Playing basketball can burn anywhere from 300 to 800 calories and hour depending on how hard you are working your body and putting in the effort. Sometimes we have a lot of unwanted fat we want to get rid of before the basketball season starts.
Should I lose weight for basketball? You want to lose weight for basketball because you think you will run faster and jump higher but this is not always the case. When you lose weight sometimes you are losing muscle in the process which can result in making you less explosive. In order to lose weight without losing strength you must be able to maintain the muscle you already have by not losing to much weight quickly.
If you are on a weight lifting program you want to stick to your workout program while cutting back the calories but increase the cardio. Or you can maintain calories and increase the cardio. Further down I will explain what I feel is the best way to do this.
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Should I cut, I’m a 16 year old 6’3, 203lbs, I have some body fat but I’m in good shape. I mainly want to go down to 190 so I can become faster for basketball. Is this bad for me, I have some belly fat And I’m already fast as I run track as well. Can I cut? Help please.
So I had a question that came up and I thought I would share my response from personal experience as a basketball player. Hope this helps anyone else coming across the same problem they are facing.
Losing weight is not always a good idea. From experience, I thought cutting weight would make me faster and help me jump higher. I lost weight that I shouldn’t have when I was 19 years old thinking that I would get quicker. The reality was I felt weaker, and was already in good shape. Losing an extra 6 pounds made me lose muscle and made me feel sluggish. All I really did was play a ton of basketball and ate less.
At 16 years old, Your still growing, you may even grow a couple of more inches, save that weight. You say you are already fast and you run track which is great, I would hold off on trying to lose weight. Save that for when you play basketball, naturally during a season you will lose a lot of weight. It is extremely easy to do so with the amount of games and practices. If your able to lose weight while keeping up your strength then do so, but I wouldn’t worry about it at your age. You may find you gain more weight but your even stronger, why mess with a good thing. But if you still want to lose unwanted weight use a jump rope.
The quickest way to lose weight and keep your strength at the same time for basketball?
Jumping rope is an excellent basketball workout that burns a heck of a lot of calories. 10 minutes of jumping rope burns the same amount of calories as 30 minutes of jogging. 15 minutes of jumping rope can burn 200 to 300 calories. Why should you care? Not only will you lose weight but you will be able to keep most of your muscle gains if you continue with the workouts your currently on, but you will develop good footwork and explosive movements that will transition very well on the basketball court.
There is no specific jump rope program you need to do, but by all means you could create one or look on you tube for one. Start off with 5 minutes of jump roping and see how long you can go for, if you can complete the 5 minutes then the following day try for 6 minutes and so on. work you way up to 30 minutes a day if you can.
At first you may find it hard to skip and struggle but that’s ok, keep resetting an attempting to jump the rope. You can even challenge yourself by counting the jumps and trying to beat that many jumps as a personal record. Or you can do this with time also, if you mange 7 minutes without stopping then try to beat that 7 minutes next workout.
Benefits to Jumping Rope:
- Lose unwanted body fat.
- Burns a lot of calories.
- Reduces injury
- Builds hand eye coordination
- Builds foot work
- builds agility
- Explosive Power when focusing on speed rather then endurance.
- Builds bone density.
Again when you do continue to be on your current workout program, using the above as a warm up is a great idea to incorporate the following. Although if you are not a current program that’s ok, keep playing basketball while doing the following.