Physical conditioning and being in good shape has been important to me, all my life. I was always a pretty good athlete growing up. My dad was a professional athlete, too. I just knew that was what I wanted to do.
I played college ball at UCLA and made it to the National Championship game. Then, I got drafted by the Lakers and played there for four years, winning two championships. I moved around a bit after that, playing in Europe and then back in the NBA. In my 10 years playing pro ball, I won two championships with the Lakers and played five years with Kobe, one of the people that I grew up idolizing and loving. I was a fan at the parade in 2000, and just a few years later I was on a championship team with him. So, that was a pretty cool life experience.
The Grind
People who work out all the time — crossfit, running, all of that — they get it. But the NBA takes daily fitness to a whole different level.
When I played, the whole season was a grind. It’s a long season. You’re playing almost every day. You might, for example, play in Chicago at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday night, and then the game’s over at 11:00, go to the airport, fly to Detroit, land in Detroit at 2:00 a.m., and then play again at 7:00 p.m. that night. So, the whole season is a grind, and your body goes through ebbs and flows of it.
You’re just constantly working through soreness, depending on where you are in the season. And if you get a little tweak or a hamstring or ankle, you have to manage that throughout the course of a long season.
While you’re playing, of course, you have a world-class training staff. You have access to the medical doctors and all different kinds of techniques to try to speed your recovery. But once that goes and you’re not playing anymore, you’ve got to find other ways to take care of yourself.
Lean & Mean Beats Bulky & Swole
In terms of taking care of myself, I was introduced to yoga my second year in the NBA. It was a random trip to Tahiti. Yoga wasn’t something I ever wanted to participate in. But there was this guy, Kent Katich, who owns a personal studio near UCLA. He works with a lot of NBA guys. He told me, “The NBA’s doing this thing called NBA FIT, and they’re filming it and they’re paying for this trip to Tahiti. Would you be interested in coming with me?” To be honest, I wanted to go on the trip more so than I wanted to do the yoga, but I did it — and I just fell in love with yoga. It became a really big part of both my mental and physical peak performance, for the rest of my career.
While I was playing, I really tried to stay as light as possible, so I tried to not lift weights. I would do yoga, and that’s a lot of body weight stuff. You can kind of tweak your sessions to make them more strength training, or they can be more flexibility training. It just depends on the way you do it. But I noticed when I lifted, I got really heavy, I got bulky, my knees would hurt, my ankles would hurt. The guys that I’m guarding and matched up against are smaller, lighter, faster. So for me, it was about staying as lean as possible throughout my career, not adding mass.
And yoga’s great for the mental aspects, too. I mean, because you’re usually quiet, you’re usually holding positions for a long time, where it’s uncomfortable and you have to find a way to just quiet everything down and focus on what you’re doing. So, not only is it the physical aspect of actually stretching and helping your body get into positions that will loosen you up and just keep you ready for life every day, but also mentally being able to just get in that space and recenter. And while everything else is going on in the world outside, you have a chance to pay your body and your mind some attention.
Even now, I incorporate it into all my basketball camps. So, when I have 200 kids, instead of stretching every day, they all get yoga mats, and we do yoga — and it teaches them.
Don’t Just Treat Injuries, Prevent Them!
In the pros, you have the ability to access the best training methods. We had a guy named Alex McKechnie, who was really big on developing your movement patterns. If you want to move your foot, you don’t only move your foot. It starts at your hip joint, and it’s proximal to distal movement. You start with strengthening your core and learning how to move properly. A lot of people have things that are out of alignment, because they have just improper movement patterns. So, that was something with the Lakers that we did on a daily basis, just working on movement patterns.
Finding out why an injury happened — whether it’s my hips were out of alignment or I have a little arch in my back that, if I get my pelvis to neutral, it puts a lot less stress on different parts of my body — these were the things I could learn to prevent future injuries. That was big for me, because my body is very tightly wound and I’m an explosive athlete. I’m not like, say, a swimmer, who’s long and all their muscles are really long and stretched out. Mine have to be tight and ready to just explode all the time, and before you know it, bad stuff would just happen. My groin would tweak, my hamstring would tweak.
I tell people all the time, don’t neglect the importance of flexibility and strength training together. A lot of people want to just lift weights, but forget about the flexibility side of it or being ready to perform, warming up properly.
The weekend warrior doesn’t necessarily have to deal with things like sitting for an hour of real time before jumping into a game and having to perform immediately at a high level. They’re able to take their time and get ready. And as we all get older, we shouldn’t neglect the prep work that is necessary before a workout.
I play basketball now, and I see guys not warming up or they’re not doing the things to make their body limber, and they go down with a hamstring, a knee, an Achilles — and they don’t have the access to all the stuff that I had while we were playing. One small, little injury can take you out for a long time and really affect your day-to-day life. So, preventative conditioning is crucial. Work on your flexibility. Warm up properly. Take care of your body!
Finding Balance Outside the NBA
Now that I’m retired from basketball, I wake up every morning at 6:00 a.m. I’m in the gym by 7:00. Some days, I try to get a yoga session in, and then I do similar strength training to what I did when I was playing. Basketball strength-and-conditioning staffs have a good program for everyday life. It’s not like football, where you’re trying to get super heavy or super bulky. It’s a good mix of balance, stability, and strength training together, as well as some cardio. But I also try to blend in some yoga in there early in the morning, and that gets my day started well.
Every day, it sucks when the alarm goes off and you’re tired from the day before and you’re just like, “I don’t want to do it today.” But as soon as you get in there and you start going through the motions, you’re glad you do. It’s 9:00 a.m. and the sun’s out and everything’s going well. Everyone else is just getting started, and you feel like you’ve accomplished a lot already.
People ask, “How are you so disciplined?” I don’t think it’s discipline. I think it’s more finding a way to create a lifestyle. An example of that would be, like, no matter what kind of bad news you got today or yesterday, you’re not going to not brush your teeth. You’re not going to not shower. It’s just something that you do. It’s part of your lifestyle. It’s not something you have to think about and be disciplined about. It becomes habit, and we’re all creatures of habit.
Fortunately, throughout my life, I was self-motivated to do those things on my own before anybody put me on a regimen or a schedule, and it became part of my lifestyle early on. So, I’m not having to break any real bad habits. I just have to make sure that I carve out the time, and if it means waking up at 6:00 instead of 9:00, then that’s what I have to do. Once you commit to those things and you just keep doing them, they become habitual. It just becomes second nature, and you don’t really have to think much about it.
CBD for Recovery
I’m still an athlete at heart, and I still take care of myself. But because I don’t play everyday, when I do get out, I feel it afterwards. I don’t want to have a long, lingering injury and be dealing with it for months. So, I use CBD all over my body. I like a good CBD bath. I do CBD foot baths. I have those big party tubs that you put drinks in at a barbecue, and I fill it up with 115-degree water and I put CBD salts in there and sit and soak my feet.
I still try to do a lot of core stuff. The back is the core. It’s supporting your whole body and everything you do. Nobody wants to hurt themselves, but we all get older. So, when my lower back sometimes gets sore, I use CBD on that, too.
I mean, we’re all tough guys and want to push through things but, at some point, because I’m not playing at a high level, I don’t have to be ready to perform tomorrow. There’s no need in pushing that soreness and letting it linger. Letting your body recover is just as important as training it.
And listening to your body, I think that’s a big part of yoga is listening to what your body’s telling you and being in tune with it. You’re spending an hour in different positions and different movements that speak to all parts of your body. You need to be able to accept your body’s feedback and then honor it. If your shoulders hurt, don’t go bench press. You have to be able to say, “I can’t do that this week,” and move on.
And then, of course, sleep. Your body does so much of its healing overnight. So, sleep is really important. If I’m having problems, I like to use CBD gummies with melatonin. I get a really good night’s sleep and then feel fresh in the morning … so I can get at it again!