Youth Basketball Stretching: Upper Body

Video Transcript

"Hi. This is Sean Hobson and what we want to talk about right now is stretching the upper body and we're going to start with targeting the arms. It is very important in the game of basketball to have your arms fully stretched. Because one of the most important things is, obviously, scoring. And that is using your full arm. You want to be able to get a good shot off and you want to have your muscle groups completely stretched. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to be stretching out the shoulder and the back of the arms by pulling across. When you do this, you want to try to grab on to the elbow. You want to go ahead and try to pull that across as far as you can, until you feel your shoulder get a good stretch. Also, the more you grab down here, the more you can stretch the back of your arms out. You can see the guys behind us are pulling across. What you want to do is you want to hold this for about a 12 count and then you're going to switch it up. So we switch it up, kind of shake it out a little bit. And then go ahead and switch it up to the left side. And you'll probably want to do this for two sets and make sure you really get the back of that arm stretched, because for rebounding purposes or for shooting, you use those muscle groups quite a bit. So that's the first stretch we're going to do. The second stretch we're going to do is the tricep stretch. You can either grab your wrist and pull it back behind you, or you can grab the elbow and pull it behind you, and you're going to pull it down until you feel a tight burn right here in this muscle group. Hold that again for 12, switch it up to the other arm. Go ahead switch it. And then you're going to also hold that for two sets. Right there you were able to stretch your shoulder out and you were able to stretch your tricep out and that's the first important muscle group that we're going to stretch out."