Every Exercise Steph Curry’s Trainer Makes Him Do | The Assist | GQ Sports

It's a tough job because I'm the guy who has to tell the greatest shooter who ever lived that he's not good enough. This is Brandon Payne. I am Stefan Curry's personal performance and skills coach and have been working with him for almost a decade. When I looked at the landscape of NBA players, there was only one player I wanted to work with and that was Stefan Curry. When Steph and I first got together, he was actually coming off ankle surgery, so it was the first major ankle surgery he had in the NBA and at that time it was about modifying drills, modifying movements. to make sure we were doing it safely and try to build that support.

I'm not the reason he's gotten better. Stefan is the talent. I'm the guy. that just puts a little bit on top, you know, a little bit of seasoning on top of the steak is what I like to say, you know, just to help it out. I started training at the college level when I was still in college and one of the things I had to do was not only the strength conditioning part because at that level of basketball you don't have a very big budget, but I also had to handle a lot of our skill work, so figuring that out led me to experiment with different

exercise

s and then made me want to learn more about how the body learns, how the brain and muscles communicate, how to activate things, and basically, how to create more efficient workouts to get the most bang for our buck, so strength conditioning used to be.

It's kind of a blanket term that we use for lifting weights and getting stronger, but now strength conditioning involves so much more, including the ability to be mobile and flexible joints and muscles, that's such an important part of what we do because if we do not do it. "We don't have fluid movements, it's very difficult for players to take the things we're showing them from a skills standpoint, really put them into games like now in our off-season progression with things we're not even in a position to do." point where we can." Regarding lifting, we are still working on mobility, we are still working on corrective actions for small injuries that occurred during last season.

We don't want the things we do on the court to be done at the wrong time because we're actually building. In correct movement patterns, we actually have some technology that will allow us to know each day what the optimal training window will be based on feedback from the central nervous system, so we use that to tell us what time of day the Train can tell it. . your three to five window is your strongest window today. I'm trying to get him in and out in 90 minutes, 90 minutes to two hours, but he'll work three days in a row, they'll take a day off when we start ramping up. increase your movement in terms of how much you run each day and our workouts will probably change and go to two days with one day off and that day off will not be completely free, it will be a strictly recovery day and then as you get closer to the season, you'll probably take about four or five days in a row off, give them another mini vacation and then we'll go about five days in a row before training camp in the '80s with the Warriors and we're looking at as many ways as possible. as we can to get him better without putting extra miles on his body so you know virtual reality is something we've started to add on days where he's strictly in recovery so now let's talk about some of the tennis ball and basketball.

exercise

s that we do with Stefan and some of our other NBA players, so we start with some basic tennis ball stuff and then progressively overload what we're looking for here as we watch breathing patterns, watch their posture. "We are looking at the tempo and speed of the basketball and we are making sure that the basketball and the tennis ball operate independently so that the speed of the tennis ball does not dictate the speed of the basketball and the speed of the basketball does." We can't dictate the speed of the tennis ball, once we see that they can do that we will take them to the next level, so now we are going to do a high bounce sketch to give you an idea of ​​how detailed we are.

We're even very specific about the path the ball takes under Stefan's legs. We don't want the ball to go under your glute. We don't want it under you, but we want it under your knee. We make a lot of lateral space. If you watch Stefan play during games, he spaces himself a lot from side to side, or goes between his legs or behind his back, the path the ball takes affects his shooting mechanics, so if he doesn't receive the ball cleanly from one side of your body to the other will affect your shot the process of acquiring new skills is really no different than when you learn something in school, so we have to train our brain to learn and absorb, so we have to be strategic about how we stimulate the brain. make sure we understand how long peak stimulation lasts, kind of like watching the same TV show over and over again, and know that if you watched an episode of a show that's really funny the third time you watch it, it's not as funny the fourth time. time you see it. you can recite each word the fifth time you see it there is no root we look at the heart rate we look at just the body in Kansas we look at all those things to make sure we are in an optimal learning environment at all times once we notice your breathing The pattern it's normal and you're not compensating or you're not holding your breath because that's the first place we've seen neuromuscular overload occur.

By holding our breath, we will then progress to the next exercise, so we will go from controlling the stops to controlling the rebounds, so now we have to react to the things on the wall. We are using the tennis ball in overload to judge how well you are processing information. Having the wall there also allows us to raise the difficulty level a little more. Stefan, we don't do a lot of individual moves like that, we want you to do a lot of things that challenge your speed, challenge your hand-eye coordination, making sure you're coordinated on all the moves, so what are we going to do now? it's what we call a high offset, so you're going to throw the tennis ball, cross it twice and catch it with the same hands so you have very quick handling of the ball with very sharp hands and you have to make sure that you process information because This is It's very easy to overload here, so now, the way we progress, because footwork is very, very important for Stefan, now we add an element of footwork to what we call a scissor foot, so which is probably the best of the line in terms of difficulty.

So now we're going to have a player with one hand open to the tennis ball, so it's almost like juggling with one hand while dribbling with the other, so this is the ultimate in terms of being able to process information and handle the ball. basketball at the same time, this is a decision-making exercise, so the ability to handle the ball, have all this external stimulus and execute, is no different than making decisions at the end of games, when you are in situations difficult, he is a little fatigued, there are other really good things. players on the court, guys trying to defend him, he has to make the right decision, whether it's passing the ball or making a shot, so the overload of the tennis ball, the overload of the second basketball, all those things are overloading what would be easier with a basketball, so if you take the crossover, take away the tennis ball, suddenly the basketball feels faster, it feels easier, the first place we look for overload is with the mouth and breathing, sometimes you'll see them, you know they'll lick each other. lips or if they clench their jaws too much or close their mouth, the next place you look is you'll see them start to bounce, you'll see them start to rot back and forth, then you can look at their hips. your hips start doing funny things or your knees start doing what we call valgus.

The hard part with Stefan is that he is so smart and so good with all these exercises. I constantly have to come up with new things to try to challenge him. encourage him, but one of the things we still struggle with is with Stefan, with the two-ball dribble. He likes to get into what we call a hinge position where he sticks his nose out in front of his toes, that's something I see sometimes. TV, when I don't watch games, drives me crazy because he knows more, but a lot of coaches maybe don't measure up to that category of understanding how important it is to pay attention to the mechanics and the little things on stationary drills, does he?

How does that really affect things? on the court continuing with our activation and now combining ball handling with footwork. It's very important for our players, especially Stephan, to have very clean and efficient footwork, so one of the ways we work on that is with the footwork ladder, so that

makes

the agility ladder traditional. without a basketball, but since we're dealing with point guards and we're dealing with ball skills, we want to mix the basketball into our footwork ladder, we're looking at breathing patterns to make sure the player isn't too overloaded how to do it. We're not breathing, we're also looking for fluidity, this movement of the hands moving towards the feet, making sure

every

thing moves together and quickly, okay, so the next one we're going to go to is called shuffle hop and shuffle hop.

It's where we really have to focus and we really have to focus. This is where we're going to look at foot patterns because we want to be fast but we want to be efficient. Probably the biggest mistake we see players make on the ladder is they take extra steps for extra steps and that essentially slows you down because

every

extra step we take is another step. The defender has a chance to get in our face the way the Warriors played. They are very dispersed. There is a lot of movement. involved and you can't really turn your head from side to side to see what's happening on both sides, so he has to be able to see all of that in one field of vision, so having the ability to help and train that with the Virtual realities become very important to us because it gives us another way to improve without having to move too much.

There are several different types of exercises or games that he performs and there are games that last 10 to 15 minutes. Sometimes there are objects moving towards it and it has multiple objects. he has to select a specific one, sometimes there are multiple objects and he has the multi task inside this, basically, it's just a way to train decision making. I think what he has improved the most is his ability to create space and the uniqueness. What he's done in the last six or seven years is that he's now become a master at controlling his defender, putting them in the position he wants them to be in or getting into space.

What he knows is that the shot is for Stefan to take. create space and for Stefan to keep the ball safe when he drives to the basket, we have to make sure our shoulders reach the inside of our defenders chest, so we call it the chest battle if I can get my shoulder in the middle. My defender's chest, the ball is protected and I'm playing with leverage, so with this drill we want to make sure he twists and turns his shoulders as the ball passes between his legs, so in all of these drills we can add footwork, we add numbers. you have reactionary elements, you have to be able to handle the ball, you have to be able to make decisions, you have to make shots with it, what are the training tools that we use and is it very effective with Steph, the Werdum ax and what?

What the Werdum ax does for us is that it allows us to add a little bit of external resistance to each movement, so not only does it help us with our movement in terms of acceleration and deceleration, but it also helps us learn things in a way faster. so adding a light load to a movement really helps muscle memory and helps us absorb what we're doing and it's very important for a guy like Stefan who stops, starts and changes direction a lot, we really have to train his patterns deceleration in the same way. much, if not more, than like acceleration patterns because we have to be able to change direction efficiently and mechanically like with the other exercises.

Every time we're trying to get Stefan to learn something quick, we're trying to add something new to his game, a quick way to help him learn it is to hook them up to green Max and have him perform that move specifically four or five times and we'll get him out of there, we'll go right to court. directly into that exercise and you will be able to perform it without problems, with much more fluidity than if we did not use this machine.He was the first to recognize it well if I can't pass the guy in front.

On my part there is always space behind me. I think he has revolutionized basketball in that way. You know, my eleven-year-old son doesn't really think much about performing a 22-foot jumper in a game and you know, maybe ten. Years ago we would never allow a kid that age to make that shot, but basketball is evolving to that point now and that's all because Stefan has changed.