Juju Griffith: Strength Training for Youth and High School Basketball (Copy)
JuJu trains Dylan Harper and Ron Harper Jr. Photo Credit: Sam Strinkovsky
Juwan “Juju” Griffith knows a thing or two about strength training and athletics. He first started strength training at the age of eight with his older brother. He then attended Bergenfield High School where he was a three sport athlete (football, basketball, and track and field), followed by three years playing as a tight end for Army football. While at Army, JuJu started training other football players and currently has his own facility in HoHoKus where he has become the go-to trainer for many of Bergen County’s top athletes, including the NBA’s Dylan Harper.
JuJu noticed as recently as a few years ago that basketball players didn’t place much of a priority on strength training. They just wanted to hoop and work with their skills trainers. “In my experience, the hardest thing was for me to convince a basketball player to start strength training,” JuJu said. But that attitude among basketball players has changed. “Some of them had to come to it on their own,” JuJu continued, “and sometimes that came in the form of AAU. They started to see that the competition was getting bigger, stronger and more resilient.”
Juju said that strength training not only enhances performance on the court but helps “bulletproof the body” with how fast the game is being played and how explosive athletes are getting at a younger age.
Does Weight Liftng Stunt Growth?
Before asking JuJu about strength training basics, I wanted to get JuJu’s opinion on a topic that many old school parents worry about: won’t strength training stunt my child’s growth? This concern is relevant for basketball players because height matters.
“When does the athlete start playing sports?” JuJu asked me.
“Around 5 or 6 years old,” I responded.
JuJu noted that regardless of what sport kids are playing at that age, they’re running and sprinting. “So getting a little nerdy here,” JuJu said, “sprinting is the most neurologically taxing thing you can do to your body since it recruits over 95% of the motor neurons within your central nervous system.”
“And on top off that, when you’re in a full-brown sprint, you’re putting down anything between five to eight times your body weight into the ground,” JuJu continued. “So if your child is old enough to start sprinting and strong enough to withstand it, they’re old enough to start strength training.”
Now, JuJu is not suggesting that a five year-old do Olympic style lifts. The type of strength training depends on the age of the child and their progress. Younger kids will start with body weight exercises and then, as they get older, progress to dumbbells and eventually a barbell.
JuJu has key performance indicators for each age group to evaluate his athletes and determine whether they’re ready to move onto something more challenging. For example, “if [a middle or high schooler] can goblet squat half their body weight for reps with good form, ‘I’m like okay now we can progress to moving to a bar,” JuJu said. “The whole point of the progression is to make what you’re doing a little bit harder so that the body has to adapt to it.”
Since some kids develop earlier than others, they may be able to progress faster. “I have some middle schoolers that train with my high school kids because they’re capable of doing it,” JuJu said. “Age doesn’t really matter as such – it’s more about what their bodies are capable of handling.”
Strength Training Principles
For basketball players, strength training can be fun! Photo Credit: Brandon Banks
Okay, so how does a basketball player go about strength training?
Here are a few other takeaways from my conversation with JuJu:
1. Strength training for basketball players is just one component of a training plan that should also include sprinting and plyometrics. “What we do is form your strength training based on your weaknesses,” JuJu said, to improve the athlete’s performance and make sure that he or she is available to play in games.
2. An effective strength training program for basketball is composed of the seven foundational movement patterns that mimic what we do in our daily lives:
push (e.g., pushup or dumbell/bench press)
pull (e.g., pull up, lat pulldown or row)
squat
lunge
hinge (e.g., reverse deadlift)
carry (e.g., farmer’s walk)
rotate
For example, “when you pick up a bag of groceries, you’re carrying,” JuJu said. “When you go into the cabinet to pull something down, that’s pulling.” For each of these seven actions, JuJu has a variety of exercises in his toolbox depending on the athlete’s needs and development.
3. Earlier in his career, JuJu strength trained basketball players the same as football players because that was all that he knew at the time. But then he started to realize that strength training basketball players in this way helped them improve their body control and coordination, especially those going through a growth spurt. Their knees also didn’t hurt as much when jumping.
Over the years, JuJu has eliminated complex lifts for basketball players because he found that they were generally not as motivated to do them. So for example, JuJu doesn’t have his basketball players do Olympic style lifts unless they really want to.
4. JuJu focuses not only on reps but time under tension. “That’s how many seconds you’re performing the eccentric [or downward] phase of an exercise,” JuJu explained. “So if I’m telling you, I want you to do five squats, with three seconds going on the way down, that’s fifteen seconds of squats.” That could be equivalent to doing fifteen squats with one second per squat. “Everybody has a misconception that if I want to build my legs,” JuJu said, “I need to do more reps. No, it’s actually beneficial to sometimes slow the weight down and control it more.”
5. JuJu recommends strength training a maximum of 2 - 3 times a week to allow the body to recover. He also recommends strength training in-season to stay injury free.
Sample Strength Training Plan
As for specific exercises, JuJu provided sample four week strength training plans for both middle and high school players. You can access the plans here.
If you’d like to learn more about strength training or train with JuJu, check him out on Instagram @_jujuperformance or visit his website jujuperformance.com.