Inside the Huddle: Conditioning in Practice

CONDITIONING

All of us probably have told our players in the pre-season that we will be in better shape than our opponents. In the 2-3 weeks before you play a game, what do you do in practice to condition your players? Are there ways when you are running drills that you make a special effort to include conditioning? Do you do any “old-school” conditioning in your practicing?

Mark Cooper- Ottawa

Players don’t need to be in game shape year round but they should never be out of shape.  

Preseason conditioning program is important for players not in a fall sport. 

Conditioning in the first two weeks is different than the rest of the season.  Time is of the essence the first two weeks.  

I’m not a believer in doing a lot of sprints to end practice.  This can lead to players pacing themselves for the end of practice running.  

We will do periodic sprints during practice.  We run fives.  We start on the sideline we sprint to the other sideline and go back and forth until we touch the sideline five times.  I keep it at fives so the players can sprint the entire time.  

The number of fives and when they occur depends on the conditioning I think is necessary.  

During the first two weeks I will also do a tip drill at the end of practice.  We have a line tipping the ball off the backboard.  They have sprint around me to get back in line.  I control how long it lasts and where I stand.  

Kellen Fernetti- Carl Sandburg JC

For conditioning, I do not do traditional conditioning with our teams. We only run with a basketball and break up our workouts with a lot of play segments. Fortunately for us at the junior college level, we can start basketball activities in August so we have a Fall to get ready. We try to have our workouts be like a sprint. Fast paced, high tempo segments followed by fundamental segments, then back at playing. I haven’t had a timed sprint since the 2017-2018 season. I let the basketball get the team ready.

Evan Massey- Galesburg

I have done conditioning three different ways:

First Approach- No sprints just commit to get in shape with practice. When we did that, some things I focused on-

— Make sure set up practices so the drills might alternate between high intensity and almost like recovery drills. We might do two high intensity drills, then one not as intense to build. But early in the year I would be very conscious in my practice plan to look at the intensity level of drills and use that to set up demanding practices. 

— We would insert high intensity drills competing as a team against a clock at different spots in practice, and at the end of practice. We had several full court drills where we needed to make so many baskets in set time. 

— Usually when we scrimmaged we would offense-defense-offense, or defense-offense-defense to have team always have just three possessions. But early in the year for conditioning, we made sure we did segments where we did not stop for longer periods.

Second Approach- There were years where we did different timed conditioning exercises. What I didn’t like about doing this was that if we did this at the end of practice, players might save themselves. What I liked about doing timed runs was that I felt like it did create a sense of toughness, and it was an easier sell that we would always be in better shape than our opponents. 

—- 8 x 2 down and backs- We would have the players start a new sprint every minute. I would assign times to players- 22 seconds, 23 seconds, 24 seconds. For it to count, everyone had to make the assigned time. 

—- Do the same thing above but set a number of sprints at 12. If everyone made the time, it counted as 2. So if everyone hit their times then we actually only did 6 total.

—- I liked to do a timed sideline sprint series in the middle of practice before defensive breakdown drills. We might start with 12, 8, 4 trips with a time goal. 

Third Approach- Most years I did a combination of of the two approaches. Once we got thru the first two weeks, we backed off, but we still tried to early each week do some form of conditioning whether sprints or drills. 

Keith Parsons- Anson HS, North Carolina

Early in my coaching career, I thought of conditioning the same as the coaches I had growing up. Run, run, run, mostly sprints. My views have changed, and it might partly be because of the style of play I've come to follow (The System). 

At this point, I believe we do enough running in practice through drills and scrimmaging to get ready to play. I have made some adjustments with the pace of practice in mind -- no team-wide water breaks (everyone has water available to them when they are off the court), constant movement throughout our time together and fast-paced, full-court drills to involve everyone. I've come to see the best way to get in basketball condition is to play as much basketball as possible. That should get us ready.

Ryan Brown- Taylorville

The bulk of our conditioning comes from transition and defensive drills.  The next portion comes from running sidelines after losing a drill.  And a smaller portion comes from free throw shooting drills.

I recently went to a Northern Iowa practice and their running of sprints was all based on rebounding in practice.  Love this idea...

 +1 for any rebound. But +1 for "doing your job" which is getting back if you are above the free throw line, going after the rebound if you are below the free throw line, or boxing out.  -1 if your man gets the rebound, fail to do your job, or fail to box out.

If you are negative for the day, you owe sprints early in the next day's practice.