Sports training company SKLZ has the constant goal of making athletes better than before they came across the brand and its products, and it includes all athletes of all sports. That includes basketball, but a lot of the time, hoops training has been relegated to drill work with regulation basketballs and lots of running and strength training, since the game requires very little equipment to play. That’s changed a little bit — behold, the SKLZ Control Basketball range.
In the range, there are three different basketballs — there’s the Light Weight Control Basketball, the Heavy Weight Control Basketball, and the Official Weight Control Basketball. All three have distant advantages. The Light and the Official are small, palmable basketballs that are just a few inches bigger than the circumference of a Nerf ball; the Heavy is the size of a regulation ball, but weighs similarly to a medicine ball. All three balls can be dribbled and are indoor/outdoor, making training with the balls easier in your respective environment. SKLZ equips each ball with a guide on how you can train with it and other products that you can buy to increase the threshold of your training, but I used the ball as organically as possible, which is to say that I just used the balls and my body as my equipment.
With the Light, I was able to work on core training with figure-8 in-and-outs between my legs and around my waist; using a regular basketball, improving quickness is more difficult because of the larger circumference of the regulation size. With the Official, I could practice dribbling with its smaller size, concentrating on power and touch, keeping my fingertips on the ball at all times without palming it. With the Heavy, dribbling was more difficult with the ball’s increased weight, hard dribbling gave me a brief arm/shoulder/core workout; also, doing swinging moves (like the clear-out motion in recovering a rebound) with the ball allowed me to do additional core work.
The great thing about all of these balls is that they allowed anyone to develop their handle and also make the ball a tool in developing your body. For kids and adults alike, anyone that wants to challenge themselves with ball work can do so with the Control Basketballs. They’re safe with proper usage and so versatile, getting a drill workout in is easier than ever.
Special thanks to SKLZ.
Photography by Sandy Dover.
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