To improve your skills and become an elite player, you need to work on your skills outside of your team practices. Those extra reps will improve your ballhandling, shooting, scoring, and playmaking. To help, we’re providing you more than 12 basketball workout plans that will take your skills to the next level. But before we get to the workouts, there are 3 important lessons to apply to the workouts…

Tip 1) Practice “Consistently”

The most important key to improve your skills is… CONSISTENCY.

You need to practice consistently.

Take shooting as an example. To become a great shooter, you need to practice consistently! Players complain all the time about how they just can’t put the ball in the basket, that their shot doesn’t feel right, and so on. So what do many of them do? They go to the gym and shoot 1000 shots – and then don’t work on their shot for another week or two.

That’s like someone complaining that they are overweight, so they cut out all fast food and sugar out of their diet for a day. Then a couple weeks later they look in the mirror and realize they are still overweight so they “diet” for another day. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

To shoot the ball consistently well you have to develop the proper mechanics and muscle memory and the best way to do that is to shoot almost every day!

At very least, you should practice twice a week. Roughly 2 days a week of practice each week will allow you to see some improvements next season.

Regardless of how many days a week you practice, the above suggestions are assuming you’re taking a lot of HIGH QUALITY GAME-LIKE REPS… practicing hard and practicing smart. You could work 5 days a week but if you don’t simulate what will happen in a game… your improvements will be limited. You also need consistent shot mechanics to make improvements. You can’t be changing your shot every couple minutes. Mechanics need to be the same (consistent)!

Tip 2) Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

To develop new skills, you need to push yourself. Get out of your comfort zone.

For example, when practicing your dribbling, if you’re not making some mistakes and losing the ball, then you’re not getting out of your comfort zone. And you’re not learning a new skill. You’re only practicing things you can already do.

The only way to learn a new skill is to get out of your comfort zone and be willing to make mistakes.

Tip 3) Learn Fundamental Skills

When working out, it’s important to understand how to perform skills fundamentally correct. This is particularly true when it comes to shooting.

When you do shoot the ball, be sure you shoot the same way each time. If you are changing your technique during the workout or just because you missed a few shots, you are not getting better. You need to practice the same technique over and over — every week, month, and year.

Check out our skills pages to learn more about developing your fundamental skills.

Ballhandling & Dribbling Workouts for at Home or the Gym

Here are a few ballhandling and footwork workouts that you can do anywhere (you just need a few feet of space). You can do the workouts at home, in your basement, in the garage, or at the gym too.

Shooting Workouts

Here are a few shooting workouts. You’ll obviously need a hoop to shoot at for these workouts.

The following workouts are for guards and post players. All players, regardless of your position, should become great at shooting the ball!

Multi-purpose Workouts

Here are a few more workouts that incorporate multiple skills…

Detailed Long Term Workouts with Day by Day Planning Programs

Here are a few skill workouts that show you exactly what to do each day for improvement. There are hundreds of workouts organized by skill level.

Athletic Development Workouts – for Speed, Strength, Conditioning and Vertical Jump

Here are a few workouts to improve your athleticism, speed, strength, and endurance.

Original post on breakthroughbasketball.com