Skinny Love: Why Players Across the NBA Are Slimming Down
The days of bulk and big muscles are gone. Today’s NBA is all about speed and space, and players are rapidly cutting weight to fit in.Skinny Love: Why Players Across the NBA Are Slimming Down
The days of bulk and big muscles are gone. Today’s NBA is all about speed and space, and players are rapidly cutting weight to fit in.
It’s September 1 and LeBron James is on his knees, teetering on a purple medicine ball. He balances himself while holding up a weight in each hand before a trainer puts a lighter weight on top of each. Neither James nor the weights falls.
To the fans that make up James’s 33.4 million followers on Instagram, the workout video is a curiosity—another window into how one of the world’s greatest athletes tunes up his body “in the lab.” But for basketball players, the video serves as a moment of realization.
“What happens now is a guy loses 15 pounds and he posts it on social media,” says Joe Abunassar, a longtime NBA trainer and the founder and president of Impact Basketball. “It’s not hard to convince an NBA guy to do something when the best guys in the league are doing it.”
As the NBA shifts more and more toward speed and shooting over size and back-to-the-basket post-ups, players are changing their bodies to keep pace. Abunassar, who has worked with the likes of Kevin Garnett, Kristaps Porzingis, and Kyle Lowry at his Las Vegas–based training facility, has seen more and more players willing to prioritize lean muscle and strength over bulk and size.
At NBA media days across the league, veteran NBA players showed up sporting slimmed-down physiques. Portland’s Jusuf Nurkic dropped 34 pounds. New Knicks center Enes Kanter lost 38 pounds. The Sixers’ Jahlil Okafor shed 20 pounds, in part by going vegan. New Orleans’ DeMarcus Cousins described his weight loss as a “significant” amount. The Celtics’ Marcus Smart lost 20 pounds, while the Blazers’ Damian Lillard and the Pacers’ Lance Stephenson both dropped 10 pounds.
When they do cut weight, more often than not NBA players are showing it off on their popular social media streams.
“It used to be guys’ own personal secret what they did over the summer to gain an edge over the other guys,” Joe Rogowski, the National Basketball Players Association’s director of sports medicine and research, says. “Now, everybody's bound to social media and seeing what that guy is doing in training. I think that's brought a huge awareness to how these guys train over the summer.”
Rogowski says the trend is trickling down to incoming draft classes, too. Younger players have seen the grainy videos of Carmelo Anthony running sprints or shooting late at night, and the Instagram pictures of Jimmy Butler sweating inside a gym.
The message is clear: In order to stick in the league, basketball indeed must never stop. Because in today’s NBA, the basketball never stops moving.
Wherever he’s training, Ian Mahinmi is always being tracked. Steve Smith, the Wizards’ director of sports science, Mahinmi’s personal chef, and Travis Reust, his offseason strength coach, all sent each other text messages and videos of Mahinmi lifting and squatting as the Wizards big man moved around this offseason in pursuit of slimming down. It worked—Mahinmi showed up to training camp this season a lean and strong 262 pounds.
“When I first started working with Ian, Indiana wanted him playing like a true big,” Reust says. “I got him looking big or bigger than Dwight Howard. He was yoked up, and he had the best year he's had.”
Mahinmi had three unspectacular seasons for the Pacers as a backup before breaking through as a starter in 2015-16, averaging career highs virtually across the board and earning a four-year, $64 million deal from the Wizards in the free-agent bonanza of 2016. But after a rough first season in D.C., in which he played just 31 games and underwent surgery to repair a partially torn meniscus in his left knee and had platelet-rich plasma treatment on both knees, the Wizards asked him to do something new: slim down. Maximize his speed. Bring out his agility. Keep his strength.
So, on hot summer days at the football field at Seguin High School, just east of San Antonio, Reust would put Mahinmi, as well as former Pacers George Hill and C.J. Miles, through a gauntlet of 110-meter gassers, focusing on not just fitness, but explosion and speed.
“I think that will be the trend for a while,” Reust says. “Because you always look at who's being successful, and Golden State right now, that's what they do, so everybody tries to emulate who's winning.”
As recently as three seasons ago, only one team cracked 100 offensive possessions per game: the Warriors, who went on to win the title. Last season, the number grew to almost a third of the league. This season, there are currently 19 NBA teams above the 100-possession mark. The Utah Jazz were the slowest team last season, averaging only 93.6 possessions per game. In 2006, that same Jazz team would have been 13th-fastest in the NBA. The Jazz are again last this season, at a pace of 96.6.
“The game has picked up another gear,” says Rogowski, who previously worked for the Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets. “It’s all about pace, pace, pace.”
Some of the biggest NBA players—literally—are getting in on the trend. With defenses switching more and more on screens, thus forcing players to match up with a wider range of positions and sizes, power forwards and centers are starting to slim-fit their offseason regimens.
That’s part of what Julius Randle, who lost a considerable amount of body fat this offseason, had in mind this offseason when he followed trainer Amoila Cesar’s exhaustively detailed diet and workout plan. “I knew the style Coach [Walton] wanted to play,” Randle says. “For me, it was just about making the game easier.”
“I think it’s a new era of big men,” says Denver’s Nikola Jokic, who lost a reported 10-12 pounds heading into the season. “A lot of big men in the league can do a lot of stuff, and I think the big men want to show the small guys what they can do.”
Their teammates in the backcourt are following suit. “Fives want to be 4s, 4s want to be 3s, 3s want to be 2s, 2s want to be 1s,” says Dan Barto, director of offseason training at IMG Academy. “Teams are playing smaller so there's just more open space. Whether you're a scorer or distributor, the advantage is being able to move quickly through that space and you're going to move quicker if you're 10 pounds lighter.”
Father Time forced Amir Johnson to adjust. Johnson started working in Vegas with Abunassar in 2005 when he was an 18-year-old rookie, alongside then-Pistons teammates Chauncey Billups and Tayshaun Prince. But after signing a one-year, $11 million deal with the Sixers this summer, the 30-year-old wanted to kick it up a notch.
“You know what?” Abunassar recalls Johnson telling him and his team in May. “I'm in for the full meal deal, whatever you guys tell me to do, I'm gonna do.” And so Impact set Johnson up with a detailed nutrition plan, a chef, and a tweaked workout regimen designed to meet his intended goal: slimming down and staying in the league.
“He redid his whole weight program and made it more like a track athlete … he was getting leaner, longer, making his muscles a little more efficient in their productivity,” Abunassar says.
The regimen was an extreme departure from the kind of advice he got earlier in his career.
"I think Rasheed Wallace told me to drink beer once to gain weight,” Johnson told reporters at media day.
This time around, Johnson ate mostly chicken breast, fish, and the occasional complex carbs, and showed up to training camp this season 20 pounds lighter. “He told me, ‘I’ve never felt this good in my life. The way I feel I could play five, six more years instead of just two,’” Abunassar says.
For Reust’s crew of Mahinmi, Hill, and Miles, all of whom are 30 or older, staying lean is as much about the future as it is the next season. “They all signed pretty lucrative deals and they don't want it to be their last,” Reust says. “When your feet hit the floor and your joints pound together, you're gonna only have so many touches before your body's gonna wear down, and when you're carrying that much weight, even more so.”
Mahinmi was given the all-clear to slim down in July, but started with lighter weights to take it easy on his knees. Losing weight also reduced the extra physical stress on his ligaments and joints when he ran, jumped, or landed.
“Someone like Nurkic—if he stays at a good weight, and he’s not fluctuating, he could add four, five years to his career,” Barto says. “He’s already had one injury,” he says, referring to the Blazers center’s broken right leg last March, “and the more weight you hold, the more you're banging your joints, and the more injury prone you're going to be.”
Players are now looking for ways to help them last—not just over the long haul of their career but over the course of a grueling 82-game season.
In previous years, Barto says, “Everyone would be like, ‘Look how hard he worked in the offseason. He's going to be so much more versatile, he's going to be able to post up.’ But the reality is those guys usually hit the wall at the All-Star break. Or they hit the wall slightly after the All-Star break.”
“It sounds ridiculous, but I was in a hot sculpting class.”
That’s what DeMarcus Cousins, then still a Sacramento King, told reporters was the reasoning behind his infamous draft-night tweet in 2016, sent about an hour after his team had traded down to select Greek big man Georgios Papagiannis.
We’ll never know if Cousins was toning his obliques or not, but his alibi is at least more believable than it would have been three or four years ago. That’s because you can find more and more NBA players doing nontraditional exercise classes such as yoga and cycling, or stepping into a squared ring.
“Ten years ago, guys thought boxing for basketball was taboo,” Rogowski says. “Now, guys are seeing players do that, do mixed martial arts, and be successful, so it takes away that stigma. Whether it's swimming, boxing, even mixed martial arts … they have now become very popular with our guys.”
Along with photos of Chris Paul and LeBron James putting in work in the weight room, a scroll through NBA Instagram also turns up Rudy Gobert and Shabazz Napier in the boxing ring or players at a pilates or yoga class. In August, Draymond Green was seen working out at a SoulCycle studio, alongside Noah Vonleh, Denzel Valentine, and Ian Clark.
“[SoulCycle] is easier on my joints,” Green says via email. “Soul classes also have that team mentality to them, so I like bringing the guys to do a ride together. It's a cool way to get out of the training facility and add some variety to our workouts.”
In 2014, Outside magazine chronicled Kyle Korver’s misogi workout, which featured a 5K relay on the ocean floor while carrying heavy weights. Two years ago, Dwyane Wade was seen playing dodgeball. Klay Thompson added beach volleyball, golf, and swimming to his summer routine. And earlier this year, Luke Walton said yoga and beach volleyball were the keys to keeping 37-year-old Richard Jefferson in the league.
Hill, Mahinmi, and Miles all hit a Pilates studio in Texas. This summer, Mahinmi started going twice a week. “All the stereotypes that previously went with yoga are no more,” Reust says. “Everybody's doing it now, and for good reason. It has a place in the game.”
Barto likens it to Dancing With the Stars. He says basketball players have to move more like dancers than ever, and as a result, less traditional training techniques like Pilates and yoga help promote and cultivate the skills the league now demands. Abunassar says he’s seen the trend toward maximizing leanness and flexibility grow over the past three to five years.
“This summer, Kyle [Lowry] is spinning, he's doing Pilates, he's doing basketball, he's playing five-on-five, he's stretching, and he did a hot-sculpting class,” Abunassar says of the Raptors point guard, who just three years ago lost 15 pounds by changing everything from his routine to his away-game diet. “The way the game has gone, a guy like Kyle does 90 percent of his weight lifting through Pilates now. Which, when I was starting in this business in ’97-’98, guys just didn't do that.”
It all began as a joke. Every offseason, Lang Whitaker and his high school friend Matt Colwell noticed the same reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of basketball players getting more muscular. It was always 15 pounds, he says. Never 17 or 14. Always 15.
“Eventually Google came around and I was able to do Google News searches,” Whitaker says, “and I found, actually, this is a common thing in all these newspapers.”
Whitaker began tracking the stories, even turning them into some of his own for Slam, GQ, and NBA.com. “Muscle Watch” was born.
“When Twitter came around, we put a hashtag on it,” Whitaker says. “When it made the crawl on NBA TV a few years ago and it said, ‘Check out the latest Muscle Watch on NBA.com,’ that was when I felt like, 'I made it.'”
But over the past few seasons, #musclewatch has evolved. #Skinnywatch may be the next frontier.
“You know, In some ways, RIP, Muscle Watch,” Whitaker says with a chuckle. “But I think it'll come back.”
For now, at least, slim is in.