Basketball Workouts

There is no single best workout for basketball. The best plan is a weekly rotation that trains four qualities across a week, and the sections below build each one. Miss one and it shows on the floor. A strong player who cannot move laterally gets beaten off the dribble. A quick player with no core strength gets bumped off his spot. Skill without conditioning fades in the fourth quarter. Balance wins games.

A complete basketball workout program covers four areas:

• Strength. Squats, hinges, presses, and pulls that let you hold position and absorb contact.
• Jumping power. Box jumps, bounds, and med-ball throws that turn strength into a quicker first step and a higher vertical.
• Speed and agility. Short sprints and change-of-direction work for the first two steps that beat a defender.
• Skill. Shooting, finishing, and ball-handling reps done at game speed, so touch holds up when a defender and tired legs get involved.

The skill reps draw from the same well as team practice. Our basketball drills library covers the dribbling, finishing, and passing work, and our basketball shooting drills guide breaks shooting into shot types, each with its own coaching cue.

Here is a five-day off-season week most high school and college players can run with a gym and a hoop. It puts strength and jumping early, when legs are fresh, spaces the two heaviest lifting days apart, and protects a full rest day so the work turns into adaptation. Rest is where you actually grow.

The sets, reps, and shot counts below are common starting points from strength and skill coaching, not fixed prescriptions or validated norms. Treat them as a baseline and adjust the loads to your age, training history, and how you recover from week to week.

Warm Up Before Every Session

Spend the same five minutes before every workout so your muscles are warm and firing before the first hard rep. Dynamic movement works better here than static stretching, which is best saved for after. Run through it in order:

• Jumping jacks, 30 seconds
• Leg swings, 10 each leg, front-to-back and then side-to-side
• Walking lunge with a torso twist, 10 total
• High knees and butt kicks, 20 yards of each
• Two or three build-up sprints at 70, then 80, then 90 percent effort

Notice what the week never asks for: a max-effort lift and a max-effort skill session on the same tired legs. Shooting sits on lower-body days because a warm, activated lower body shoots well. Finishing and floaters sit on upper-body days. Print the sheet, keep it in your gym bag, and log the loads you actually used so next week starts where this one ended. If you would rather not keep a paper log, Striveon's athlete development tracking stores each player's loads and skill numbers over time.

How Many Days a Week Should You Train?

Three to five days a week fits most players, and the right number tracks the season and the age. In the off-season, four or five days is realistic while school is out and the body has time to bounce back. In-season, two or three focused sessions around games and practice are plenty, since games are their own hard workout. Younger players belong at the low end. The count matters less than the consistency. Three good weeks will beat one great week and two skipped ones.

A workout that builds a player in July will grind him down in January. The season rewrites the plan. The load, the volume, and the balance between the weight room and the court all shift as the calendar moves from off-season toward playoffs. Coaches call this periodization, and it is the difference between peaking in a fall scrimmage and peaking in March.

The in-season number is the one most players get wrong. Lifting drops to one or two sessions a week, but it does not stop. A systematic review of resistance-training frequency(opens in new tab) found that well-trained athletes hold on to most of their strength on as little as one focused session per week, which is why a smart in-season plan trims volume before it touches the weight entirely. Striveon's season plans map these phases across a 12 or 16-week calendar and tag every block by intensity, so the taper before playoffs lands on purpose.

In-season, the day you lift is as important as how often. Lift heaviest the day after a game, when the next game is furthest away, and keep the session before game day light so legs are fresh at tip-off. A short, hard session on a day with no game and no practice is the ideal slot. The goal in-season is to hold the strength you already built, and a workout that leaves you sore for game night has missed the point.

No gym, no problem. A driveway hoop, a ball, and your own bodyweight cover most of what an off-season week needs. Home workouts also happen to be free, which matters when a whole roster is training on its own over the summer.

Run this bodyweight strength circuit three times a week, resting a day between sessions:

• Bulgarian split squat, 3 sets of 10 per leg
• Push-up, 3 sets stopped two reps short of failure
• Single-leg glute bridge, 3 sets of 12 per leg
• Reverse lunge, 3 sets of 10 per leg
• Plank, 3 sets of 45 seconds
• Calf raise off a step, 3 sets of 20

Skill work does not need a full court either. Stationary two-ball dribbling builds handle in a garage. Form shooting on a driveway hoop builds touch one hand at a time. A jump rope covers conditioning in a space the size of a doormat. A player who puts in thirty focused minutes at home four days a week will pull ahead of a teammate who only shows up to practice.

Age changes the workout more than skill level does. A ten-year-old and a seventeen-year-old should not run the same program, and the reason has nothing to do with talent. It is about what a developing body can safely handle.

For younger players, roughly twelve and under, the workout is almost all skill and movement. Ball-handling, footwork, running, jumping, and bodyweight games do more at this age than any barbell, and the reps are better spent on coordination. The NBA and USA Basketball youth guidelines(opens in new tab) lay out age-appropriate activity for each developmental stage. As players reach their mid-teens and their movement holds up under fatigue, light resistance training with real coaching becomes valuable. By high school, a supervised strength program is one of the biggest edges a player can build.

Keep youth strength work about movement quality, not weight on the bar. A clean bodyweight squat earns the right to a goblet squat. The goblet squat earns the right to a barbell later. Rush that order and you build bad positions under load, which is harder to fix than it was to teach.

The 3-3-3 rule is a general-fitness framework that has trended in gyms, and it shows up in two common versions. One splits the week into three days of strength, three days of cardio, and three days of recovery. The other keeps it to three workouts a week, with three compound exercises per session and three sets each. Both are built for simplicity, which makes them a reasonable on-ramp for a beginner.

For basketball, treat it as a starting shape and not a finished plan. It has no dedicated jumping, speed, or on-court skill work, and those are exactly the qualities that decide games. If you like the simplicity, keep the three-day rhythm but make one day power and skill, one day strength, and one day speed and conditioning. The weekly plan earlier in this guide is essentially that idea with the basketball-specific pieces added back in.

Kobe Bryant's off-season training is widely reported as the "666" routine: six days a week, six hours a day, six months a year. The six hours were split across track running, on-court skill work, and the weight room, and the shooting volume was famously high, in the hundreds of made shots every session before most people were awake.

You do not have six hours, and you do not need them. The lesson underneath the legend is the part worth copying. Bryant front-loaded his volume in the off-season, trained his body and his skill on the same day, and shot to a target number of makes rather than to a clock. A high school player who shoots to a count of made shots, three or four mornings a week all summer, is running a scaled version of the same idea. The magic was never the six hours. It was the consistency and the make-based standard.

Writing a good workout is the easy part. The hard part is getting twelve players to run it on their own over a summer, and knowing who actually did. A plan folded into a gym bag carries no accountability. A plan you assign and can check on does.

This is where an individual workout stops being a PDF and becomes a coaching system. When you assign each player a program and they check off the work, you can spot who logged their shooting three mornings a week and who went quiet in July. Striveon's athlete development tools let you set individual workout and skill targets per player and track progress against them, so a guard's summer shooting volume and a post's strength numbers sit in the same profile as their in-season stats.

When the workouts, the practice plans, and the evaluations all live in one place, the off-season stops being a black box. Striveon's structured training sessions connect what a player does alone to what the team does together, so you plan the next block on evidence instead of a hunch.