Healthy Hooper: The Book

Your journey to high performance in basketball, health and life.

Nine chapters covering preparation, strength, nutrition, load, injury prevention, rehab, recovery, the mental game, and what basketball teaches you about everything else. Everything I wish I had known as a young player, combined with everything I have learned working at the highest levels of the game.

The book is in its final stages. It will be $44 AUD when it lands. Subscribe at the bottom of this page and you will be the first to know.

Read a chapter first

An early look at Chapter 5, PREVENT: injury prevention strategies for basketball.

Here is a stat that matters: NBA players who averaged fewer than one injury per year played 13 to 20 year careers. Players who averaged 1.5 or more injuries per year played 1 to 5 years.

Staying healthy isn’t luck. It’s the result of understanding your body’s vulnerabilities and addressing them before they become injuries.

Tendons adapt slowly. Your muscles can get stronger in weeks. Tendons take months. When you rapidly increase jumping volume or training intensity, your muscles might handle it but your tendons lag behind. Load spikes are the primary culprit: going from low activity during a break to full basketball volume, jumping from two practices per week to six, adding plyometric training suddenly.

The warning signs arrive early if you know where to look. Morning stiffness that improves with movement. Pain at the start of activity that decreases as you warm up. Pain after activity that persists. These are signals that load is exceeding capacity, and addressing them early is the difference between a small adjustment and months on the sideline.

The full chapter covers how to build tendon capacity through the week, how to train body control and landing, and the patterns behind the injuries I see most in junior basketball.

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