Today’s podcast guest is Chris Chase. Chris is a strength coach and performance specialist with extensive NBA experience, known for integrating biomechanics, movement quality, and strength training into practical systems for basketball athletes, with an emphasis on durability, adaptable movement, and long-term athletic development.
Chris Chase returns to discuss the evolution of modern sports performance training, from force outputs and plyometrics to deceleration mechanics, movement constraints, and load management in the NBA. Chris and Joel dive into the balance between “functional” and traditional strength work, the risks and rewards of plyometric training, resisted acceleration/deceleration methods, and why many athletes may benefit more from simplified, output-driven systems than excessive movement complexity. The conversation also explores basketball athleticism, reactive strength, tendon health, and the art of minimal effective dose training.
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Topics
0:00 – Basketball Beginnings and Training
2:37 – Outputs Versus Sport Skills
9:35 – Golf, Rotation, and Implements
14:00 – Med Balls and Functional Training
21:10 – Machines for Strength Progression
33:00 – Loaded Slides and Change of Direction
39:35 – Deceleration and Flywheel Work
45:50 – Suicide Sprints and Game Speed
56:25 – Plyos and Court Demands
1:07:40 – Load Management Matters
1:17:45 – The Case for Machines
Chris Chase Quotes
“I love the elements of basketball, the unique elements of the sport that I think people underrate… People have to play offense and defense… You have to be good at both ends of the floor. You have to be very athletic from a vertical and horizontal standpoint, speed, multi-directional speed… the conditioning that you have to have. Those things are super interesting in basketball and I think unique in that sense.”
“I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive, of course… I am definitely an output guy, especially when you’re a strength coach trying to apply just general training, like that’s your job.”
“I wish there were some guardrails in there, some buffering… to think that without that base, you should be throwing a bar on your back and going through these non-constrained complex, heavily loaded exercise, I think is a bit foolish.”
“I try to keep emphasizing outputs in what I would call… trainability of an exercise, which is just this all-encompassing thing to maximize the good over the bad… minimizing systemic stress, hitting the target musculature with the exercise itself… then primarily, or most importantly, hitting the intent of the effort.”
“We maybe because of the functional movement screen and the corrective craze… sterilizing training a bit in terms of this, progression is based off of movement instead of progression being based off output increases.”
“I think the core training gets into a subject of, hey, we for some reason got away from training the core like everything else, pretending that it’s not a muscle or pretending or it’s not made of muscles and pretending that they don’t adapt in the same way.”
“Think of function as being functional outputs, that are being exposed to you in training or specificity of outputs as being functional versus like the movement itself looking functional.”
“I think no matter who you are, that is a nice broad spectrum of training exposure that helps improve tendon and muscle tissue, helps make muscle tissue bigger… having more muscle is something that can help make you stronger as well or help in the improvements of these nervous system elements of absolute strength.”
“What I found… the initial deceleration steps are your highest intensity steps. So say you get up to 15 miles an hour in your acceleration… those first three to four steps are kind of crazy forces in terms of like the collision forces and then just the impulse in general that you’re having to deal with.”
“You can be a load manager and that is a great skill as a coach, knowing that you don’t need to do this thing or the volume of the thing that you believe is ideal or that’s going to make a change.”
“Just take a dive in and train like a bodybuilder for a period of time. And not to say that’s your only training, but add in two days where you’re doing repetition efforts towards failure on machines in your local gym. I think you’re going to have a nice time with it… I promise you that.”
About Chris Chase
Chris Chase is a veteran performance coach known for his integrated approach to athletic development, blending biomechanics, movement quality, strength training, and on-court transfer. Over his career, he has worked extensively with NBA and high-level basketball athletes, emphasizing adaptable movement solutions, resilient physical preparation, and individualized programming. Chase is respected for bridging the gap between traditional strength and conditioning and more movement-oriented performance systems, helping athletes improve durability, explosiveness, and long-term performance capacity.
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