FOR DECADES, basketball training has been defined by rigorous, cross-court drills — perhaps best exemplified by this scene from the movie Coach Carter:
It’s a style of training experienced by Joma Adornado, who, as the son of PBA legend Bogs, harbored dreams of making it big in basketball. Now a doctor and a fitness advocate, he looks back on those days with a critical eye… at least when it comes to fitness.
“Nung college kami, pinapa-touch yung board sa amin fifty times. Pagod na pagod kami,” he recalled in a SPIN.ph audio show on the Calamansi app (Google Play, App Store). “Knowing the stuff I now know, mali pala the way to coach, the way to train before, yung parang Coach Carter type, na you'll run the whole gym, tapos nag-jump as many [times] as possible.”
While the show's host Wayne Tulio acknowledged the disciplinary value of drills like suicides or the infamous “planting rice”, Adornado, who was team captain in Ateneo’s Team B, cautioned trainers and sports professionals to define the value of these exercises and know what they really do to improve an athlete’s fitness.
Take all those jumps Adornado had to do to tap the backboard.
“Hindi tataas yung taas ang vertical jump that way. Tataas lang ang aerobic capacity ng muscle mo,” he said.
In other words, Adornado explained, those 50-rep backboard taps built endurance, but did not improve your vertical leap.
“If you want to improve vertical jump [...] kaunti yung reps, very high speed, tapos hindi rin dapat mapapagod yung client mo,” said the doctor, who also runs an account debunking fitness myths called Brain Gainz.
He compared the drills he used to do — “50 times ka tatalon, you will exert effort around 50 percent para matapos yung 50 times” — with a low-rep, high-intensity exercise focused on vertical jumps. “If pina-train kita ng 100 percent ang jump mo pero three times ka lang tatalon, there is a certain adaptation on the muscle and it will try to adapt to that, at ita-try niyang masanay na mag-produce ng 100 percent na height na kaya mo for a certain jump.”
He added: “You're not training for jumping as high as you can with the 50 times.”
The importance of exact definitions extends to another popular basketball drill: the agility ladder.
Even the name itself, Adornado said, is a misnomer. “Agility kasi dapat, hindi planned. Yung reaction time mo is actually determined by the circumstances in the environment. So if planned, if coordinated na yung tinuturo sa yo, halimbawa, step dito, step dito, step dito, di na siya agility,” he said.
Instead, what an “agility” ladder builds is actually motor planning and coordination, to train your brain to move your foot this way or that way.
“I think it's very important for trainers, especially in the basketball field, in the athletic field, to know the definition of each type of training, whether it's agility or coordination. Kasi doon mo mate-train better yung clients mo,” Adornado concluded.
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