Basketball Training 101 - Building the Right Muscles

Basketball is a sport centered on power.

Physical ability is king and the higher you jump, the faster you run and the more punishment you can take will determine your ability to dominate the game. But to get all of this power you need the right kind of muscles.

Players, especially younger players, are oblivious to the fact that there are 3 different kinds of skeletal muscle in the human body - all of which have different properties and uses.

Type 1 muscles are the muscles that long distance runners try to develop because this kind of muscle is good at putting a constant amount of power out for a long time.

Type 2b muscles are the muscles that basketball players should be looking to develop. This kind of muscle is used for movements that last only a few moments but that are explosively powerful like sprinting and jumping.

There is also another type of muscle - Type 2a - which is the most interesting muscle type because it is this muscle that has properties of both type 1 and type 2b. It can also be influenced to become more like either muscle by targeting training techniques.

Basketball players should be concentrating on developing mostly type 2b muscles because these are the ones that are used for basically every movement on the basketball court. Training these muscles is done by looking at what kind of movements this muscle type is used for then overloading the stimulus for this type of muscle to work.

This essentially means that to train your 'power type' muscles you need to do low rep - high intensity training. By doing this you specifically target the type 2b muscles because this is the type of movement they are meant for. Type 1 muscles are not really used to capacity here because the stimulus is too great and so they are of nearly no use.

A simple example of such training is squats. By doing only 5 squats but doing them with an overload of weight we specifically target the type 2 muscles. Less reps means that the type 1 muscles are not needed because the training is power training and not stamina training.

By doing this type of training another thing happens - type 2a muscles are starting to transform into type 2b muscles. As this happens the percentage of quick twitch (type 2b) to slow twitch (type 1) increases.

It is this ratio increase that will allow you to become a player with muscles better suited to the sport you love - basketball.



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