Basketball Age and why it matters ⏰

Good Afternoon,

This week’s podcast newsletter is a little delayed because we had some other more important topics to cover. So this will be a bit more of an ICYMI, type of message. 

Here is a link to the pod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLU1YDjkxbk&t=85s

Here is a link to the video that dropped today:

Let’s Jump in:

In this episode of the pod, Trey and I riffed on this idea of Basketball Age. It pulls from a larger training principle called training age. I have added a diagram below to help give context. 

There were a few really interesting aspects to this, but I think that the most important point to be made is one that we didn’t actually talk about in the conversation. 

Unlike Chronological age, Training age is not something that just happens. Your training is something that you own, and is representative of the work you put towards it rather than just days passing by. 

A topic that Trey and I are really fired up about right now is owning your own development. It looks like experimentation with workouts, workload, new moves, etc. We will be talking about it, what I can imagine, quite a bit over the next few weeks.  

So with this context, what is basketball age?

Basketball age is the total number of high-quality physical reps and mental reps you’ve stacked.

Why do I need to worry about my basketball age? The more that you have experienced the more obstacles you will face, and the faster you will be able to create a solution and move through them. 

For example, you get benched for the first time. There are emotions associated with that, there is confusion, and there are conversations with your coach that you need to have. 

You get bench for the fifth time (over the course of your career). You have experienced those emotions before, you have found clarity before, and you have had difficult conversations with coaches before. 

When you own your development, when you dedicate yourself not just to your training age, but to your basketball age, you are prepping yourself for every obstacle in your path. 

I want to leave you with this, you are not the first person to experience a big game, a bad game, getting benched, your first start, making a big career jump, having a career set back, an injury, feeling like you can jump out of the gym, being under-appreciated, being over-appreciated, and so many other things that can happen in this game. 

Being the first to do something means its a new problem, being the 2nd , 3rd, or 1000th means there are stories of other people doing the same thing you want to do and doing it. 

You aren’t starting from 0, you get to build on the experiences of those who came before you. Just make sure you do the work to build the context to understand the lessons when you learn them. 

Have a good week,

Kyle

p.s. subscribe to the podcast 🙂 

The chart I referenced above: