Stick your butt OUT like BEYONCE advises Tahir, my coach. We’ve met on a wet windy Tuesday morning on an impressive basketball court in St Matthews in Leicester and I’m getting some mid- 26 Day Challenge training advice. It’s clear that standing upright, throwing the ball from over my head like a footballer’s throw in isn’t cutting the mustard when it comes to shooting from the basketball charity stripe.
I’ve never been instructed to behave like Beyonce before but the offer is too good to turn down. Butt OUT, pounce in place and voguing it like a MF, and I’m away, all those Beyonce tunes bouncing around my head in sympathy with the ball as it bounces out of the net and all over the court. All the single ladies are irreplaceable, putting a ring on it if I were a boy crazy in love.
The energising effect is indisputable and whilst the conversion rate from miss to near miss to basket hasn’t noticeably improved over the course of the training, I’m confident that a combination of butt OUT, elbows UP, follow THROUGH and flick your WRIST will see me through the remaining 18 days of the challenge.
I’m definitely on a tipping point of basket success rather than becoming a basket base and it won’t be a matter of ‘Will I ever shoot 26 baskets?’ to ‘How much can I reduce the time taken to shoot them?’
Wishful thinking may be but as the lady might have said, ‘if you like it then you gonna put it through a ring’.
Dr Nick Owen MBE PLUS 