The Athlete Development Journal🥇

Train your mind. Build your body. Fuel your soul.

Listen to this episode in the car with your athlete. ⬇️

You can also listen on ​Spotify​ or ​Apple Podcasts​.

Mind. If your suffering has no meaning…

Most of us can deal with suffering when we can find the meaning in it.

• You can deal with stressful, monotonous work situations, because it provides you with the means to fund the rest of your life.
• You can deal with struggling through a ridiculously hard conditioning session, because it means you have a better shot at playing well on game day.
• You can deal with going through 9 months of pregnancy, culminating in utterly painful labor and delivery, because it means you get to bring your child into this world.

But, what if you can’t find the meaning in your suffering? What if it seems your suffering is entirely pointless?

Here’s a perspective for you:

“The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable.

Then I pushed forward with the following question: ‘And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?'” – Victor Frankl

Just because you can’t find the meaning in your suffering, that doesn’t make your suffering meaningless.

Body. Reverse engineering high school basketball workloads.

Last week, I promised you that I’d reverse engineer a sport for you to help you eliminate 95% of injuries. Today, I’m here to fulfill that promise.

The sport with the most votes was basketball, so let’s get to it.

A couple of notes before we dive in:

To make this as applicable to a wide range of you, I’m using research data. Remember, you can get more specific to your demands by looking at your own team’s game film and talking to your coach.

To give you an inside look of what exactly goes into digging up research, I walk through the step by step process I used. If you don’t care about that and just want the numbers, you can skip down and look for the red lettering to pick back up.

Step 1: Identify the Peak Demands

I let Gemini (Google’s AI chatbot) throw me an assist here. I used its Deep Research function and fed it the prompt:

“Please create a needs analysis for a male high school basketball player. I’m particularly interested in the volume and intensity of: jumps, sprints/running, change of direction, and shots.”

(Yes, I always say please and thank you in case the AI overlords take over the world one day. I want to be on their good side.)

While it ran the report, I hopped over to PubMed to see if I could find any landmark studies that I wanted to make sure Gemini doesn’t miss.

Initially, it was a relatively unfruitful search. I was searching only for systematic reviews or meta-analyses and the keyword/phrase with the most relevant hits was “load monitoring basketball.”

I thought I had 4 high-quality studies from PubMed to help make decisions.

• One had the full text locked behind a paywall.
• Two studies only measured internal load, and we were looking for external load. (Internal load would be things like heart rate, RPE, etc.)
• The ​remaining study​ focused on females of varying levels (pro, college, HS), so it’s slightly different than our population of interest, but it’s close enough for us to extrapolate if we need to.

I broadened my search parameters to allow for experimental and observational studies and refined the keywords to “external load monitoring basketball male”.

Now, we were cooking with gas.

I found 3 studies that were a better match for our population. Two have the full text locked behind a paywall, BUT, I have a membership to the journal ​one of them​ was published in. ​The third​ was open access.

• The open access study used a combined proprietary metric to evaluate external load and didn’t post the individual metric results, which made this study useless to us. We can’t use it to figure out our sprint and jump counts if they don’t publish those.
• However, the study I had access to was a gold mine. The population was a perfect match to our research question and it had clear data for all but one of our topics of interest.

I then went back to Gemini and read through the report it generated.

It didn’t find any data sources as good as the study I found, so I used that best study I previously found for our jump and change of direction counts.

For total distance covered, Gemini found a few options. Most of them, however, just listed total distance covered in a game, but the games were 40-48 minutes. High school basketball games in this area are 32 minutes, so I went with the study that listed the average distance covered per minute in a basketball game and multiplied that by 32 minutes.

So, the per practice and per game counts that we’re working off of are:

Step 2: Turn those Daily Peaks into Weekly Peaks (If you skipped the research, start reading here.)

We want to prepare for weekly demands, not just demands in a single day. As we went over last week, the peak demands are likely going to be in the back-to-back (to back-to-back) days of pre-season.

So, we’ll take the practice numbers and multiply those by 5 days per week to get the peak weekly load demands:

QUICK BREAK

I know this is a lot, but that’s what it takes when you’re dealing with something as complex as injuries are.

There’s no one quick fix exercise you can do. There’s no magic pill you can take. There’s no secret supplement you’re missing out on.

A lot of you might see this as overkill, and for many of you, it probably is.

But, if you’re somebody who has been plagued by injuries in the past, maybe you missed a big chunk of the season or maybe you just dealt with knee pain all year and didn’t perform at your best, the effort that this takes upfront will be worth the reward on the back end.

Plus, if you read to the end and send me the right message, I might make this a whole lot easier for you…

Let’s get back to reverse engineering.

Step 3: Turn those Weekly Peaks into a 10% Progression Plan

When we match that to our progression plan from ​last week​, here’s how it shapes up:

“But, Dr. Mr. Coach Zach, Sir, what do I do about open gyms?”

Most of you are at the mercy of what your coach has you doing in fall open gyms. To make this more actionable, here’s what I suggest.

1) Keep track of each of the number of the drills you do each day. You can easily work backwards to figure out how many of each movement type you had in each controlled drill.

The drills won’t really change much from practice to practice, so if you do the upfront work to figure out how much of each metric you do per drill, you’ll be able to count this in no time.

2) Figure out your live play “minute averages”

You’ll never be able to remember every movement you make during live action, and it would be just straight-up implausible to film and count every single moment of live play.

Here’s how you can get around that.

The first time you have live play, film it for 5 minutes.

Then, afterwards go through and count how many of each type of jump, change of direction, and running volume you get in those 5 minutes.

Let’s say your numbers look like this (these are nonsensical and just made up, so don’t use these):

Next, we’ll need you to divide each of those counts by 5 to get your average per minute number.

Your minute averages then become:

From then on, every time you have live play, you just track how many minutes you play. By multiplying the number of minutes played times each of your minute averages, you can extrapolate how many of each metric you accumulated during that time.

Your open gyms right now are likely 2 to 3 times per week. On the off-days, it’s then your responsibility to fill in the gaps to hit your weekly progression.

There’s a lot of information here. It might be too much to swallow. So, if there’s enough interest in this, I’d be happy to create a spreadsheet that automatically tracks all of this for you.

Just shoot me an email to let me know you want it and if there’s enough demand, I’ll build it out.

Soul. Be more unreasonable.

I know a lot of you are thinking about how unreasonable the reverse engineering process is… and I agree with you.

However, I have no interest in being reasonable. If you want to chase excellence, then you shouldn’t either.

“The reasonable man conforms to the world. The unreasonable man expects the world to conform to him. Therefore, all progress is dependent on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

Last week’s podcast AMA ⬇️

Volleyball Arm Care, Building Aggressiveness, and Coaching Mindset

You can also listen on ​Spotify​ or ​Apple Podcasts​.

IN THIS EPISODE:

01:00 – How to Manage Hitter’s Shoulder in Volleyball

07:00 – When to Push Through Pain vs. When to Rest an Injury

08:53 – Helping a Discouraged Athlete with Low Playing Time

09:50 – The Jalen Hurts Story: Being the Ultimate Teammate

16:59 – How to Break an Athlete’s Self-Made Mental Barriers

20:10 – The “High Expectation, High Support” Coaching Method

23:24 – Using a “Cookie Jar” of Past Wins to Build Confidence

25:55 – How to Help a Young Athlete Who Isn’t Aggressive

We’re recording another “Ask Me Anything” episode this week. If you have any athlete development, sports performance, rehab, or life questions for me, send them ​here!​ (Or just email me back if you find that easier.)

A couple important things…

1. This newsletter is completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, and illustrating. The best way you can support it and allow it to continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to ​gtperformance.co/newsletter​ and they can subscribe there!
2. Everything in these newsletters and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or your athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.

Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!

Be >,

Zach

Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS