Bigger, Faster, Hurt: Why the NBA Is Breaking & What Somatic Training Could Change.
Every era of basketball reshapes the human body. Players adapt to the demands of the game, and in response, the game adapts to the bodies that play it. Over the last decade, that evolution has accelerated. Seven-footers move like guards. Guards jump like small forwards. Speed, verticality, and sheer physical power have become baseline expectations.
And yet, for all the progress in strength, conditioning, and sports science, the league is carrying an unmistakable tension: more injuries to its biggest, most skilled, most valuable athletes. Night after night, another star disappears from the rotation. Not for a tweak or a rest day, but for something significant.
It would be convenient to call this bad luck. Most do. But patterns don’t unfold this consistently by accident. When an entire generation of extraordinary athletes struggles to stay on the floor, the problem isn’t individual—it’s architectural.
We are watching a system reveal its missing piece.
The Promise—and Blind Spot—of Load Management
The load-management era began with good intentions. The aim was to reduce cumulative strain, protect players from soft-tissue injuries, and preserve longevity. And yet the outcomes are difficult to ignore: despite unprecedented amounts of rest, the league is not healthier. If anything, the gap between talent and durability seems wider than ever.
Michael Jordan recently criticized the trend, calling it unnecessary for players who are otherwise healthy. His point wasn’t nostalgia; it was philosophical. He felt a responsibility to put on a show and make an impact for his team and the league. The debate has become almost exclusively structural—minutes, schedules, workload—while drifting away from the more fundamental question: What does it mean for an athlete to be prepared?
In much of modern training, preparation is treated mechanically. Build power. Build force output. Build size. Recover. Repeat. The external body advances; the internal awareness does not always follow. And as the body grows stronger, the forces multiplying through joints, tendons, and connective tissue grow with it.
This is the imbalance hiding inside the load-management conversation: rest can protect a fatigued body temporarily, but it cannot upgrade the system that senses, interprets, and distributes load in the first place.
Michael Jordan on load management and the mindset that kept him on the floor, via NBA on NBC.
A League of Extraordinary Bodies—and Rising Cost
The lower body now absorbs more stress than at any point in NBA history. Higher jumps. Faster deceleration. Heavier frames. More torque. More possessions played in space where a change of direction happens at full speed rather than in traffic. Add the travel schedule, the emotional demand, and the year-round nature of professional basketball, and the organism is rarely in neutral.
This doesn’t mean athletes are unprepared. They work relentlessly. They lift. They condition. They receive world-class treatment. But the training culture surrounding them has grown increasingly skewed toward output rather than integration.
A performance system can reach impressive heights while still overlooking the very capacities that hold everything together—proprioception, interoception, breath regulation, and the nervous system’s ability to adapt under pressure. Without these, raw strength becomes load rather than support. And when that happens, tissues designed to be durable begin to fail.
The league isn’t blind to what’s happening. This season, the NBA launched a multi-stage biomechanics assessment program, running hundreds of players through detailed movement analyses meant to identify inefficiencies, predict risk, and prevent the next wave of injuries. It’s a sophisticated step, and an understandable one. You can feel the urgency behind it: something is breaking, and the league is trying to measure its way to clarity.
But its very existence reveals the paradigm’s blind spot.
The assumption is that more data will solve the problem. That if we understand every joint angle, ground-reaction force, and deceleration pattern, we can outsmart the body’s failure point.
Measurement matters. But measurement can’t feel. It can’t regulate or integrate. What’s failing in today’s game isn’t the biomechanical model—it’s the human one. The nervous system is the governor of movement: the interpreter of stress, the distributor of tension, the organizer of timing, rhythm, and control. When it’s overloaded, dysregulated, or fragmented, the body loses its ability to coordinate force, adapt under pressure, or transition smoothly between effort and ease.
That loss shows up long before the data does. This is why framing the problem as an “awareness gap” is too small. The real issue is a breakdown in awareness, regulation, and integration—three capacities that determine how the athlete experiences the load their body generates.
Awareness tells the athlete what is happening internally.
Regulation changes how the body responds to those signals.
Integration weaves strength, movement, emotion, and perception into a coherent system instead of isolated parts.
Without this triad, even the most detailed biomechanics report is a photograph of symptoms, not the cause. Players aren’t getting hurt because we lack information. They’re getting hurt because they lack internal bandwidth—and the skills that expand it.
The league’s intervention is well-intentioned. But it proves something crucial:
We are trying to solve a regulation problem with measurement tools, a systems problem with isolated data, and an integration problem with mechanical fixes. Until that paradigm shifts, the injuries won’t.
The Achilles as a Signal, Not an Outlier
Last season, the NBA saw eight Achilles ruptures—the highest number on record. The previous high was five. The total does not include offseason injuries or pre-draft tears.
This is not a coincidence, nor is it purely the product of higher athleticism. The Achilles is one of the most resilient structures in the human body. It does not rupture spontaneously, and certainly not repeatedly across a league with the most advanced strength and medical staffs in sports.
When the strongest tendon in the body becomes the breaking point, it’s worth considering what the tendon is being asked to compensate for.
An athlete can deadlift 500 pounds and still lack the awareness to recognize when their landing mechanics are compromised. They can absorb contact and yet be unable to perceive when their nervous system is too taxed to stabilize a cut. They can build strength without building the sensitivity to know when they’ve crossed the threshold between adaptation and danger. The Achilles becomes the messenger of a deeper imbalance.
The Missing Component: Somatic Training
Somatic practices—performance yoga, breathwork, mindfulness, brainspotting, nervous system regulation—are often framed as recovery tools. Something to add when time allows. Something optional. Something separate from performance.
But the research tells a different story.
A 12-week yoga intervention improved collegiate athletes’ functional movement patterns and elevated their mindfulness levels—two markers closely tied to injury prevention and movement efficiency.
In Division I athletes, days involving mindfulness practice were associated with lower likelihood of injury the following day.
A combined mindfulness-and-yoga program in U.S. Army trainees led to better self-reported health, less pain interference, and fewer injury-related medical visits.
These are not marginal effects. They reveal a throughline: awareness changes how the body carries load. Not in theory, but in measurable, physiological ways.
Somatic training strengthens the internal systems that distribute force, modulate tension, and communicate warning signs before pain appears. It refines the nervous system, sharpens coordination, and supports tissue integrity at the moment of impact.
Strength and conditioning remain essential. But without the internal scaffolding that somatic training develops, the body becomes powerful in ways it cannot fully manage.
Building Athletes Who Can Listen
The next frontier in high-performance sport will not simply be bigger athletes or more precise workload data. It will be athletes who can feel the state of their bodies with accuracy—before the tissue gives out.
Players who understand the difference between effort and strain. Between activation and bracing. Between focus and tension. Between a system that is challenged and a system that is overwhelmed.
These distinctions cannot be coached verbally. They must be trained somatically. And when they are, durability changes. Recovery changes. Career length changes. The floor of performance rises, but so does the ceiling.
A System Ready for Evolution
The solution is not to reject modern training or dismiss load management entirely. Both serve a purpose. But neither can substitute for the internal development that the current model often ignores.
Somatic tools should not be reserved for downtime. They belong at the beginning of the training process, not the end. Not as accessories, but as architecture. Because the issue facing the NBA is not simply that players are more powerful—it’s that the nervous systems organizing that power have not evolved at the same pace.
The result is what we see now: remarkable athletes carrying loads their bodies can generate but can’t always regulate. The next era of basketball will belong to those who train both.
—
If you’re a player, coach, or part of an organization ready to go beyond surface-level fixes and truly invest in athletes' physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience, reach out. There is a different way forward, one rooted in self-awareness, embodied confidence, and sustainable growth, even in the face of pressure. Whether you’re looking to integrate somatic practices into your programs, support individual athletes in breaking destructive cycles, or build a culture where well-being is as celebrated as winning, let’s start that conversation. The stakes are too high to keep doing it the old way.
Metta,
Drewsome.
