Last year, Victor Wembanyama visited the Shaolin Temple in China for extensive training.
He was coming off a sophomore NBA season in which he had played just 46 games because of minor injuries followed by a more serious diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot in his right shoulder that ended his season early.
The journey bore fruit. He went on to have his best season of his young career, improving at a pace we rarely see among players already so impactful. This past regular season, Wemby surpassed Nikola Jokić in NBA impact, as measured by xRAPM — a metric that had been dominated by the Serbian for half a decade before the rise of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Wemby.
What Wemby did there, and why it worked, is what this piece is about.
As someone who has practiced meditation for more than a decade, I can address these questions with some specificity:
What are the techniques that helped Wemby’s rapid ascent to the top of the NBA?
What are the benefits?
How can other NBA players — or any of us — take the same strides toward peak performance?
