A nice summary. I hope it gets widely read.
Hi Mark,
as I am a long-time follower and advocate of your content I applied your Two-Factor model of Sports Performance to Basketball. Of course, the application was rather trivial given all the content you already put out about this subject. I chose Basketball because, for once, I just like the sport and secondly because I believe those concepts should be very new to the general audience interested in Basketball. On the other hand, as I don't have a lot people to share it with, the reach will be very limited.
For those who are interested the link to the article is below - but be warned it is merely a less detailed summary and trivial application of material that was already published on this website:
Strength Training for Basketball. — Application of Rippetoe’s Two Factor… | by Shaq Card Collector DE | Mar, 2021 | Medium
Thanks again for the great strength training related content!
A nice summary. I hope it gets widely read.
Good piece. However, the young players today may not be familiar with Wilt or even Shaq, or simply think that a wing player or guard play does not require strength.....until they get knocked off the ball by a stronger player.
I lived and breathed basketball as a player and fan.
I never understood why, despite my quickness I would lose position or get pushed away from the play. I could not understand it -- did not even have the vocabulary for it. Now I do: its strength. And when you coach basketball, you will see the most difficult matchup is when you have to neutralize a strong player on the other team and all you have to throw at him is your fast but skinny guys. And that strong player will have a field day against you.
But I enjoyed the article. Nice work.
Thanks for your kind words. You could be right in that the kids today don’t know who Wilt was but at least they could see Shaq’s physically still in play recently when he conducted a decent power bomb on Dustin Rhodes during a Wrestling exhibition last week. There is also a clip on Youtube where Devon Larratt (former world champion in armwrestling) says that Shaq has been the strongest non-armwrestler he ever pulled - even stronger than Hafthor Björnsson. Given the fact that Shaq never properly trained for strength one might wonder how strong he could have been.
One of today’s strongest players might very well be LeBron. But when you look at his “training” it is straight out ridiculous - to the point that it would be worth its own article.
I always had the same experience in that it is virtually impossible to beat a significantly stronger opponent in Basketball - provided the skill set is similar. All the more disappointing that most coaches already know that strength matters but still do not have the slightest clue how to train for it.
Look at the anatomy of the ACL, and compare it to the distal function of the hamstrings.
As far as I understand, the ACL goes from the back of the femur to the front of the tibia and pulls the tibia back to the femur. The ACL in a way prevents the tibia from going in front of the femur. The hamstrings come down the back of the leg, connecting at the bottom of the knee. They also run a little towards the front of the shin so the line of pull is similar to the ACL. That means that the hamstrings help pull the tibia posteriorly and offload the ACL. Is that what you mean by distal function?