(Ep098) Gray Cook - Part 1: Helping Basketball Players Move More Sustainably, Better Ways to Build Power, Strength, and Balance, and John Wooden’s Wisdom about Basketball Conditioning
Ax throwing. Log balancing. Carrying kettlebells through the forest. Standup paddling. Visitors to Gray Cook’s lake cabin invariably do some activities that might seem unconventional at first but actually train every major movement pattern and then some. Gray applies a similar real-world lens to the movement and function assessments that he co-created for athletes, including the Functional Movement Screen (FMS), Functional Capacity Screen (FCS) and Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA).
When Basketball Strong co-host Tim Francesco was the S&C coach for the Lakers, he used these screens to identify the gaps in their movement literacy so that he could make them more durable on the court. Gray’s practices are used across the NBA and in many college and high school programs, and his movement philosophies and practices offer coaches, parents, and players at every level the chance to reduce the risk of injury, increase strength, power, balance, and speed, and play the game better for longer.
In this episode, Gray shares:
What movement patterns and exercises are best suited to basketball players and other tall athletes
How to improve balance, squatting, rotation, jumping, and more
What S+C coaches, PTs, ATs and other professionals can do to help players with ACL injuries avoid getting hurt again
What “functional” training does and doesn’t mean
Which physical qualities should be developed to make basketball players more durable and how the FMS can help identify weaknesses that can be turned into strengths
How John Wooden ensured his UCLA teams were fresher than their opponents in the fourth quarter
Click here to read Gray’s books and articles, find seminars and other resources on the Functional Movement website, and keep an eye out for Gray’s new book, The Business of Movement.
