Strength Training Strategies Every Basketball Player Should Have

• By Grant Young

In basketball, strength is an essential attribute for any player. It provides a competitive edge when vying for rebounds, maintaining position, and driving to the basket. Moreover, being strong enables players to endure physical challenges from opponents, allowing them to execute plays with greater efficiency and resilience. Additionally, strength is indispensable for executing effective screens, fending off defenders, and playing robust defense. Ultimately, being strong not only enhances an individual player's performance but also significantly contributes to their team's overall success on the court.

Despite these clear benefits, it's surprising to see how strength is often undervalued. While attributes like speed, shooting, and ball-handling skills are highly praised, the significance of physical strength is frequently overlooked. Many people fail to recognize the crucial role that strength plays in the game. It's often underappreciated how strength enables players to hold their ground, power through contact, and execute powerful moves on the court. Despite these contributions to a player's effectiveness, strength is frequently not given the recognition it deserves in basketball.

One potential reason why basketball players don’t emphasize getting strong as part of their off-season workouts is because they don’t know how they should be increasing their strength while not sacrificing their athleticism and agility on the court. Many believe that lifting as heavy weight as possible all the time is the only reason to get strong. But in reality, there are plenty of ways to get stronger without becoming a powerlifter or putting one’s body at risk of unnecessary injury in the weight room. And Kostas Chatzichristos is the perfect person to teach you how to do so. 

Kostas Chatzichristos is currently the Director of Performance at the Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul. He is responsible for player athletic development and rehabilitation, as well as medical and performance staff management.

An eleven-year veteran in the Euroleague, prior to Fener Kostas held the same role at CSKA Moscow for eight years. 

Coach Chatzichristos’ ‘In Season Strength and Power Training’ course analyzes his philosophy in building in-season strength programs during a game-dense season, which makes it the perfect tool for basketball coaches and players to employ when building out their own strength programs. 

Why Strength is Important in Basketball?

Before Coach Chatzichristos discusses how to build out a strength training regiment for basketball players, he outlines why it’s important to have one in the first place. 

He begins by noting that every athletic, dynamic move that’s made on a basketball court is based on having strength. Given how much basketball is predicated on being explosive and making quick, powerful movements, having insufficient strength compared to peers and opponents is a significant disadvantage not only during the course of a game but also during a season and a career. 

Another important reason to build strength is the benefit it has on getting and staying healthy. Coach Chatzichristos says that having an “injury prevention” strength-building program isn’t accurate because there’s no way of truly preventing an injury from occurring in an athletic competition, but you can try to minimize the possibility of somebody getting hurt. The reason that strength building when it comes to minimizing injury is due to the joint stability it provides, the muscle fiber strength it offers, it strengthens tendons, and it also helps improve fatigue resistance. Given how difficult basketball can be in terms of endurance and cardio, building up a capacity to perform on the court for longer without getting tired is a massive benefit. 

Program Design

When it comes to designing a strength program in the season for a basketball team, there are a couple of crucial components that a coach must consider. 

One is that, regardless of what level you’re going to be coaching at (assuming it isn’t professional basketball), your players are already going to be pressed for time. Not only will they have actual on-court basketball practice to deal with, but they also have school, as well as family and social obligations. This means that when you get your players into the weight room, you need to make the time efficient and engaging, as players who aren’t as into strength training can get bored. 

It’s also important to alternate workouts between hard and medium. Not every day should be a hard day (especially during the season, when the focus needs to be on performance in the game), but not every day can be easy or medium because progress (or at least maintenance) must be made, or else there’s no point of strength training at all. But you certainly don’t want your players getting too tired or sore to the point where it affects their performance. 

Dividing players up into small groups is also a great idea because it will keep players more focused and allow the coach to give more direct, individualized feedback because they don’t need to worry about an entire team at once.  

Weekly Schedule Overview

In the sample weekly strength training program that Coach Chatzichristos curates for teams who are in the middle of their season, the first day after a game should be meant for rest (at least in the weight room) for all the players who played a lot in the game. But for anybody who didn’t play or is injured, they should be getting a good heavy weightlifting session in. The next day will be heavy for everybody, and then the day after that (which is the day before a game begins) will be catered to each player’s individual needs. 

If the next day is a game day, there should be no weight room work. And then the following two days after that game day will be the same as the first game day from that week, aside from the weight lifting being moderate difficulty instead of heavy on the second day.