Training up for basketball

O

OperIvy

0
This may be long so please bare with me. Ok, sounds easy enough right? Well the wrinkle is, im in a wheelchair. I am going to be attending The University Of Alabama for fall 2007 to play wheelchair basketball. Basically i am paralyzed from the knees down but my upperbody is normal for the most part. My doctor told me that if i could stand up, I would be about 6'7-6'9. Basically i need to slim down(lose about 10-15 lbs of fat), and get my muscle up as high as possible with out getting too bulky. I have about 11 months before i go to U of A so i figured thats enough to start achieving my goal. Right now i jog, aka a 50-60% push, 2.5 miles a day m-f. I am fixing to start going to the Y and working out all areas from the abs up. I know most of you are a little beyond your expertice here, but do you think a daily jog, increased as i become more fit, plus an upperbody weight training regiment will help me? Basically i need to have the upper body of any other basketball player. Strong, but not too bulky and able to push up and down the court for 40 minutes at top speed. Um...yeah, im sure i missed something important so just ask. Sorry if i was a bit wordy, im just trying to explain my situation best i can since most of you have probably never dealt with something like this. I am not offended by anything, so feel free to ask anything you want.

For those who are interested. Here is a video about the University of Illinois Wheelchair basketball team. The work out that robbie explains is basically what i will be doing at Bama. And josh george was a team mate of mine on my jr league team. We won the national championship my sophmore year of HS. . Ok im shutting up now.l
 
whoops

I just realized i posted in the womens section. Can someone please move this to the appropriate mens forum.
 
Howdy from a Birmingham native.

RE: the program....this will be no different for you than it would a regular BBaller. Obviously conditioning and actual skill/performance will be entirely upper-body dependent, so you'll have to be a bit more judicious about selecting training methods, but the other side of that is, without having to expend the energy and effort on the training of the legs and core, you'll have more left in the tank to expend on the upper body work you'll have to do.
 
Cool! I played my High School ball at Lakeshore in Bham. So is what im doing a good start to a work out? This is obviously on top of a little basketball and a healthy diet.
 
Howdy OperIvy,

I had the privilege of training some elite high performance wheelchair basketball athletes for 4 months. I'll give you a rundown of what we did during our weight training sessions:

- upper body explosive power medicine ball passes
- side to side medicine ball slams
- narrow grip pullups (in the chair assisted by trainer)
- seated cable rows (single arm, double)
- lat pulldowns
- bench press
- lots of stretching the back to counteract upper body tightness

We really focused on balancing out their posture b/c of anterior deltoid and upper chest tightness due to the forward leaning nature of the sport. We performed a variety of back exercises to counteract upper body tightness.

As for the energy systems involved in wheelchair basketball, we focussed on sport specific training. Fortunately we had access to a skating treadmill so a lot of our work was done on that at different inclines w/ a safety harness attached to the chair.

- warm up (easy strides to get blood flowing)
- variety of sprints of 5-20 seconds with 5-10 seconds rest, sets of 4 (focussed on form)
- resistance provided from behind with bands for 10 metres (effort: max), bands released, followed by a max sprint for 20 metres.
- same exercise as above except with alternating arm strides (right, left, right, left, etc..)
- speed and agility work: cones placed 3 metres apart, athlete would stride inbetween each cone, turn as quick as possible upon reaching a cone, and sprint to the next one (as many times as possible w/n 30 seconds).

In addition to energy systems, we focussed a lot of attention on maximixing the efficiency of the arm stride using bands as resistance while the athlete maintained proper form (back straight, head up) through each stride.

Hope this helped out buddy! If you have anymore questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.
 
Who did you train? Gah, all that training brings back memories. That sounds just like my routines i used to do in highschool. Gotta love medicine ball exercises just after 60 suicides :)
 
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