the rim. So we start, it's kind of like a control to chaos continuum, then bring it out to the court and say, this is the skill that we're looking to build and you'll start with just myself and the player and then try to incorporate other coaches, provide them different coaching cues and alter the constraints from afar and say, let's, let's add a different defender.

Let's constrain the space. Let's constrain the time. So we've evolved it like that.

Yeah.

And I guess the one benefit is that when they're returning to play, the load management, they're not playing as much, right? So they, you have, you can, I guess, Do more with them, right? Because when they're actually playing and you're working out with them, they're— especially if they're a high usage player and they're playing 30+ minutes a game, they're already going to be so tired that you really don't want to push them maybe too hard.

It goes back to the point of like, begin with the end in mind. What do you want this player to be? Is this a guy that the coach is anticipating playing 15 to 20 minutes a game, 10 to 12 minutes a game? And based off what his expected role is, how do you want to supplement that?

If this is a low rotation guy, but we want to keep him ready in the event somebody else gets hurt. All right. Well, we're able to periodize his days and his weeks to maybe feature more large space, small-sided games as we progress throughout his rehab.

If this is somebody who is more of a higher minute rotation player, then maybe we're not doing those things and we are having more creativity. CLA in the weight room and not necessarily with on-court stuff. So it kind of depends on the player, the time of season, the role that they have, and the timeline that you have for their injury.

But all things that we try to consider for sure.

Yeah, it's interesting because you even look at like LeBron James almost found pockets this past season with his trainer to take nearly 2 weeks off at a time at 2 separate occasions. And I would imagine that, you know, part of it is, you know, Working on some of the little injuries he had.

And then another part of it is like, how can we add rest to the schedule? So all those factors combined, which I think is, you know, fascinating for strength conditioning coaches to think about. I want to ask about specific warmup examples and places with the warmups and not just warmups, but maybe return to play and even in the weight room.

I remember, so you spoke already about different speeds when you're doing reps. I remember when we were at camps and Alex first introduced like adding variability to warmups. It's like we would have a player do Romanian deadlift, but then every time they would be with a partner and every time they'd go down, their partner would give them a hand to high five.

So like they would do the Romanian deadlift and just to add some variability, you know, they would high five or just doing lunges or squats in a different way every single time, sideline to sideline when we're warming up. So different ways like that.

That kind of come to your mind about adding variability?

Yeah, warmups is one of the things that I've been fortunate to like have a lot of creativity with. Definitely say it's like not 100% unavoidable to stay away from traditional warmups. Sometimes you got to read the room, but—

Players like it, don't they? I've had this conversation before, like players feel comfortable and they like doing, you know, some of them like doing the traditional warmups.

Yeah, some of them do. So you got the, I think the first thing is just Knowing when to be intentional about implementing new ideas. But a few examples come to mind. So several that we did last year, we would have guys partner up and we would take tennis balls and they would do like a tennis ball volley back and forth.

And you could start stationary. And then as they get more comfortable, try to hit the ball a little bit harder. The pair that keeps the ball up the longest is, you know, Theoretically wins. We've done it where partner spike ball with the tennis ball, and you're kind of bouncing the tennis ball in between both partners.

The more comfortable you get, try to decrease the distance, and you're still working on some lateral mobility, some hand-eye coordination. It makes it fun. We've done stuff where instead of doing a skip sideline to sideline, add a basketball, and now do a skip where you are.

or tapping the ball above your head or wrapping the ball around your waist. We've included volleyballs into our warmup where, you know, we would have groups of 4 or 5 and even include the coaches. And let's do some one-person sets, one person passes, one person hits to the next.

Sometimes throw an American football out there, especially if there was, I don't know if it's around Super Bowl weekend time or there's something that we know the guys were looking forward to. So we would try to incorporate fun in a lot of different ways.

You know, when I was at the academy, there was a lot of room for exploration in warmups, dribble tag games, sprint games. We would do a ton of dribble knockout. So it all kind of depends on like how the culture of the team is.

And that's often set by your coach and your best players. You gotta kind of like read the room on a given day. But I think warmups is a great way to include CLA pre-practice. There's a lot of different things that you could do, even with more of the stationary, like stretching.

The examples that you gave of having a partner-based RDL and having a high-five target is very easy to start.

Can you speak about tag games? I think I'm, you know, I'm obviously huge into tag games. I know a lot of the stuff that Jamie does that you see on his X account, you know, there's a form of tag games, but just generally speaking, tag games, how they're like, they incorporate so many movement patterns.

Depending on, you know, the game itself. And obviously you can add skills into it, like if it's passing tag game or if it's a ball handling tag game. Can you just speak a little bit about tag games from your perspective and, you know, maybe just how you feel about them?

Yeah, I love tag games because I have a lot of experience with them going back to my private sector days, working with elementary school kids and middle school kids. And sometimes for a warmup, having them do glute bridges and they're playing Colts wasn't The best thing to do.

Sometimes we just get a group of 4th graders and play tag. And I was able to see how things worked at that level and how they're able to scale. So one of my favorite tag games is a 1 versus 1 tag game. You could constrain the space to a small area on the court or weight room and say, you have to use one hand to tag the opposite person's left shoulder or right shoulder.

And maybe after the first round, you could say, use your non-dominant hand. Or switch the limb that they have to touch. Hey, try to touch this person's shoe, touch this person's knee. And the movements and skills that would emerge from that would always fascinate me.

These were things I wouldn't think to teach. I wouldn't necessarily teach an athlete how to move in the way that they did to solve that task. But if they were able to discover that inherently, then that allows them to be a little bit more adaptable.

We would do the same with When I was at the academy, a lot of bear crawl variations because I had a ton of teenage guys who were 6'11, 6'10, 6'7 feet tall. Needed them to get comfortable interacting with the floor. How are you going to fall?

How do you brace your fall? Most of them grew up playing sports where they didn't necessarily have to be on the ground a ton like we are in America, American football and such.

Mm-hmm.

We would have one person in a bear crawl position, another person standing. The person standing, they'd be tasked with Try to tag this person's foot, or try to tag this person's hand, and the person in the bear crawl position would have to try to evade them.

And they're getting a ton of shoulder stability. They're moving in all three planes of motion. They're able to stay engaged. We're able to make it competitive. You could scale it to where it's two v two. With some of these tag games, you could add in a basketball.

You could change the space that we're playing in, and depending on the start of the drill, you could have a tag game. go right into a transition drill that a coach might want to do. So I saw a lot of benefit in doing tag.

I think at every single level, there's always people who really enjoy it. And I think it's a great way to like encourage movement, competition, and get people laughing, smiling right before practice.

It's a great warmup. I think it's also, you know, perception-action coupling as well. You know, I challenge coaches because I feel like the warmup is maybe the one thing Where they're still doing, you know, layup lines or whatever the case is, but where we can make it fun, engaging, and still get the benefit of players moving in different ways, discovering, self-exploring with that.

I love that first game that you mentioned about trying to, you know, I call it knee tag. Both players are trying to tag each other's knees. While you were speaking, it gave me the idea of like, oh, maybe only one person is on offense and the other person can only evade.

Yeah.

And they can only evade with their hands behind their backs. So it just gave me some ideas as to how to change up that game because I use that game extensively, not just for basketball, but just for like if I'm with my family and cousins and, you know, and they want to like play.

I'm like, all right, let's play this game because it's not too demanding for me to play with them. But then it's also something fun to see how they move. I like, you know, I like to explore like that as well.

Yeah, I'll jump in and share a quick progression of that. When I was Academy, we would start one-on-one knee tag, and then we would add a, like an obstacle, like a third person to kind of act as a screener where they are able to block the defender.

And from there, add a basketball and you're able to still like work on your ball handling. You're still doing the tag game. And that would transition right into like some small-sided game, pick and roll stuff that our coaches wanted to do. So we start without a basketball at all.

You go one-on-one.

Mm-hmm.

Go 1 against 2, add a basketball. It's more contextual, more representative to what they wanted to do. And that can segue straight into small-sided games activities.

No, that's excellent. Do you ever teach players how to fall? Bit of a silly question, but do you work with players on that at all?

All the time, at every level, right from elementary school to professional. I've had to teach NBA players how to fall, just like I taught 3rd and 4th graders how to fall. It's something that I think is Like a very fundamental skill of athleticism.

I think when we think about like young kids or like infants, we think about their progression of getting them to crawl and roll and then walk. I think at the professional level, you have to do the reverse. They're already so skilled at knowing how to change directions and produce high forces.

You also need to give them the brakes. You need to give them the, like, the skills to know what happens when They hit the ground when bodies collide at very high forces. And these guys are doing this in small spaces across a court that's 94 feet.

So you need to teach them how to fall so that they're not hurting their wrist or hurting other parts of their body and then having to be out for days or weeks because of it. And I think it's another really easy thing to incorporate in a warmup, a backwards roll, a forward roll.

I've had to do it in return to play sessions. I've also had to do it with Some of our 7-footers who our coaches felt like they hit the ground too much. So yeah, I've had to do it a lot.

That's funny. Zay, I have a question about the recent rise in Achilles injuries. I just want to know from your perspective, from someone that's obviously, you know, closely around the space, why do you think it's happening? I know obviously the pace has picked up, but just from your perspective, like, you know, why is it happening more?

Why did it happen more this last season?

I think it's really like multifactorial. And oftentimes on social media, there's a lot of people who could be really reductionist about like why injuries are occurring, whether it's the shoes or whether it's some other factor. But I think there's a few things. So on one standpoint, you have early specialization where athletes are only playing one sport from the time that they're 12, 13 years old, getting privatized training.

And oftentimes they're doing training one-on-oh or one-on-one. And the repetitive movements over the course of like a decade, by the time they even enter the NBA, might impact the level of adaptability they would have if there was just more free play and more unstructured play and adapting to different movement strategies if they didn't specialize in one sport.

I think that's one thing. I think you have the compounding effect of what, like, Certain other like factors might add up to. So let's say you get an ankle sprain in year one. You don't necessarily think it's that big of a deal, but that ankle sprain might add into other decisions that you might make around what you train or what you don't train, what footwear you use, what type of shoes you like to play in, whether or not you brace or don't.

And what could seem like a really small moment could compound over time. And eventually, 4 or 5, 6 years down the line, when you tear your Achilles, everyone would just evaluate that one season or that one game or that one playoff series and forget the other compounding factors.

So I think that's an element too. The third, I would say there is a, like a spike in load. So let's say if you go from being a rotational player to now, all of a sudden you've increased your value, your minutes go up, other players get hurt or A new coach comes in and your style of play fits the style that they want to play and increase in minutes and increase in games.

That could also impact like the opportunity for injury. And then I think the other thing that comes into play is players are human. Players have emotions. Like they could be very well aware of what the risks are, but sometimes the stakes are really high and you say, what happens if I don't play?

Yes, you could not get hurt. But what happens if I do? And I think in that standpoint, you know, we can't overlook the fact that like, if it's a game 7 or if there's a chance for your team to advance in the playoffs, and even though you trust the medical staff, they lay out all the risks and you understand what it is, you still have the ability and the autonomy to make your own decision.

And I think that goes into it too. So it's very much like a dynamics systems approach of You have to look at their athlete history, like what sports did they play and how long have they specialized? What was their injury history? What things that we don't think play that big of a role that lead to other decisions and lead to other injuries?

Sometimes those previous injuries are indicating factors of what bigger injuries could become. And then you have the athlete themselves. Sometimes they say, hey, I know the risk and I still want to do it because This is why, yeah, this is my train. This is why I play.

This is what I love to do. And I'd much rather go out there and fall knowing that I tried rather than not go out there at all.

It's crazy. Indiana had 3 Achilles this season, which is wild to think about. You know, it still made it to the finals without 2 of their guys. Last question for you, Zay. I just appreciate your time, your insights, and for sharing. You know, I've been listening like, oh wow, like It's just a different perspective that myself, who primarily focuses on, you know, coaching it on the actual court, you know, I don't necessarily think about the return to play and, and what I can do as a coach to help my athletes be better if they get,

or just generally, like, how can I challenge them with some constraints and variability in the weight room? So I just really want to thank you for your time today. And the last question I have for you is your transformative tip. If you could leave coaches with one piece of advice that will instantly improve the quality of their environment, what would that be?

I would say to try to be an architect of your environment, design the environment to facilitate learning. And if you do that, then you'll see how your curiosity always sparks more learning, always sparks more engagement with players and understanding that your job as a coach is to work with them and help shape it so that They're able to, to learn, be engaged, and the more they're able to do that, the better the results will be and the more sustainable they'll be.

Excellent. Zay, thank you so much.

Absolutely.

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