Today’s show welcomes back Bobby Whyte.  Bobby is an athletic performance and basketball skill enhancement trainer operating out of northern New Jersey.  Bobby recently appeared on episode 178 of the podcast https://www.just-fly-sports.com/podcast-178-bobby-whyte/, speaking on his integration of strength and skill training for basketball.

The world of sports performance can easily suffer from isolationism in the realm of strength, speed and movement skill.  In the recent podcast with Tony Villani, the difference between 40-yard dash speed, and actual game speed in the NFL was made very clear.  We need to understand more about the nuances, and principles of movement in sport to prepare athletes for it, instead of over-focusing on linear speed mechanics.

When we understand the over-arching principles of learning and movement, we can apply them to any sport or skill.  Throughout this podcast, we’ve had intelligent minds like Adarian Barr speaking on biomechanical principles, and then folks like Michael Zweifel, Tyler Yearby, and Rob Gray talking about foundational principles of learning and skill acquisition.  Bobby Whyte has been using those principles, and tying it all together in his basketball performance program.

On the show today, Bobby Whyte speaks how he has taken concepts picked up from Adarian Barr and applied them to movement training and acceleration in the game of basketball.  He shares his thoughts on key physical abilities in basketball, and how he uses motor learning principles to help athletes improve their specific skill array for the game.  Bobby will speak on how he has taken motor learning principles into landing mechanics and common injury prevention themes in training, and finally Bobby will talk about how he specifically seeks to develop the all-important confidence level in his players in his training sessions.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

5:21 – What Bobby has been learning and integrating since his last time on the podcast 2 years ago

6:45 – How Bobby has integrated some of Adarian Barr concepts directly into basketball speed and movement training

18:49 – How basketball, and related movement training, has universal application into many other sports, such as football

24:44 – Key physical abilities on the basketball court that can transfer into great gameplay

28:33 – The importance of chaos in basketball qualities and carryover

35:26 – How Bobby views landing and landing mechanics for his basketball athletes, and how good general strength training can go a long way in helping prevent injury without needing to do plyometrics where athletes need to move a “certain way”

42:45 – Bobby’s take on feedback and instruction in the course of coaching his athletes, and avoiding over-coaching

51:54 – How confidence in one’s specific game and skill abilities is a key and defining factor in athletes that make it to the next level of performance

59:01 – What is a “good drill”?

1:03:14 – Bobby’s thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of the vast amount of information available to athletes today

“The best athletes can maintain (Adarian Barr’s) athletic posture until… it’s time to cut, it’s time to shoot, etc.”

“When I’m falling (to drop into a basketball move), I’m almost pulling myself down”

“A lot of players will go into that horizontal fall, and there will be a pause before they get moving… our goal is to smooth that out”

“They players that struggle with (coming up off the knees into an acceleration) struggle to get on their arches”