⬇️See IBSA's Athletic Performance Program in Action⬇️

"Researchers have shown rising trends in injury rates ranging from 12.4% to 15% within the National Basketball Association (NBA)" - in our opinion, this is correlating directly with an increase in games, and decreased focus on preparation at the youth level.

Pillars of Athletic Performance

• Strength & Conditioning
• Speed & Agility
• Injury Prevention
• Skill Expression

• To develop strength, the athlete must utilize progressive overload (a principle of increasing demand on a muscle or movement) in a safe environment.

• To develop conditioning, the same principle is used against the aerobic & anaerobic systems in the context of sport movement

To summarize - strength and conditioning can be boiled down to putting the body through ever-increasing demand. However, this must be combined with adequate rest periods or the body will no adapt.

• Speed is a measure of your top end pace in a given movement. Development of speed requires both strength, and power (ability to express strength quickly)

• Agility is made up of acceleration, deacceleration and reaction time. Development of agiltiy comes with power, coordination and plyometrics.

Both are important, and must be developed. Doing 100m sprint after sprint is great, but won't have much affect on your ability to slide laterally in a defensive stance.

• For athletes to perform, they must be injury free and healthy

• The combination of a muscle/joint that is strong, mobile, has adequate rest, and is trained properly over a long period of time will make it less prone to injury

An athlete that does the correct strength training, movement work, rests enough and does this over and over will stay healthy over the long-term.

• The last part of athletic performance is skill expression, or the ability to perform skills in competition

• While skills include ball-handling, shooting, and so on, skill expression also includes strength, power, explosiveness, agility and all athletic qualities.

Skill expression is often the missing piece to the puzzle. Athletes need to learn to take their movement patterns, muscle recruitment and full athletic ability and use them at game speed under game conditions.