It’s the morning after, and all of my muscles from the chest up are in pain.
My shoulders feel like they are filled with cement, and raising my arms over my head is nearly impossible.
I had hoped that my body would recover quicker after the basketball workout – I couldn’t have been more wrong.
After I completed a baseball workout just a week earlier, I could barely walk as my quads felt like bricks for nearly a week. It’s a sick case of ironic humor since I swapped that pain from my lower to my upper body.
This is the second of a three-part series that gives an in-depth look at how not only college athletes train but also how an average Joe can handle various Division I workouts. This week, The Pine Belt News was granted access to do a workout led by Southern Miss’ head basketball strength and conditioning coach Brian King.
King is less intense, and his friendly nature and smile are honestly deceiving, considering the physical aftermath my body endures.
THE SCIENCE
King, who spent two seasons as a member of the Golden Eagles football team, has only had the job since June. So, unlike the first part of the series, King is still implementing his program as both the men’s and women’s programs are still learning how to deal with his workload. But another reason to start slow is that King’s goal is to keep his players’ bodies naturally progressing and ensure they physically peak at the right time of the season.
“Normally, I’ll start off a program with a higher volume, which means more reps at a lower weight,” King explained. “There’s a motor learning aspect of it. If they don’t have weight room knowledge, you can teach the patterns. It also lays a good foundation.
“Training is really simple. When you take the mindset of, I want to master the basics first, that can really change your outlook on programming and training.”
This puts me in the same spot as his athletes to a certain degree in terms of how King breaks the workout down for me. My challenge this week is the equivalent of an early off-season workout, but my day is slightly watered down since the volume is lower and there are a few exercises less than a normal lift. This is partly done to avoid repeating what I completed last week and so I can experience workouts that are intentional for basketball players.
One of King’s biggest focuses for basketball players is their shoulders, so every workout will have some type of push-pull dynamic.
“When you get to be more specific with the basketball team is that I’m going to add a little bit more shoulder stability and shoulder care,” King explained. “I’ll have a little more emphasis on overhead work. That doesn’t mean we neglect horizontal pushes like bench press and things like that. But basketball is a sport, they’re playing in an overhead position a lot. I do want to make sure that we have got strong shoulders, stable shoulders, and mobile shoulders.”
King’s other focuses are ankles and hamstrings so that he can ensure that he can develop force production and injury prevention.
“Athletes would go through a long season and not perform at the level they were initially,” King said. “I attribute that to fatigue and other things. But in season, I want to make sure that when it matters, when we get into conference play and postseason play, that’s when we are at our best physically in terms of power output.”
DYNAMIC WARMUP
Immediately we jump into some low-level cardio that involves variations of running, jogging, shuffling and skips. The entire warmup consists of essentially some sort of active exercise that requires me moving across the Reed Green Coliseum court at a higher intensity than average stretch.
The is intently designed to raise my heart rate, which by the end of the warmup is standing at 154 beats per minute and is where it’ll stay for the entire duration of the workout.
By the end, I’m huffing and puffing pretty good, and my warmup is starting to feel more like a workout itself, especially since this so-called warmup is not over.
My first warmup in the weight room is a hang-clean complex with a barbell. The hang clean involves lifting a barbell from a hanging position from the mid-thigh level to the front rack position. I’ll start doing this with no weights, but I’ll gradually raise my weight to 155 pounds.
There’s no question in my mind that this exercise is the root of why I couldn’t raise my arms the next day – but my naïve self would be clueless that such soreness could ever exist.
We next shift to the mobility warmup doing ankle drivers. These require standing on arched steps and pushing your knee forward over the middle toe, pinkie toe and big toe. After doing a round of shrugs, we shift back to mobility using hip and groin drivers. I highly recommend Googling these because they feel amazing.
It’s worth noting this is the only time I’ll feel amazing during the rest of the workout.
THIS MAN CAN’T JUMP
There’s a reason that I ran cross country and track in high school and that’s because I lacked some key aspects of athleticism – jumping being one of them.
As the weight for the shrugs grows from 95, 115, 135, to 155 pounds, I’ll also do a trap bar vertical jump, another exercise meant to develop a basketball players’ explosiveness.
The most interesting aspect of this part of the workout is that we test my vertical jump with a jump mat that measures how high I can go.
King uses the newly implemented device weekly to measure how his athletes’ bodies feel. As mentioned, King’s goal is to ensure his athletes are hitting a peak at the right time, and so by consistently gathering data from the jump mat’s metrics, he can judge how the athletes’ bodies are feeling.
“I don’t want to see those numbers start to decrease,” King said. “I’ll use that weekly to make sure and track if we are on pace. If you drop more than a full inch that does start to be worry. Or you might see 90% of the team progressing then if there’s a 10% that are not and regressing then it could be something else.
“So you got to kind of find that that fine line of putting enough on the body to adapt to and to truly maintain or get better.”
For me, this is an ego test, but unfortunately, after about six total jumps, my vertical jump numbers steadily decrease. In my case, it’s because of a lack of athleticism. I register a best of 19 inches, six centimeters.
On average, King’s basketball players sit around 30 inches. I make the mistake of challenging King, and in one attempt, he posts a 34.
Reminder, King played college football, and I did not.
RELIVING HIGH SCHOOL TRAUMA
I’ll be the first to admit that pull-ups are my ultimate kryptonite in the gym. Even in my best shape back in high school, the most I could do consecutively was maybe three reps. It’s just something I wasn’t designed to do.
When King mentioned that I had to do three sets of eight, let’s just say that I didn’t feel confident.
If you struggle to do pull-ups like I do, you can use a workout band to aid you. The band is wrapped on the rack of a squat stand, which is what you rest a barbell on. This requires me to climb carefully to the pull-up bar as I place my legs on the band to ensure I don’t injure my groin.
But what’s even more heart-pounding is that as you feel the burn from the pull-ups, you start to lose balance on the workout band. I develop a real fear of having a catastrophic accident in a prized part of my groin. My fears are warranted since King mentions that he has seen this happen several times in his career.
We move on to the kneel landmine press, which requires you to get down on one knee, shoulder a barbell in one hand, and place your other hand on your ribcage to monitor spinal positioning. This wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m really starting to feel the shoulder shrugs, and that, coupled with dealing with my lifetime’s sworn enemy of pull-ups, makes it a lot more difficult.
Already, I feel my shoulders stiffening up.
AN EVIL VILLAIN RETURNS
An old torture device made a reappearance for this workout – the TRX cables. If you remember, these killed me during the baseball workout. But unlike before, they aren’t meant to be used as core exercise but rather as shoulder care.
My shoulders do not care for these exercises. This time, I was required to move my arms in the shape of an I, Y and then a T. It’s way more challenging than it seems.
Rounding out this group of exercises are glider hamstring curls. You lie on your back, place your feet on the glider, and pull your feet towards your body while keeping your hips off the floor.
This coincides with King’s favorite exercise, the landmine lateral skater squats. This requires leaning on a barbell, doing a backward lunge with my inside leg, and then following with a knee drive. It’s challenging at first because it’s hard to master the move itself, which requires both balance and coordination. To make matters more difficult, you can’t see your feet, and you fully depend on situational awareness.
It’s five reps on each leg for three sets, but by the end, I can happily report that I mastered it.
“You are really impressing me with these I have to tell you,” King says. “I’ve seen a lot worse doing this for the first time.
“That went way better than I expected.”
I’m doing this with just 11 pounds, but King mentions that he’s had athletes go upwards to 90 pounds. It’s another unasked for ego check.
I close out the day by throwing the medicine ball to help with more core. It sounds easy, but doing it for 20 reps from three different angles frankly sucks.
I’m down another 750 calories. That figure is on par with what King’s female basketball players burn, while his male players only lose about 100 more.
In the end, King grades my overall performance with a B-, which is an improvement from the C+ that I received in baseball.
Despite the better grade, after this workout, I’ve never been more assured that basketball was never my calling in life.
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