There are players who work hard in the league. Then there was Kobe Bryant, whose work ethic was simply insane. The Mamba’s training regime was simply too much for most. But Bryant stuck to it and achieved a lot of things in his career.
Coming into the league as a teenager, Kobe had a lot to prove from day 1. Although he was blessed with great basketball skills as well, it was his relentless work ethic that put him on a different level than the others.
But what was the secret behind it? Well, as per Bryant himself, it was quite simple. In a video, Kobe explained the importance of waking up early. That’s not all, he also started training earlier than everyone and stayed late than most.
“If you job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be. To do that you have to practice, you have to train. You wanna train as much as you can as often as you can. So if you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 12. Train for 2 hours, 12-2, you have to let your body recover. You get back out, you train. You start training at 6, train from 6-8 and now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and you do it again.
Those are two sessions. Now imagine, you wake up at 3 and you train at 4, go 4-6, come home breakfast, relax. Now you back at it again, 9-11, you relax and now all of a sudden you back at it again, 2-4. Now you back at it again, 7-9/ Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4. So now you do that as the years go on the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers, just grows larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. By year 5 or 6, it doesn’t matter what kind of work they’re doing in summer, they’re never gonna catchup. So it makes sense to get up and start your day early because you can get more work in.”
In a simple yet effective way Kobe explained the importance of getting up early. He certainly used this strategy when it came to increasing the gap between himself and the other NBA players.
Like he said, after some time nobody could come even closer to Bryant in terms of training and staying ahead of everybody else.
You can watch the whole video and everything else that Bryant talked about in the interview here:
