Friday, July 17, 2009

Less is More When Done More Less

Does this statement above make sense?? Probably not, but let me explain it to you as it is one of the important parts of my basketball practice philosophy.

I do not believe in working on one thing, with one drill for a long time in practice. In my humble opinion it is better to work on a skill with a bunch of different short drills than one or two long drill. For instance, you are going to work on shooting for 20 minutes in practice on a given day. Instead of doing one drill for 20 minutes or two drills for 10 minutes each, I would MUCH RATHER have four 5 minute drills to accomplish the same things. I PERSONALLY feel that doing this fights complacency and boredom. I think it does a better job of teaching players to master skills and not simply master drills.

Furthermore, I would rather work on a given skill for a few minutes every day than for a long time for just one or two days. Some coaches like to spend 25 minutes a week on rebounding in one big 25 minute chunk. It is my belief that players will get more out of it if you do a rebounding drill 5 minutes each day for the entire week. Players seem to retain the information better when they are hit with it for a little bit every day.

One downfall of doing this is that initially it takes a little bit longer to teach all the drills. But once players have done the drills once or twice you can snap from one to the next in rapid succession with little downtime in between. The benefits of having a bunch of different drills greatly outweighs the time lost in teaching the drills, in my humble opinion.

I try to incorporate these ideas into practice every day. Keep things short, keep things different, and keep things moving. I think this makes practices and workouts flow better. What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to comment!

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