Elite conditioning separates great teams from good ones. If it’s a close game and you’re gassed in the fourth quarter, good luck making big shots – good luck making any shots, actually. And understand that fatigue doesn’t just affect physical performance. Your brain runs on oxygen, too, so if you’re gasping for breath, it’s unlikely you’re in a position to make good decisions down the stretch.
We all know the basic strategies for improving conditioning. Play a lot of basketball, run sprints, go on jobs, strength training, etc. Anything that empties your gas tank – that pushes you to the edge of your current level of fitness – will force your gas tank to grow. So, you should keep pushing yourself physically and keep increasing the size of your fuel reserves.
But that’s not the only way you can improve conditioning. Today, we’re going to talk about an awesome hack popularized by Steph Curry to supercharge your conditioning.
Steph’s method (which we’ll describe in detail momentarily) is all about training the diaphragm. What is the diaphragm you ask? It’s the muscle responsible for inhalation and exhalation. It’s shaped like a dome and sits below your heart and lungs and on top of all your lower organs. When the diaphragm contracts (flexes) it moves lower down into the sternum and creates space for air to fill your lungs. When it contracts, it returns to its normal position and forces the air out of your lungs. If you breathe properly (most of us don’t breathe properly, actually, but that’s an article for another day) your diaphragm is the muscle doing most of the work.
So how does Steph train his diaphragm?
When he gets out of breath during a workout (or at the end of a full workout) instead of stopping immediately and getting a drink, Steph lays down on the ground and his trainer puts a sandbag on top of his abdomen, right under the ribcage (where the diaphragm is located). Steph then proceeds to catch his breath while under the load of the sandbag.
It’s an incredibly simple exercise, but an incredibly effective one.
How does it work? Remember that the diaphragm is a muscle. And how do we train all our other muscles? By exposing them to load – i.e. by lifting weights or doing weights that leverage our own bodyweight against the targeted muscle.
This sandbag routine is doing the same thing. It’s loading Steph’s diaphragm in an attempt to make it stronger.
And what does a stronger diaphragm get you? Well, being that the diaphragm’s contracting is what draws air into the lungs, a stronger diaphragm – a diaphragm that can create more contractile force – can draw more air into the lungs, and thus, it can oxygenate the body more efficiently. So a stronger diaphragm leads directly to better conditioning by way of improving your body’s ability to oxygenate itself – to fill up the gas tank with fuel.
This exercise will also help teach you to breathe diaphragmatically at rest, which is important. Again, we’ll discuss this in depth another day, but most people don’t activate their diaphragm properly when they breathe. As a result, the bottom third of their lungs remain semi-compressed even during inhalation, and they lose out on their ability to get the most oxygen out of every breath. So the sandbag method will help train you into proper breathing in addition to making your breathing stronger.
Make sure to start out light with this training. Steph uses sandbags, but he’s a professional athlete who has been doing this kind of training for a good bit of time. You can start out with a couple big books – even a pound of weight will have an impact on your conditioning. As you get stronger and stronger, you can add more weight and reap more rewards.
In addition to starting light, make sure you’re in relatively good shape before engaging in this practice. If you can’t run a single down and back without gasping for air, this won’t be a magic fix for your conditioning woes. It’s an exercise meant to enhance the conditioning of athletes who are already performing at a high level – so make sure you’re in good shape to start off with, and check in with your doctor to make sure you have no respiratory or heart problems that this kind of training might exacerbate.