Athleticism and long-distance running for basketball

"'What do you know about athleticism? What purpose do these long runs have other than to hurt your back?' He [Pep Guardiola] chuckles again and continues: 'Now they'll come back thinking they've trained hard because they've had a 15-minute run, but it's just placebo effect. They think that when they're doing these positioning exercises that they're not working.'Lorenzo Buenaventura, who is working alongside Pep, explains: 'Initially they were a bit taken aback that we weren't asking for 1000-m sprints, even though Bayern were already the least traditional of German teams....'There's not a huge difference between what we do and other training methods in terms of intensity and volume of work....We value quality over quantity and prefer to do more high-quality exercises together than spend time doing long stints of physical training.'"

From Pep Confidential: Inside Pep Guardiola's First Season at Bayern (Perarnau, 2014)By Brian McCormick, PhDDirector of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development LeagueAuthor, The 21st Century Basketball Practice