Mamba Plan

Philadelphia, West Fifth District, 6:00 a.m. The sun had yet to rise.

Planet Fitness was a twenty-four-hour gym. There were countless gyms across America that operated around the clock. Fitness culture was a crucial part of American culture, and many people treated working out as a hobby. That was why so many Americans appeared stronger than Asians. They were not naturally stronger; studies showed that Asians naturally had higher testosterone levels than white and black people. Asian athletes had once dominated weightlifting-related events.

Kobe chose this gym because he could work out whenever he wanted and freely set his own training schedule. He also loved its purple-and-yellow decor. He had already been training here for several days. Training was his life. If some streaming platform filmed a day in Kobe's life, then nine times out of ten, whenever viewers clicked in, he would be training.

Kobe knew he no longer had to worry about a lack of basketball skills. At seventeen, his lean body was his deadliest weakness. In his previous life, when he had first entered the league, he had toughness but lacked strength. Unable to adapt to the NBA's physicality, he had spent a long time coming off the bench. That was what Kobe needed to improve quickly now. With his young, slight frame, he would definitely be at a disadvantage in the NBA's brutal physical battles.

Kobe guessed that his current ability to handle contact was probably close to that of Golden State's legendary dunker, Stephen Curry. With that level of physicality, the muscle-bound brutes of this era would knock him all over the place, leaving many of his basketball skills unusable. He had been thinking about adjusting his style of play for the season. He had no intention of being a bench player for an entire year. Even coming off the bench for one game would leave the Mamba with a bone stuck in his throat.

Kobe's signature post-up footwork required overwhelming strength, along with quick and explosive transitions. Right now, he could not even hold off a defender. No matter how exquisite his post moves were, they would be useless.

Isolation ball-handling and driving to the rim for finishes likewise required extremely high resistance to contact. Maybe without contact, Kobe could put on jaw-dropping performances, but the savage players of this primitive era would drag him from the heights of the sky straight down to hell.

That left Kobe with only two skills he could currently use in the NBA: off-ball movement for shooting, and pick-and-roll offense with the ball. Neither approach required him to rely on overwhelming physicality to shake defenders and make plays.

Off-ball offense required reading the overall defense, quick movement to get free, and the ball handler's broad passing vision. Once those conditions were met, off-ball tactics could become incredibly lethal. Especially with the future rise of the three-pointer, this easy and efficient scoring method would make off-ball movement a necessary tactic for every NBA team.

In this era, the representative of off-ball movement was future Hall of Famer Reggie Miller. Reggie Miller, a former American professional basketball player, had been born into a military family. Due to a deformity in his leg development as a child, he had needed to wear braces and could not exercise like other children until he grew older and his legs fully developed. He was a famous NBA clutch performer. Known for his accurate three-point shooting and late-game scoring, his clutch displays at the end of games were called "Miller Time" by fans. He spent his entire career with the Pacers, earning him the nickname "Mr. Pacer." Though his regular-season numbers were not particularly eye-catching, he averaged more than twenty points in each of his twelve playoff appearances from 1990 to 2002. In the 1993 and 2001 playoffs, he had respectively produced astonishing averages of 31.5 and 31.3 points per game.

The mainstream off-ball movement in the current NBA primarily involved cutting toward the basket, then curling around screens. Catching the ball in the mid-range, whether to shoot a jumper, post up, or drive to the basket again, were all common options. Jordan's role as an off-ball player in the Triangle Offense was a typical example.

Kobe had also made extensive use of this classic shooting-guard style of movement in his previous life. Do not think Kobe could not play off the ball. Every spearhead of the Triangle Offense had mastered off-ball skills to the highest level. They needed to suppress their desire to hold the ball, use massive amounts of off-ball offense to stretch the team's offensive spacing, and then take over the entire offense with abundant energy at the most crucial moments.

But with his current ability to absorb contact, this mid-range bruising style was clearly unsuitable. Kobe was not planning to run from it. He had decided to quickly use the fitness methods from his previous life to improve his physicality. However, that would take time to build up. At an age when his body had not yet been adjusted to its peak, Kobe had decided to make ball-handling pick-and-rolls and off-ball threes his primary offensive weapons.

Ball-handling pick-and-rolls were a point guard's signature means of survival. Putting a great deal of possession in one person's hands and having the star dictate the offense was also typical of the future NBA. This style placed extremely high demands on the ball handler. Ball-handling, playmaking, and scoring all needed to reach elite levels to fully bring out this tactic. A representative figure from the future was James Harden, who stirred up storms in the regular season for several consecutive years.

But in the current NBA, shooting guards rarely controlled the pick-and-roll. Coaches believed that was a point guard's job. They were relatively rigid, using positions to distinguish every player's on-court responsibilities. If Kobe wanted the right to initiate pick-and-roll offense, he had to show his ability.

So what was the Black Mamba's training plan? Kobe's secret was both simple and complicated: the "6-6-6" training method. Its intensity was so extreme that only "hell" could describe it. What was the "6-6-6" training method? Broken down by category, it meant "six hours a day, six stages each session, six training days a week."

He trained six days a week, six hours each day. Two hours went to running, two hours to ball drills, one hour to lung-capacity training, and another hour to strength training.

There were generally two locations for running: track training and basketball-court training. During his runs, he sometimes chose short-distance sprints to improve his reaction speed while running. Of course, long-distance running was also essential because it helped build stamina. On the basketball court, his running drills mainly consisted of shuttle runs, which helped simulate actual game movement and prepare him in advance. Kobe had given this exercise a highly vivid name—"Stomach Destroyer."

His ball drills were mainly shooting drills. Every day, Kobe forced himself to take no fewer than seven hundred to one thousand shots. But such intense shooting practice was not measured by volume alone. He constantly varied his shooting locations, forms, and release angles until he was satisfied.

For lung-capacity training, Kobe mostly used high-intensity exercises such as jump rope and boxing as supplementary practice. It was worth mentioning that although the plan allotted only one hour to this category, the actual time spent far exceeded that limit.

Over the six days of strength training, four days focused mainly on upper-body strength, while the other two were primarily paired with leg-muscle training. However, sit-ups were a daily staple throughout all six days, while dumbbells and training machines made up the rest of the routine.

The 6-6-6 plan was an ultra-high-load training regimen tailored specifically for Kobe after years of refinement by Kobe and his trainers, Gary Vitti and Joe Carbone. Kobe had relied on this level of training to win the five championships of his career.

The current Kobe had no money to hire Gary and Joe as his personal trainers, nor did he have access to facilities and training partners capable of completing every part of the program. But he had decided that the first thing he would do after getting paid was hire the two of them as his trainers. Training and physical therapy were matters Kobe valued greatly. In the future, Emperor James would spend two million dollars a year maintaining his body, and Kobe would be no less committed. The body was a player's most important asset, and training was the only way to turn talent into results.

Kobe knew that many future athletes would use steroids, growth hormones, external testosterone, and other drugs to rapidly build muscle. They often pretended to be injured or waited for the offseason to use those drugs and avoid league testing. But Kobe disdained such things. Proud Kobe had always looked down on those chemically enhanced athletes.

Of course, Kobe had come to Planet Fitness before sunrise for strength training. His strength plan used the future three-way split, cycling through the three major muscle groups of chest, back, and legs. Each session also trained smaller muscle groups such as the shoulders, biceps, triceps, forearms, and calves. He trained six days a week, cycling through the three major muscle groups twice.

The advantage of this method was that the recovery time for large muscle groups was theoretically forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Once they recovered and reached the peak stage of supercompensation, they could undergo the next workout. With three to four days between training each muscle group, he could better seize the window of muscle supercompensation. More effective stimulation meant faster growth.

Kobe's talent gave him recovery ability far beyond ordinary people. Not everyone could handle such high-load training, but every time Kobe went through a day of hellish workouts, he would wake after a night's sleep feeling full of energy.

Kobe needed to improve both his muscle density and muscle size. During the first cycle, he would use lighter weights and more sets to stimulate muscle growth. During the second cycle, he would use heavier weights with fewer repetitions. This training plan was also the method most suitable for him, based on future scientific research and more than twenty years of training experience.

Kobe was not worried that rapidly increasing his strength would affect his shooting touch. First, future science had proven that changes in strength would not make someone lose their shooting touch. That was why future players all chose extensive strength training to gain muscle. Second, he already had abundant experience playing at peak strength, so he would adapt again very quickly.

The large amount of daily aerobic training would also weaken the effects of muscle gain, while the overloaded training intensity would consume vast reserves of muscular energy. Rome was not built in a day. Even with this training method suited to Kobe, there would be no qualitative improvement in the short term. But Kobe knew that the moment he built up his strength would be the moment he ruled the NBA.

Kobe's training plan carried an enormous workload. Everyone was strongly advised not to imitate it, because following this plan would probably cause muscle breakdown. For those who wanted to work out at home during the pandemic, you could split Kobe's one-day training plan across six days, training one hour a day. That level of intensity would be enough for ordinary people like us to strengthen our bodies.