How to bring variability, mobility and the constraints-led approach into the weight room and return-to-play — building different movement solutions instead of adding random exercises, with guest Banj Abeleda.
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In this episode, George is joined by Banj Abeleda, also known as Mr. Move with Purpose, to discuss how coaches can use variability, mobility, and the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) to better prepare basketball athletes for the unpredictable demands of the game. Banj shares lessons from working with elite athletes, explains how he applies variability in the weight room and during return-to-play, and breaks down why coaches should focus on creating different movement solutions rather than simply adding random exercises.
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Esta transcrição corresponde ao áudio original em inglês.
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Welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. On today's episode, we have a very special guest, Mr. Move with Purpose, Banj Aboleda. And Banj, I've been watching you for a while, and I think when I actually learned about you was when I started learning about the CLA as well.
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So it was really cool seeing you work with these high-level athletes. Some of them I worked with at the time as well. Toto, who his sister played in the WNBA and now he's playing in the BBL. So it was like, okay, they're doing work together.
Let's see what he's doing. So for me, it was really cool to see some of these ideas. You were using variability in the weight room and just some of these CLA principles in the weight room. And I was like, I've never seen that before.
Because I was just getting into, you know, this space. So, you know, really excited. I say all that to say, really excited to have this conversation with you and pick your brain. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
All right. So question for you, Benj. What have you learned from working with elite athletes? What's been the biggest lessons that they taught you?
I think the most important thing is understanding where the athlete is at. In the case of elite athletes and the pro level, a lot of them understand what they want. It's just a case of meeting them where they're at and sort of creating a roadmap of how to get there.
Ultimately, we're there to facilitate that. And I think if I'm thinking about the athletes generally, they want to do a certain thing, but then there's other things like time constraints. How long do we have with the athlete? So it's just building a relationship and outlining some sort of realistic way of getting there.
And I think what they've taught me is the case that everyone has— the spectrum is wide in the sense that there's some athletes at the pro level that are like really good in the weight room. And there's the opposite where some really haven't been exposed to that environment.
So it's a case of sort of finding the in-between and being able to Yes, give them what they want, but at the same time, it's sort of educating them in terms of how we can get there, because sometimes they want to skip the steps.
So a lot of it is communication and building a relationship with the client, with the athlete, and going from there. Yeah, man.
And how did you like get involved with all this? Because you've always, to me at least, used variability in the weight room. So how do you go about using repetition without repetition in the weight room? And we'll get into the specifics on this in a minute.
Like, how did you get introduced to the variability and its kind of importance, I guess?
So I would consider myself a sort of hybrid performance coach in the sense that I do work on the court as well as in the weight room and just using those principles in both environments. And the more I've sort of learned how to apply it, the more that we can sort of create the outcome that we want.
Yeah, in terms of the weight room, I'm just experimenting. I believe that if you create variability, and I must note, not novelty, we create variability in the weight room to create buy-in as well. There are instances where we can use variability in the sense of a rehab lens or return to sport protocol.
You can explore A lot of different avenues as opposed to going for quote unquote form.
Yeah, no, that's great. I remember I had a conversation with, you know, Zay West, who was on the podcast, and he mentioned that, you know, with return to play, basketball is such a dynamic sport. So, you know, players are moving, there's zigzagging, they're, you know, running, and then they're having to stop on the stop of a dime, and they're having to react to like what other players on the court are doing.
So with return to play, as you mentioned, like adding the variability just helps them get used to moving their body in those specific ways. Can you just talk about like what that looks like practically for you, maybe even on the basketball court, how you add that variability for that return to play athlete?
A lot of it is exposing them to like reintroducing the forces. So when you're accelerating, decelerating, You're creating multiple times your body weight. So you need to be prepared for that. So in the weight room environment, we can control that a little bit more, where there aren't external stimulus, where maybe a defender's in front of you.
Here, we're able to, sort of, again, expose them to different movements. Something like, if we're thinking about, in the context of the basketball court, when we turn the corner, We need to be able to get our foot to turn in eversion and then in pronation.
So if the foot's able to do that, then there's less compensation. If it's quite jacked up, if you will, then there's going to be some sort of misalignment, and then we create movement up and down the chain. And then that's where things unfortunately happen in a negative way.
things like injury. So we want to make sure that within this environment, we're able to create more range, more mobility. So when they do return to the court, they're able to deal with that ultimately.
Yeah, it's interesting. So then you'd say the mobility piece is super important with like, let's say you twist an ankle. So like having the full mobility would just drastically, I guess, decrease your chances of getting injured or reinjured, is that right? And then how do you go about like adding the mobility back?
What kind of stretch, like how do you do mobility? How are you adding that in?
So mobility is a big part of essentially what I do. I think it's essentially the missed part in the sense of strength training as a whole. I like to use the thought process that we have to approach joint training the same way we do with tissues.
So Like muscles, even the tendons and ligaments. We need to strengthen everything as a whole. And by creating more mobility, we create more suppleness, we create more adaptability, if you will. We're able to create more shapes, get into different ranges. And ultimately, that's what basketball is, as you mentioned.
A lot of change of direction, lots of deceleration and acceleration, a lot of rotational movements. So mobility allows us to get into these positions and not just get into the positions, it's also project into what's next.
Yeah, I guess generate that force output from those positions as well. Let's keep the same example, you know, player twists their ankle, they're coming back, maybe it's non-contact. How are you working with them to get more range of motion on their ankle so that they, you know, they can continue to have more mobility there?
Yeah, so, like, the foot and ankle complex is something that I pay attention to a lot, especially with hoopers, just because it's one of the most common injuries. And unfortunately, what we do is we rest when there is pain. Like, the inflammation is a natural response in terms of the healing process.
But in terms of slowly returning to sport, we need to be able to reintroduce range. So, making sure that we have that usable range in the sense that we need the foot to turn a certain angle, we need to have tibial rotation, just because we don't want it to go up the chain.
So a lot of the things that I do are built around FRC, so functional range conditioning. It's the idea of being able to increase space around the joints And we apply that in the sense of return to play as well as rehab. And again, bringing the same sort of intensity.
Right. So it's kind of making sure that they can have those— if they have that range of motion, then they can move those certain ways. And then, you know, you can start adding in different, you know, maybe you give them some kind of weight, maybe you're adding a basketball that you're giving a slight push, and then you're testing the range like that.
I want to, I want to ask you, because I've always believed that, you know, training in the weight room shouldn't necessarily be different to training on the basketball court, you know, in terms of that you want to add repetition, fault repetition. But I want to ask you, when is it a good time to focus on form in the weight room?
For example, if you're doing a very heavy lift, let's say you're doing a deadlift or, you know, a back squat, and, you know, you're maybe doing a few reps because you're trying to really work on that power and strength output. Like, how do you justify not adding variability to that because you don't want the players to get hurt?
Like, can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. So there's 2 instances that come to mind in terms of managing the form versus variability. So somebody that's very new in terms of training age in the weight room environment, that's when they're learning how to lift. I think it's really important that they understand what they're trying to move, what they're trying to feel.
So that's one instance. And then you did touch on it. It's when we're moving through the force-velocity curve where the cost of error, if you will, is a little bit higher, then we'd focus more on form. Just because if we're purely thinking about intention, sometimes that's where the cues of a certain lift may go astray.
So we want to be able to have an understanding, a fundamental understanding of how to move. And once they have more experience in terms of form, and I say that quote unquote, everyone's different. Somebody that's 6'10 will move very different to me, who's— I'm 5'10 on a good day.
So it's just understanding things like metrics in terms of Some people I've worked with, a couple of athletes, one who's 7'2 and his lower limbs are really longer in terms of his upper half. So we need to understand he's going to have a slightly different movement strategy to somebody like myself who's normal size.
So it's just understanding when we can sort of have acceptance in a sense of how we move. And then once we get a better understanding, then we can add a bit more variability.
That's fascinating. It's, you know, it made me just think when you were speaking, when you talked about the cost of error. I guess it's, you know, a lot of, I guess injuries happen because athletes don't have a safe way to stop. And so that you maybe don't have a functional way to stop.
And then, you know, they stop in a way and then, you know, maybe they twist an ankle or, you know, they get injured in another way. But what you said in terms of what if you're doing a, you know, a heavy lift, you want to make sure that you're— when the cost of error is high, you want to make sure that you're focusing on form.
But then it's almost like, and I don't know, maybe you can talk about this a little bit more. I guess, you know, you're going to be strengthening the muscles around, you know, your knees and your legs and your arms, all of that, by getting stronger and focusing on doing those lifts.
But then at the same time, you also want to add the variability so that when you are stopping unpredictably and you get bumped off, You're still able to not only absorb the contact, but then because of the variability, you're also able to find a different way to land safely, to absorb, and then bounce back up.
That's absolutely right. You do want to expose the body and the brain to different solutions. You want to be able to, as you said, in a sense, if we're thinking about the basketball environment, a lot of it is chaotic. A lot of it is very unpredictable in a sense that You may want to go to the basket, but all of a sudden somebody's in front of you, so you need to change direction or you need to be able to step back.
And that takes a lot on the body in terms of decelerating or moving laterally. So variability in the weight room is, for me, has become a staple in the right environment. I think once they have that experience of what form should feel like, then you can experiment with things like, if we're reciting back to the example of how the foot should move, you can experiment with foot placement in terms of how your foot lands.
You can exaggerate how you want it to move in dorsiflexion or the opposite where it's moving in extension. So there's different ways we can expose the body to variability. Because ultimately, that's going to prepare us better for when we return to the court.
And I guess to add to that, what practical ways do you add the CLA? And specifically, like, what constraints? You talked about different ways your foot can land. What are some other practical ways that you can, you know, add the constraints to add that variability?
Before we move on, I think a common misconception is that CLA is random. So We need to be able to provide context in the sense that we don't want to just change the exercise. We want to be able to change the movement problem.
So if we're thinking about the CLA, so a simple task constraint could be how we load. So if we're squatting, if you will, you can do the traditional way where we load it from the back. We can front load it. We can mix it up.
We can do contralateral or ipsilateral, where ipsilateral is where we're using, say, the right leg—that's the working leg—and then we're also loading on that same side. So the right hand, and then we can do contralateral, where the opposite essentially. So if it's the left leg is the working leg, you load on the right side.
And I think those are good ways to learn because. Ultimately, yes, they do work on, say, the muscle, the quads, the glutes. But at the same time, if you front load it, it's a very different feeling to if you load it from the back.
So there's different ways you can play around with it. And then there's also the environmental constraints where something as simple as a surface, so a landing surface. So if you're doing like Some plyometric movements. A lot of people, they want to do work on ankle stiffness, which is like, it needs a stable environment.
So if you're landing on a hard surface, it's very different if it's like a soft plyobox, just because whenever you land on it, it's very hard to stiffen. As you land, the force dissipates. So it's very different. So those type of things are, are important as well.
So you would even say if you're doing plyometrics, it would be— or I guess that, you know, having the variability is good, but what I'm hearing you say is like, if you're doing the plyometrics, better to do it on a hard surface so you can quickly, you know, absorb and react.
There's different pros and cons to both. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Soft plyoboxes, friendlier on the joints and the body as a whole, but in the sense of like, if we're thinking about ankle stiffness or just landing and thinking about short contact time, generally it's going to be easier to transfer that force through a hard surface as opposed to a softer surface.
So those things you have to take account for. I wouldn't say one is better than the other, but it just depends on what are you trying to achieve.
Yeah, I guess it goes back to what you said, like, you know, the intentionality behind the CLA. Like, if you're maybe working on ankle stiffness, Then you're maybe focusing more of it on a hard surface versus if you're trying to do these one rep max kind of jumps, then maybe it's, you know, much better to do it on a softer landing spot.
So it's again, just being super intentional, not only with the constraints you add, but also the environment that your athletes are in as well. Also, like, how long have you been using research to guide your training? Because like I said, you know, as long as I've known you, you've been, as far as for me, like forward thinking.
I've always kind of been, you know, really interested in strength and conditioning generally. But, you know, everything I've always saw before kind of getting myself, you know, immersed in the CLA was more traditional workouts, more traditional, you know, people in the gym lifting weights, plyometrics.
So it's like just these more traditional kind of strength and conditioning, like, ways to do it. But how long have you used it to guide your training? And when did this become, like, you know, part of your identity as a coach?
I was exposed at a deeper level to CLA during COVID During that time, we had a lot of essentially moments where we could sort of choose to use time wisely. So that was an opportunity for me to sort of upskill in a sense.
I think it's important as coaches to constantly evolve and adapt, just as we would ask our players. So, That period is when essentially I was doing the basketball side, sort of basketball skill work along with the weight room. And a lot of it was just applying and sort of experimenting with the ideas and using the research to support essentially my application.
And then when I'm thinking back, I read a lot of books. One that comes to mind is Learn How to Move by Rob Gray. I think that's a fundamental book a lot of coaches should read. It's insightful, very digestible. It's not a long book in the sense that it provides a lot of information for what it is.
I still read it back when I do have time. And then in the sense of the practical side, I've been lucky enough to be able to use resources like yourself, Transforming Basketball, other figures like Chris Oliver, B-Ball Immersion, my guy Coleman, who we actually, we saw each other there.
At his camp, right? At the sports stuff. Yeah.
Exactly. Also Hooping Mitch, I think does a good job in terms of articulating that. I'm not sure if you're aware of Josh Fan. I think he's been on this podcast before. So Josh Fan is the trainer of Jeremy Lin, and he handles both the on-court as well as the weight room stuff for Jeremy Lin, as well as other athletes.
And I think he does a really good job In terms of educating his audience, in terms of how to bridge the gap between the weight room and the basketball court. And then there's other guys, of course. Ricky, shout out Ricky, our local community in the UK.
So I've been spoiled in terms of resources, people that I can share a back and forth with. And it's just the idea of community sort of elevates me in a sense that I can. What I'm doing is correct in a sense.
No, I love it, man. Yeah, for real. Shout out Ricky. You know, around the same time that I met you, and we had Ricky on the podcast not too long ago, but he opened his doors at, you know, at Barca Nabi, and I was able to see what they were doing in my early stages.
So, you know, it was just really cool for me to like, I would be doing workouts with my guys at UEL, and then I'd see you. This is before I met you, but then I'd see you come on, on the court with some of my other guys that I would train here and there.
And it would be like, oh, okay, like, what are they doing here? Like, and then, you know, I'd ask T about you, like, oh, you know, how's the training? He's like, yeah, man, you know, Benj is really good. And so, you know, it's just really interesting, just that community, you know, we always kind of known about each other, but it's just, you know, it's always good to see that people are doing the work in the field and kind of justifies that you're kind of in the right path as well, like you said.
So exactly. Yeah, we're on the same page.
Yeah, I want to ask you, if 3 exercises, if you could prescribe 3 lifts for the rest of your life, what would they be and why?
Oh, tough one. There's a whole variety of exercises. If I could choose 3, I would say some sort of overhead press. So I like, I love single limb work just because the sport is played on its locomotion ultimately. And we don't really to work with 2 hands in a sense is always alternating.
So overhead press, and I choose overhead press over like a chest press in this case, just because the game's played above the head ultimately. So we do a lot of the dunking, contesting shots, shooting. We need to be able to deal with those force demands, especially when we're contesting shots or dunking.
A lot of the time it's not just Ask force, it's also opposing forces working against each other. So you need to protect the shoulder, you need to be able to be strong in that position where a lot of people are actually quite vulnerable in that position.
The other 2 I'd probably reserve for the lower limbs. Bulgarian split squat, again, single leg work I think is really important. You want to build some sort of density, some sort of Strength in the lower legs, just because we're doing a lot of running, jumping.
Again, we're creating a lot of force. We need to be able to accelerate and decelerate. So I think Bulgarian split squats create a good foundation, and from there we can sort of play around with the variables in terms of maybe it's a bit more focus on the eccentric work where we're focusing on more health, or maybe.
It's more something where we're creating oscillation, where we're playing around with the ranges. So yeah, there's so many ways we can play around with Bulgarian split squats. And lastly, probably my favorite is trap bar deadlift. I know it's a favorite for a lot of coaches just because of how easy it is to create intent without a lot of coaching.
And by saying that, I don't say it in a lazy way, but The main thing that we're trying to create in the weight room is contention. So if we can load up a bar and get the athlete to just attack it, that's the ideal scenario.
So that's probably my favorite lift of all.
Love it. Trap bar deadlift, Bulgarian split squat, and an overhead press. I don't do any of those. I'm not going to lie. And I don't really think my players do it.
We're going to get you in the weight room.
Exactly. So I definitely got to— But what you said is interesting because like the game is played with one, you know, with kind of like, you know, one hand and arm. So it makes sense to kind of, you know, train over the head a lot.
And I didn't even think about it that way. I want to ask you, what do you recommend for coaches to improve their warmups or S&C, even if it's like they don't have a weight room per se? Let's say they're just on the basketball court.
What are some things that you would recommend like for their players to do to get stronger, to get faster, more mobile? You know, that they can instantly add maybe to their warm-up part of practice?
Again, going back to intention, I think it's really important to create that environment. I think a lot of warm-ups or game preps don't have that for whatever reason. It's— I think it's a culture thing as well. A lot of people believe that warm-ups are just raising the body temperature, when in essence it's actually a cheat code in a sense that If you can prepare yourself within this window of preparation, whether it's half an hour, 10 minutes, whatever, you can prepare yourself for the main thing.
You see a lot of the time where some players are going through the motions in the first quarter, where they're sort of warming up during the game, when we can use the time prior To create that intent. So I think that's the one thing I would advise in terms of how to use game prep better.
And in terms of how we do that, a lot of it is just having a sort of framework. It's a little bit different when you have to warm up one player, one athlete, as opposed to a group of 12 to 15. With one player, you can be a bit more specific.
You can work around their capacities, you can work around. Maybe they have some lingering issues or limitations. In a sense of, if it is time constraint in terms of a team environment, I think it's if you follow something like RAMP protocol, where it's raise the body temperature, activate and mobilize, and then lastly potentiate, then you've got a good idea of how to sort of go through a step-by-step So things like working through the force-velocity curve, so slowly mobilizing, so things like multi-joint, like stretching, if you will, like loaded mobility help.
And then you sort of ramp it up where it's a bit more dynamic movement. So things like sprints, things like change of direction and deceleration. And then also introducing some sort of level of isometrics. So they're a staple in my warm-ups where you're learning how to hold a position.
And then within a partner setting, so what I do is I group my players, I get them to pair up, and then you sort of create that buy-in, you create that competition, and then they can work each other. And it goes back to creating that intent, that intention where you can create competition to elicit that response that we want, that sort of that buy-in to elevate themselves in terms of preparing both the brain and body for competition.
Yeah. Just quickly before I ask you the last question, in terms of activation, like, you know, I'm huge into it. Like, we'll do the warmup and then I'll do a little portion of the warmup at the end to activate. So it could be things like, you know, Maybe they're in a lunge position and there's another player just gently pushing and pulling from that position.
Maybe, you know, they're dribbling the basketball and another player, and they're trying to get sideline to sideline and the player's just adding that resistance on their shoulders or, you know, maybe pulling from behind their back. So just different ways to, you know, really activate.
But could you just quickly talk about the importance of the activation?
Yeah, activation, super important. The warmup in general has so much Bang for buck, if you will, in the sense it's preparing you. You got— if you can do this now prior to the game, then there's one less thing to worry about within the game setting.
You want to be able to mitigate injury as much as possible, but also you want to, you want to prepare the body for performance as well. So things like you've mentioned, so partner work, being in isometric positions, creating perturbations. And again, thinking about creating intention.
So being able to prepare yourself for the competition is, is going to be valuable in the sense that you have one less thing to worry about.
I love it, man. Just want to thank you for your time, man. You know, I really enjoyed this conversation, just kind of learning from you. I have one more question to ask you before I'll let you go. And that's our transformative tip question.
We ask all our guests this, and it's, if you could leave coaches with one piece of advice that would instantly improve their practice environment, what would that be?
I think 2 things come to mind, and it comes back to the question earlier in terms of why I turned towards further education and CLA. I think we need to, as coaches, we need to be able to be wrong, if that makes sense.
I think we're in an industry where a lot of the practices are quite outdated in the sense of it's a lot of go hard, go home type of mentality where there isn't science-backed methods in the sense that we're not backing our practices with practical processes, if you will.
What I'm trying to say is we need to constantly evolve and adapt and continually learn about what's important, and that's the athlete in front of us rather than what we want as coaches. Yes, there's an element of us practicing and experimenting, but at the end of the day, the goal is to create a better athlete, a better mover, a better person ultimately.
And the second one is how can In the sense of the weight room and even the basketball court as well, is how can we create a healthy environment, a healthy relationship with the weight room? I think a lot of it goes sort of underrated and sort of underutilized in the sense that we sort of skip the steps.
We play as much as we can, and then we turn to the weight room environment when we're injured, when we couldn't sort of do the opposite where we use them hand in hand. We hoop and then we use the weight room to facilitate better health, better performance.
And I think if we can do that, we could create a buy-in value, better understanding of how they are essentially intertwined. Then we can move forward in terms of doing the things that we really want to do. And that's For the players, that's hooping, being available.
Yeah, exactly. It's like that prehab work, the importance of that pre— you know, like you said, we go to it for the rehab, but I think the prehab is just as important, if not more important, you know, to, you know, to keep players on the court ultimately.
And essentially, that's going to make them better players if they can continue to keep playing. Vaz, once again, thank you so much, man. It's been great speaking to you.
Amazing. Thank you for having me.
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