Transcription
What's up basketball ring fans and members? I got a question the other day in a YouTube comment and it was, "How do we prepare for games? How do we get in the mindset, the right mindset, before a game starts?" They also wanted to know how we get in the right mindset before practice.
And there's a few things that you can do. Number one, in the full program of Basketball Brain, if you're having problems with pregame anxiety or jitters, if you go through our pregame routine, which is called Breathe, Stretch, Shake, Let It Go, by the time the game starts, and you do this in the warm-up line, you're going to be in the zone. We're going to slow down your heart rate. We're going to slow down your breathing. As we always say, when you shoot really well in pickup games or in practice, but it doesn't translate into the game, it's often because you, you may not notice it, but your physiology is ramped up a little bit, and you don't feel like you're in a natural environment. So what we do is we try to get your blood pumping and your breathing tempo at the same rate you have when you're just hanging out or when you're shooting around in the gym.
Great players have the ability to go into a practice, an intense practice, or a game, and maintain the same sort of physiology they have when they're just shooting around in practice. I remember Gilbert Arenas said of Kobe, "Have you when Kobe was scoring like 50 points four straight games and I think he scored 49 straight times?" Gilbert said, "He shoots shots like he's in practice, or like nobody's there." When your physiology is tamped down a little bit, your focus can increase. So imagine you're being chased by a bear, right? And you're nervous, and then trying to thread a needle. It's very hard to do. Your hands are shaking and so forth. On offense, if your physiology is like in a game, you feel sort of threatened, maybe, or you're afraid you're going to perform bad, which we help you get rid of as well in the full program. But if you can calm down your physiology, you can use your smaller muscles better. And when you're shooting, or you're passing, or you're dribbling, you got to use your small muscles. Your, your dexterity has to improve. So you got to calm that down.
If you really want to, you know, get good at that, is go get the full program and learn how to do Breathe, Stretch, Shake, Let It Go. It'll significantly improve your performance. In fact, it's one of the best things you can do before practice as well. Get into the zone, get your mind right, and get ready to go.
Usually during practice, however, there's a slightly different problem. Unless it's like your first practice on a new team, you're probably a little anxious. Sometimes for practice, you got to get yourself up. And the way to do that is you almost got to be a little paranoid. You got to think about your competition. You got to think about being embarrassed. Now, again, we always talk about the fuel coming from inside, of course, you play because you love it, you want to get better. But it's okay to be a little bit paranoid, just a little bit paranoid that somebody out there is practicing harder than you, or your team you have to worry about. In practice, in practice only, you have to worry about maybe not performing well. That drives a lot of great athletes. Again, number one is because you love the game, you want to get out there and do it because it's your passion. But number two, you're in a competition. If you're going to go to war, you would do everything you can so you have the right weapons, the right skill set, you could fire anything you picked up, no matter what happened to you, you would be prepared. The same sort of mentality you have to have in practice. You want to cover all your bases. You want to know the other team. You want to practice as hard as possible.
I said this in another video, but I had a guy when I was in high school, his name was Brandon, and he guarded me so hard that when I got into games, it was a little, little bit easier because nobody guarded me that hard. And I told him, I said, "I don't care if you follow me, you know, don't hurt me, but I don't care if you follow me hard. I don't care if you hit me on my jump shot. Be all over me. Make it tougher on me so when I get in the game, it'll be easier." So that's what you got to do. You have to have a little bit of fear. And I usually don't talk about that. You don't want fear going into the game itself. At that point, you want to be confident, have expectations. But in practice, you know, you got to have that little bit of paranoia. It'll wake you up earlier, you know, to get out there. Even in business, I'll tell you now, in business, I sometimes use a little bit of paranoia. I want to make sure that we're ahead of the competition, that we're getting better in every way. Of course, I love it, that's why I mainly do it. But if you need to get up for practice, that's a good thing to think about.
Larry Bird always did that, you know. He said, "I'd get up at 5:00 a.m. in the morning and go shoot before school because I was afraid somewhere somebody was out practicing and I wasn't." And I always had that feeling too before I even read that Larry Bird quote. I'm sure a lot of you do too. So if you need to get up, up for practice, get a little bit paranoid that somebody's there out there outworking you.
Another thing you can do is make sure you increase your body tempo and your, your confidence. Make sure you're moving fast enough. Make sure your face is lit up. Get excited. Make your physiology in tune with, you know, what you're about to do, which is practice. Come into the gym with energy. Make it a conscious thing that as soon as you step over the lines, everything else in the outside world is blocked out, and you get energy from stepping on the basketball court. Every time I stepped on the court, I felt energy pour into me. I had this idea that the court itself, the hardwood or the asphalt, had an energy that I could tap into, sort of like an avatar where they kind of get energy from the things around them. That's what you want to have. You want to get the energy from the things around you.
And then when you're in an actual game, after you put in all this work in the practice, you probably need to tone it down a little bit because the crowd's going to provide even more energy for you, you know. So you need to calm your physiology.
Okay, so that's what I think you need to do to get up for a game or up for a practice. And by getting up for a game, we usually mean tamping it down just a little bit. By getting up for a practice, we mean raising up your energy just a little bit. That's typically how it goes.
Check out BasketballBrain.com if you want access to the full program. It's really a great program and it'll help you. Have tons of testimonials. If you have any questions, email us at basketballbrain@gmail.com. We are dedicated to your greatness.