Laura Baden

How to Prepare. How to Perform. How to Recover. How to Be Remembered. Tournaments and showcases are exciting. They’re high stakes. They can also be exhausting physically, mentally, and emotionally. And here’s the reality I see all the time as an athletic trainer and performance coach: Most athletes don’t underperform because of talent… They underperform because they’re under-fueled, under-recovered, and under-prepared. This guide is for parents and athletes who want to walk into every...

Parents often hear: “If you want to get ahead… you have to do more.” More games. More practices. More AAU. More private lessons. More everything. But here’s the truth backed by sports science, sports medicine, and what every elite-level program already knows: 👉 Athletes don’t fall behind because they take a season to train they fall behind because they never take one. In fact, the highest-performing athletes in the world do not  play their sport year-round. NCAA Division I athletes,...

Basketball is one of the most demanding sports on an athlete’s body and not just because of how much running, cutting, and jumping it requires. The real test happens every time an athlete lands. Think about it: a typical basketball player can jump and land hundreds of times in a single practice or game. Each of those landings produces ground reaction forces up to 4–6 times body weight  (McNitt-Gray, 1993; Devita & Skelly, 1992). For a 150-pound athlete, that’s 600–900 pounds of force...