Basketball Workouts And Basketball Conditioning Drills To Help You Get In-Shape For Basketball Season.

The basketball workouts videos below are designed to help you improve your agility, quickness, stamina, explosiveness, and increase your vertical on the basketball court.

As you know, basketball is a very fast-paced game and if you're not quick enough, you will have a very difficult time keeping up with the opposing player especially when you're playing defense.

Therefore, as indicated above, use these basketball workouts and basketball conditioning drills as a starting point to improve your agility, speed, endurance, total body strength, and overall conditioning as a basketball player.

Keep in mind that when you're training with weights, your goal as a basketball player is not to develope excessive muscle mass like a body builder because doing so would most likely increase your body weight which would most likely slow you down on the basketball court.

Instead, the resistance training component of your basketball workouts should primarily focus on helping you develope your power and explosiveness, which as already mentioned is essential to your success as a basketball player.

When you are training for power, the rate at which you're performing the particular exercise is the difference maker; in other words, you should perform each exercise as quickly as you physically can without compromising your technique. A good way to do this is by timing yourself when performing a certain exercise.

For example, when performing the crawl-up push-ups below, you might want to do as many as you can in a 30 seconds time frame or 45 seconds, or 60 seconds and so on.

Crawl Up Push-Ups

This is one of those basketball workouts that helps you develope upper body strength, improve your explosiveness and vertical, and it will also help you burn tons of calories so that you will be nice and trim just in time for basketball season.

This basketball conditioning drill utilizes your own body weight for resistance. All you need to perform this basketball workout is yourself and an open space.

From a standing position, you bend forward almost like you're reaching for your shoe laces. When your hands are fully extended and almost touching the floor, you crawl forward. Once your body is parallel to the floor, place your palms about shoulder width apart so that you will in a position to perform a push-up.

After performing the push-up, you crawl back up to a standing position and immediately perform a jumping-jack exercise. Repeat the entire process multiple times. You want to perform this basketball conditioning drill as quickly as possible without compromising your technique or over straining yourself.

Change of Direction Drill

As the name implies, the purpose of this basketball conditioning drill is to help you improve your overall agility and your ability to change direction quickly during a basketball game.

Being able to change direction quickly is an important skill or ability to have as a basketball player so that you can keep up with the offensive player when he tries to get past you, for example, with a crossover dribble.

To perform this basketball drill, you could either use a set of cones or chairs--it doesn't really matter. Space the chairs equal distance apart from each other. The more chairs you use, the more challenging the exercise.

As demonstrated in the video above, when you get to a chair, for instance, you suddenly change direction and repeat when you get to the next chair and so on. Remember, you want to perform this exercise as quickly as you can. A good way to ensure that you're getting better each time that you perform this basketball drill is to see how many that you can do within a pre-determined time frame.

Depending on your current fitness level, you might want to start out with two chairs or cones. As you get in better shape, then progressively increase the number of chairs in order to take your basketball workouts to the next level.

Bicep Curls and Jump Roping

Even though basketball is considered a non-contact sport, you still need to be physically strong; otherwise, you will be pushed around, especially in a situation whereby you're trying to establish your position in order to maybe grab a rebound or receive a pass in the low post.

One of many great exercises to help you get stronger so that you can handle such a situation is bicep curls. Bicep curls is an arm exercise that help you build the muscles in your bicep muscles.

However, because you're not trying to get bulky of muscle-bound, you want to perform this exercise as quickly as you can so that you will be training for power which would in turn help you enhance your explosiveness on the basketball court.

Use an amount of resistance that's comfortable but somewhat challenging. To make this a more challenging basketball conditioning routine, you perform a set of jump roping exercise immediately following the bicep curl exercise.

Doing this would enhance your basketball conditioning immensely thus allowing you to run up-and-down the basketball court during a game without getting exhausted.

Bent Over Row

As a basketball player, your core muscles (abdominals and back muscles) immensely affects your performance on the basketball court. If you don't have a strong core, your vertical, explosiveness, agility, and your ability to withstand the rigor of a physical basketball game would be seriously compromised.

There are numerous basketball workouts that you can use to train your core muscles that would ultimately help you improve your ability to jump higher. One particular exercise that you can use to train your back muscles in the bent-over row.

You can either use a pair of dumbells (as shown in the video above) or a barbell to perform this basketball drill.

To perform this exercise, while holding the dumbells in your hands, you lean forward at the waist until your chest is parallel to the floor with your arms fully extended. Make sure that you're looking up while performing this exercise, and not looking at the floor.

Now, in an upward pulling motion, lift the dumbells to your waistline while contracting your back muscles. Again, you want to perform this exercise as quickly as you can because you're training for power and not trying to gain muscle mass (see video above).