top of page
Hoop Firm FAQ
Although nobody knows the exact amount of hours you need to practice to become the best player ever, there are some philosophies that we can use to guage where our discipline and work ethic lies. And what better way to guage your progress than to see a bar some of the greats have set. Lets take a look at three regimens of some of the most competitive athletes to ever grace this planet.
Kyrie Irving: Known to believe that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, Kyrie tracked how many hours he had practiced every day until the end of his senior year in high school. According to Kyrie, he would play all day after school. By the time he graduated high school, he had practiced well over 10,000 hours meaning he was already a master of the game before he even reached the NBA.
Kobe Bryant: Known to practice 3-4 times a day in high school, he sometimes logged in 8 hours of practice in a day. He was known to start his days at 5am and it seemed the optimal practice time per session was 2 hours. He basically got as many 2 hour sessions in as he possibly could within a day.
Lebron James: He is also known to start his days very early and an average day for him is 3 sessions per day. It also seems like his optimal session length is about 2 hours at a time.
The basic standard for an effiecient amount of sleep is 8 hours. Sleep schedules vary but if you feel tired when you wake up or have a hard time getting up on your own, you probably need more sleep. As an athlete you want to be as efficient as possible and if your body or mind is tired, you are not helping your case.
All players should still be working on their game throughout the season. If you do not, your improvement will fall way short of what it should have been. Also, by working on your game, you will continue to be in tune with your skills as an athlete.
As far as lifting weights, many athletes lift weights during the season in order to maintain their strenght gains that they have made in the off-season. This should be monitored with precision as you do not want to compromise your play when it comes game time.
A person can be in relatively good shape and not be in "basketball shape". This is simply because majority of the movements in basketball are sport specific (running, defensive slides, jumping, boxing out, etc). These movements are kind of hard to emulate efficiently if you are only doing sprints as a source of cardio for example. You may be a great runner, which is one part of the game. But your defensive slides and other parts of your game may very well be subpar because they have not been worked in a competitive setting consistently. So it is always beneficial to play basketball consistently to work on all of these other aspects of a game.
There are many ways in which you can incorporate free-throws into your practice. A simple one is to shoot a bulk amount and record your makes and misses. For example, record how many shots you make out of 10, 20, 30, etc. Another great way to practice free-throws is when your tired. When your in a live basketball game, your not always going to have all of your energy and this can break your focus on the free-throw line. Teaching yourself to push through the pain and knock down your shots shows great mental toughness.
Ambidextrous is the ability to use the left and right hand equally. If you can only be effective on the court using one hand, you are limiting yourself and your abilities to a high degree. Defenders will look to exploit this by forcing you to use your weak hand and keep you on one side of the court.
bottom of page

