IN THIS ISSUE

01 the rebuild starts in the kitchen

02 priming before performing

03 intention decides everything

TAKEAWAY #1

The first system I lock back in isn't basketball. It's my diet.

Here's why it goes first. When I come off my break, I'm not moving like I do in season. No practices, no games, no daily gym. If I eat like I'm in season while moving like I'm on vacation, I'm starting the rebuild in a hole.

So before I touch a ball, I lock in two things. Protein goes up, so the muscle I spent all season building doesn't walk out the door while I rest. Carbs come down, because carbs are fuel and I'm not burning much yet. As training ramps back up, the carbs come back with it.

Nothing fancy. But it means on day one of real training, my body shows up ready instead of playing catch-up.

Most players do this backwards. They come off the couch, jump straight into two-a-days, and eat whatever's around. Then they wonder why week one feels terrible.

The kitchen is the first gym.

If you want the exact system I run, I already wrote it down for you. It's called The Pro Plate and it's free.

TAKEAWAY #2

Here's what those Florida weeks actually are.

Ball handling. PJF band work. Mini band work. Shooting with my brother on the neighborhood hoop.

I don't count any of it as workouts. I count it as priming the body. The whole point is to wake everything up, not to test it.

This is the exact band I use, the long black one.

There's science under this too. The fastest way to get hurt isn't training hard. It's spiking your workload after time off. The guys who tweak something in September usually earned it in July, going from zero to a hundred with no ramp. The priming weeks are the ramp. Low load, high frequency, nothing that steals the next day.

So when I get back to Utah and the real work starts, there's no shock to the system. The body's already awake. First real session, I'm building, not surviving.

Priming before performing. Every rebuild needs a ramp.

TAKEAWAY #3

Now the deepest layer, and the biggest mistake I see.

Before I touch a single rep in Utah, I already know exactly what I'm working on. Not because a trainer told me. Because I watched my own film and let it tell me where I struggled.

This year the film was clear: take care of the ball. So this offseason is built around limiting turnovers. The year I had plantar fasciitis, my body said something different, so that whole summer was built around foot health and calf work. Every year the target changes. The process of picking it never does.

Here's why this matters. If you don't have intention, one day you're working on a bump fadeaway, the next day it's all catch and shoot threes. You're busy, you're sweating, and you're building nothing. You need to have an idea of the player you're trying to become. If you don't, you're leaving it up to your trainer.

And underneath all of it sits the one system I never have to rebuild. My faith never went on break. The prayer and the scriptures ran through the time off the same way they run through the season. When I say faith, I mean both kinds. The belief in myself that comes from knowing this order works, because I've run it every summer of my career. And the anchor underneath that doesn't move, whether I'm on a neighborhood hoop in Florida or in a playoff game overseas.

Everything else gets torn down and rebuilt every year. The foundation stays.