Individual Skill Development

A few videos circulating through social media endorse individual training, and, naturally, are promoted by individual skill trainers. Of course individual trainers promote individual training; it is their business, their source of income. As an NBA coach said when forwarding one clip, “No conflict of interest there.” Nearly all content in today’s social media age is marketing or self-promotion.

One?video?shows Tracy McGrady talking about a conversation with Kobe Bryant. “When I was in my prime, I never played pick up basketball. When I worked out in the offseason, everything was skill work. Me and Kobe took a trip to Paris, and all we worked on was individual skills.”

The video continues with a trainer saying, “This will continue to be my message…the greatest risk to the future of basketball is not trainers, not shooting deep threes like Curry. The greatest risk is a message that playing pickup is the key to success and that a human being has to train against bodies in order to get transferable skills.”

First, McGrady mentioned his prime. He did not say when he was in high school or even when he was an NBA rookie. He was already elite, arguably the best player in the world, and had played tens of thousands of hours in games and against defenders. An elite NBA player in his prime, and a youth, high-school, college, or even young professional player are not the same, and do not have the same training needs. Basing a youth player’s training on an NBA player’s training in his prime is nonsensical.

One can agree with McGrady, while disagreeing with the trainer’s comments that followed, assuming the comments referred to non-elites (professionals). I alluded to this last week: McGrady’s offseason in his prime, as an example, should focus on the last 1%, the minuscule,?the details, the probably imperceptible improvements because he had mastered the first 99%. He also played 100 games a year and had the ball in his hands for a large percentage of possessions, meaning he received tens of thousands of defended and decision-making repetitions throughout the year. Non-prime NBA players have not mastered the first 99%: Improving decision-making against defenders is more important for the vast majority of players than changing the length of their first step by 10 cm to improve quickness. Focus on the big rocks first.

Everyone can learn from professionals, but very little is transferable directly from NBA players to youth players. We should be more interested in the player’s training in his youth or developmental years (Bryant’s pickup games in Philadelphia and at UCLA when he was 17 and 18 years old are legendary, and he notoriously played soccer in his younger years, to which he has attributed some of his success) than copying an NBA player’s training once he has reached his prime.

Now, even the development years and stories are not directly transferable, as the game has evolved, as well as our knowledge of training, sports science, and more since Bryant and McGrady were teenagers in the 1990s, and many NBA players reach the NBA despite their training, not because of it; often there are misattributions of a player’s success. We attribute success to one thing — Bryant playing soccer, Bryant saying he only trained individually — which confirms our own beliefs, but which may or may not have caused the player’s success.

Not every single thing an NBA player did contributed to his success. Dwight Howard notoriously was?addicted to sugar: He ate the equivalent of 24 chocolate bars’ worth of sugar every day. Should we encourage youth players to binge sugar because it worked out in the end for Howard? You laugh, but why is attributing a player’s success to his diet any less valid than one aspect of his training, whether playing soccer, training individually, playing AAU, or running a mile every day in the offseason? Coaches hear about an NBA player running a mile every day in the offseason and many nod in agreement, and maybe even use the story to motivate their players to run a mile every day. Why not encourage more sugar in their diets? Howard is a first-ballot Hall of Famer: Shouldn’t we learn from him and copy his approach?

Second, and this is my disagreement with McGrady (and Bryant): Pickup or unstructured basketball?is?skill development. Not always, just as not all practice drills are skill development and not all individual training is skill development (see?21st Century Guide to Individual Skill Development?and?Fake Fundamentals: Volume 3?for more). However, play is learning.

Years ago, I wrote about a comment by Brett Brown about NBA players not developing their dribbling skills as well as their shooting skills. He suggested dribbling was a skill one must learn at a young age. I suggested the difference was not in the skill, but in the practice. Most NBA players practice their dribbling with straight-line, basic dribbling drills and eliminating mistakes. They emphasize harder drills, maybe by adding extra moves or having a trainer push against them or slap their arms, things with no relation to successful game ball-handling.

Children often use the same drills, but children engage in more play too, at least traditionally: They play tag or 1v1 or 21. I wrote about the two nine-year-olds who played one-vs-one in the hallway outside the gym after every practice as their parents talked; they were playing, having fun, and passing time, but they also were learning to make moves in a tight space and read a defender. Which leads to better game moves, beating a defender in a tight space while having fun or having a?trainer hit you while you are dribbling in a straight line?

Children learn through play. We often cite the learning that occurs in young children, and the need to learn new skills during these?windows of opportunity, but rarely mention this period of learning and growth also coincides with the time when children engage in the most play and unstructured play experiences.

We (adults) are biased toward explicit learning. We imagine the proper way to learn a skill is to follow an expert’s directions and feedback in a very linear, progressive manner. Adults learning something new often take lessons; they do not just try to learn through trial and error. A businessman scheduled to play golf with his partners does not show up and learn through trial and error; he hires a golf pro to instruct him on the proper golf swing in order to impress his clients, or at least not embarrass himself. Children are less concerned with mistakes and embarrassment, and do not begin to distinguish between effort and ability until 10-11 years of age (Folmer et al., 2008). Trying hard is succeeding regardless of outcome. Children explore, fail, and try again, and this process leads to learning. Children learn implicitly through play through this trial and error process, whereas adults often avoid things at which they are not competent, especially in public settings, and even more so when they have giant egos (which any professional athlete must possess) and an expectation of competence (which we expect from a professional athlete in anything related to the sport). Children develop dribbling skills because of the practice and play, not their age.

Instruction, feedback, carefully-crafted exercises, and more can help players; they play a role. I am not suggesting an abdication of coaching or instructing.?The argument should not be?only?one or the other. However, we underestimate the learning that occurs through play, trial and error, and exploration, and the benefits of this implicit learning, which, studies have shown, include a greater resistance to pressure and choking than explicitly-learned skills (Masters, 1992).

Finally, despite McGrady’s story, Kobe Bryant played pickup. He may not have played pickup, or a lot of pickup later in his career, but he played pickup as he developed, and he played one-vs-one and three-vs-three in the offseasons, placing?various constraints?on himself to improve the defense against him. Success and development is multifactorial; we cannot reduce Kobe Bryant’s success to one thing (individual training) regardless of interviews and stories.

Now, regarding the trainer’s comments: Naturally individual trainers argue against pickup games because nobody profits financially. However, if one fails to see the value of play, and training against defenders, just unsubscribe because ultimately, basketball is a team game.?

There are no individual skills. Every skill includes an interaction with the environment, including defenders, teammates, location, and more. Unless players are practicing for three-point shooting competitions, players need to practice against defenders. Not every single repetition, but, as I have argued, players, coaches, and trainers need a good reason not to practice against a defender. There are reasons, there are good undefended drills, there are things to address individually rather than in a team setting; however, the coach and players must know why, and should be very specific.?

The default should be defended practice (with non-beginners), and players and trainers should regress for specific reasons or to address specific aspects of a skill, as opposed to the default being unopposed practice with progressions to add defenders later.

As I have written ad nauseam at this point, individual training is not wrong, if done correctly, but most of the time, it is exercise; just drills for repetitions. Grinding is not skill development. Drills solve a problem. Too often, workouts are just that: Working out, exercising. Going through drills. Getting reps strengthens a habit, but is not developing a skill or learning. Increasing consistency through the accumulation of repetitions leads to some improvement, depending on age and skill level, but strengthening the habit is getting better at one’s current level: A 30% three-point shooter reduces variation through hundreds of repetitions, and becomes more consistent at shooting 30%.

The 30% three-point shooter improves to 40% through some combination of changing technique (specific, deliberate practice), becoming more comfortable shooting against defenders, improving one’s ability to read cues and anticipate shots, shooting better shots, getting stronger, and shooting with more confidence. Strength develops primarily off the court through specific practice (weight lifting, plyometrics, etc.) and changing technique often requires deliberate practice, typically individual practice. The other paths to improvement require bodies to practice against.

Also, as I have written previously, everyone refers to Kobe Bryant’s practice and training in the offseason, but leave the results unstated, leaving us to imagine a linear, year by year ascendency due to the heavily mythologized volume of work. Bryant notoriously made 1000 shots per day every day in every offseason, but he never shot over 90% from the free-throw line in a season; he had one season (2002-03) with a higher three-point percentage than his rookie season; and his field-goal percentage peaked in his 6th (of 20) season. There are other ways to improve beyond percentages, but there is no direct line of transfer from his 1000 made shots per day in the offseason to his game shooting performance.?

If we evaluate the shooting practice solely by examining shooting percentages, the practice appears ineffective and inefficient, and one could argue his shooting statistics demonstrate a need for opposed practice and/or pickup games to improve the transfer of practice to games. Most of his learning and development appears to have occurred before he eliminated pickup games. The argument that his results demonstrate a need for pickup games and opposed practice is at least as compelling as the argument for solely individual skill work espoused by his comments.

Individual training has a role, but the training should be individualized. A group doing the same drills one after another is not individual skill development; it is unopposed practice. When a player does the same individual workout with multiple players, the practice is not individualized; it is just drills. The goal in individual training should be to improve a specific aspect of a skill, not to count repetitions. Making 500 shots in a session is working out; it strengthens the habit. It does not necessarily improve performance.?

Once a player has learned a skill, which takes 20-50 hours, more does not cause improvement. Players need deliberate practice to improve beyond this point, according to Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, the expert on deliberate practice and exceptional performance. Practice must be mindful with drills carefully designed to elicit specific improvements to performance.

A 40% three-point shooter can focus on volume to strengthen the habit to reduce variance and possibly make incremental improvements. However, the improvements are more likely to come through other areas, whether increasing strength, increasing variation of shots, improving comfort when defended, better feel for the distance one needs to shoot comfortably, and more. Players do not learn these lessons in unopposed drills. Individual training may focus on an aspect of footwork or improving shooting when breathing heavily; these are the details to address in individual skill development.

Therefore, the 30% three-point shooter likely needs individual drills to focus on specific adjustments to his or her shot to improve her performance. The 40% three-point shooter likely is better off with opposed to practice to prepare better for game situations to better retain and transfer improvements to game performance or individual practice on the details, the 1%. Regardless, reps on reps on reps has a poor cost:benefit ratio because players need thousands and thousands of repetitions for slight improvements, whereas specific, individualized drills can create large improvements in far fewer repetitions.

As an example, earlier this year, I?tweeted two drills. One was a typical group shooting drill, often mislabeled a?game-like shooting drill?(Fake Fundamentals: Volume 2?and?Evolution of 180 Shooter: A 21st Century Guide) because the players ran into their shots and attempted from a location within our sets, and the second was a movement shooting drill, which I use for various reasons with different players. When I had posted the drills on their own previously, coaches responded that the first drill was a “great drill”, whereas they called the second drill “stupid” and suggested I did not know anything about skill development or shooting.

In reality, the first drill was just a drill; the drill challenged the players because they dribbled two balls and passed one of them, and they got up some shots. This was a morning “skill session”, which, due to gym availability, was conducted in small groups. I believe this video was the day before the game when players asked to get up shots to get their rhythm and see the ball go through the net, a totally valid reason on the day before a game, but not?individual skill development. The second drill was used with a specific purpose; he often shot off-balance and needed to get more vertical off his shot Therefore, we used some different movements to challenge his deceleration and balance when shooting.

Our perception is the first drill is better because it looks more like the game, but, in reality, the second one had a more specific purpose, with more individualized feedback, and was much more aligned with deliberate practice (that does not mean the drill is better or to use the drill; it means create a drill around a purpose). Individual skill development actually looks more like the second drill, whereas the first drill is indicative of workouts, habit development, and improvement through effort and conditioning.

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