Boost Your Speed

Speed and quickness are important abilities for basketball players. No matter which position you play, speed and quickness are assets, and you should do everything you can to increase them. Many players believe that speed and quickness are something you either are born with or not. And if you are not born with these abilities, there is not very much you can do to increase them. But this is not quite true. Of course natural ability does play a big role in determining how fast a basketball player can run and move. However, with consistent hard work, any player can become faster and reach the potential he or she was born with.

Basketball speed is a little different from regular sprinting speed in that it involves quick starts and sudden changes in speed and direction. The most important way of training for basketball speed development is playing basketball. The only problem is that every basketball player does this in team practices and games during the basketball season. So if you want to close the gap between yourself and the fastest players, you need to supplement your on-court running with speed-boosting conditioning drills during the off-season. In particular, you should perform running sprints and special power drills called plyometrics. But what even fewer players recognize is that sports nutrition can also affect speed on the basketball court, so after I say a few words about conditioning I would like to show you how you can use nutrition to gain a speed advantage over other players.

Plyometrics is a form of power training that involves jumps, leaps, and bounds. Power is closely related to speed because it's actually a combination of strength and speed. Power is especially important for explosive starts, which are just as important for basketball players as raw speed. One simple example of a plyometrics exercise is placing a 12- to 18-inch box in front of you, leaping onto it with both feet, and then hopping back down. Do this over and over for 15 seconds and then rest. Do four sets of this drill. This is important for gaining speed and quickness in your first three steps.

Improving your raw sprinting ability is also an excellent way to improve your basketball speed. Running sprints trains both your muscles and your nervous system for speed. A good running workout is to go to a local football field and run several sprints ranging from 10 to 100 meters with rest periods of 30 seconds to two minutes. Make sure to warm up before and stretch after running your sprints to avoid pulling a hamstring or other muscles. If you do two 15-minute plyometrics workouts per week plus two track workouts per week throughout the summer, you will notice a significant improvement in your speed and quickness when you lace up your skates again in the fall.

The nutritional way to enhance speed is a little more indirect. When basketball players get fatigued toward the end of a game, their speed decreases. The main cause of fatigue is running out of the carbohydrate energy that is stored the muscles. It's just like a car running out of gas. Sports drinks contain carbohydrate in a form that can get from your stomach to your muscles quickly. So by drinking a sports drink during games, you can keep your carbohydrate energy level high and maintain your speed late in the game while the other players become fatigued and slow down.

Tests have shown that sports drinks containing carbohydrate and protein in the right balance are most effective in keeping carbohydrate levels up. (Most sports drinks have no protein.) The carbohydrate provides the fuel source while the protein helps deliver this fuel to the muscles more quickly. It's like a turbocharger in a car.

A recent study performed at St. Cloud State University compared the effects of a sports drink containing carbohydrate and protein (Accelerade) to a sports drink containing only electrolytes on sprinting speed at the end of a long training session. Following an intense workout of 75 minutes, the subjects of the study participated in four speed trials with five minutes of rest after each sprint. Half the players drank the carbohydrate-protein drink while the other half drank an electrolyte-only drink. The carbohydrate-protein group actually improved their speed by 1.1 seconds between the first and last sprints, while the other group decreased their speed by 2.2 seconds.

These results show that drinking a sports drink that contains carbohydrate and protein can increase athletes' sprint speed by reducing fatigue. I encourage all the players I work with to drink a carbohydrate-protein frequently during practices and before each shift in games.

If you're serious about basketball, you need to do everything you can to increase your quickness and your sprinting ability. Performing sprint drills and plyometrics exercises and drinking a carbohydrate-protein sports drinks such as Accelerade are proven ways to do just that.