Basketball Strength – Polakovich Gives Pro Advice For Young Athletes
Many kids dream of playing a sport professionally, but only a few reach that goal.
Jacob Polakovich had that desire when he was younger.
He was always tall, but those closest to him knew if he was going to reach his goals, he would need every advantage from a young age.
It started in middle school when his dad showed him videos of football players working out in PowerStrength’s original facility, ‘The Garage’.
Shortly after, Polakovich began his strength journey at PowerStrength.
“I remember my first conversation with Jim (Jacob’s dad) about Jake,” Mark Ehnis, owner of PowerStrength said. “He (Jim) knew he had so much potential but he needed to work to make it happen. Jim told me to push him hard and coach him up. We both knew that if he enjoyed the process then the sky was the limit. Needless to say, Jake did the work and has never stopped working towards that next level. It’s been an incredible journey to watch that has spanned over a decade. We’re all so proud of him and what he’s been able to accomplish – and he’s not done yet.”
Jacob recalls those early years and the long-term effects it had on him.
“At the time I didn’t really understand but I think that really kind of laid the foundation for not only my muscle, my strength, and everything going forward, but my mindset,” Polakovich said. “I kind of realized that the more serious you took the weight room at an earlier date off the court, the more mature, the more discipline, and all these things it taught me as a kid that a lot of people didn’t learn until they got in high school and started lifting that I think gave me a really big head start.”
GETTING SERIOUS
As Polakovich got into high school he started to focus on transforming his body and his game. He was training at PowerStrength 4 and sometimes 5 sessions per week year-round, through sports, school, and anything else that was going on.
“Still to this day, lifting and working out in-season is kind of a hard thing for me to figure out mentally, I know what I’m supposed to do but it’s hard to always get yourself to get out of bed and do it when you just played 40 minutes in a game and your legs hurt, back hurts and you’ve got nagging injuries,” Polakovich said. “I learned that too from here at an early age, that 10, 15, 30-minute lifts will make you feel 10 times better than you felt before and especially in-season so I’ve been coming five days a week,” Polakovich said.
He was also taking advantage of the knowledge of PowerStrength’s expert trainers who focus on the whole athlete.
“If you look back at pictures of me freshman-sophomore year, you can tell I wasn’t built like this. Most tall guys, especially younger tall guys, they don’t really put on weight,” Polakovich said. “I think the biggest thing that I learned here apart from lifting weights and naturally getting stronger from that was my diet. Everyone always sees the promotion of lifting with people that are big football guys or big basketball guys jumping out of the gym, all these big lifts, but the things that aren’t promoted aren’t necessarily talked about about PowerStrength is how much they talk to you about eating, your diet, your sleep, your rest, all this recovery, and the mindset part of it. I think that was the biggest thing for me because I was able to gain 30-40 pounds from my sophomore season to my junior season and that’s when I really took off and I felt like a man on the court instead of a kid after that year.”
He played football and basketball but started to focus solely on hoops after his sophomore year of high school.
His hard work and dedication led him to an outstanding high school career where he became Grand Rapids Catholic Central’s all-time leading rebounder and led the Cougars to the Division 2 state championship game as a senior.
LEADING THE NATION
He earned the chance to play collegiately at the University of Indianapolis, a Division II school. He eventually transferred to Southern Indiana which made the move to Division I by his senior season.
“The only reason I could play as a freshman in college was because of the work I put in in the weight room and here (PowerStrenght) specifically,” Polakovich said referring to PowerStrength. “I remember I got to college my freshman year and my head coach sat down with me and said, ‘You’re not going to play a lot this year, and if you play it’s not going to be because you score the ball 20 points a game, it’s going to be because you dive on the floor with your face first, you get offensive rebounds, you set hard screens, things like that.’ And that’s another lesson I learned from the weight room, if you’re gritty enough, if you work hard enough, you get your hands dirty you can make something happen. I ended up playing I think 20 minutes a game my freshman year towards the end of the season and every second of that was earned. In my sophomore season I had a starting role and played 25 minutes, in my junior season the offense ran through me.”
In his final season in college, Polakovich was in a furious battle to be the nation’s leader in rebounds per game with All-Americans Zach Edey from Purdue and Oscar Tshiebwe from Kentucky. He eventually finished second to Edey averaging 12.8 rebounds per game.
“Rebounding, it’s physical. High school is physical, once you get to the college level it changes completely,” Polakovich said. “If you aren’t prepared in the weight room you’re not going to be able to play and the time comes around your chance is called and you go down to get a rebound and a big body hits you and you go flying, it’s the little things that make differences and I say getting in the weight room is up there with your skillwork. Because at the end of the day, if you can’t hold your own on defense, you can’t rebound the basketball, you can’t set good screens or play physical before you get the ball, it’s impossible. So you got to get strong in the weight room, you have to be in shape and the way these seasons are made now, especially with the AAU circuit and playing five games a day, if you’re not strong, you’re not healthy. You got to be strong to be healthy and that’s a big part of why I take this so seriously.”
PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL
Jacob is now making his passion a career. He played this past season professionally in Italy where he set single-season and single-game records for rebounds.
“It goes back to the same thing,” Polakovich said referring to mindset, “PowerStrength has a big poster on the wall that says ‘Move The Chains,’ it’s a big message to keep it moving. It doesn’t matter how big again it is just keep moving forward and eventually your work will pay and always does no matter what you’re going through. It all comes back to the weight room, and honestly more than my physical strength, that mindset of if you want it bad enough, when a shot goes up in my mind, and I’m not a cocky person at all, but anytime I see a shot go up I think that that’s my ball, that’s my rebound. That mindset starts here where if you want to get stronger, you got to go get it in every set, every rep has got to be yours and it even comes down to competing in sprints at warm-ups or sleds at the end you see a guy start that is halfway down and he doesn’t even know it’s a competition yet, but you want to finish before him and it’s that mindset that kind of makes everything different.”
Polakovich is anxiously awaiting what is next, which is most likely playing somewhere in Europe again, but he is driven to keep ‘Moving The Chains.’
THE SECRET INGREDIENT
Through his basketball career and experiences, Jacob has learned a lot and credits strength training and PowerStrength for helping to continue to level up.
“I think it’s the most underrated thing on the basketball court,” Polakovich said. “I’ve been a lot of teams in my life and there’s always that guy on every team for every sport that is naturally gifted, athletic, it doesn’t look like they work that hard and they’re really good, but a lot of times those guys are the guys that are in the weight room, taking it seriously all the time. There’s people that can do it, but it’s very rare that someone walks into a gym and is dunking a basketball or jumping 35 inches off the ground and all that stuff. The weight room is by far, outside of shooting and working on your skills, the most important thing for basketball and it gets more true the older you get, I’ve been used to being the older guy on the court in college as I got older and this is my rookie season overseas so I’m going against 40-year-old men, it’s different again. Luckily, I had a solid foundation but I wasn’t used to seeing guys that were bigger, stronger, and faster than me and seeing that this year kind of reinforces the idea of how important the weight room is. It’s a mandatory thing, you don’t skip it. You make that promise to yourself and if you don’t skip it and you can put pennies in the jar every single day you’ll get better and you’ll get stronger and naturally, it makes the biggest difference in the world on the basketball court.”
Strength + Skills
Polakovich began working on his basketball skills with Kaan Civici since the summer of 2023. Civici has been training basketball players of all ages and ability levels for four years but has become more intentional about it over the last year.
Civici also trains recent East Kentwood grad and PowerStrength athlete, Christian Humphrey-Rembert, who will attend St. Thomas More prep school in Connecticut this year.
He tells all his clients that strength training is non-negotiable when it comes to upgrading their basketball ability.
“It’s a must,” Civici said. “Basketball players, they’re not like football players, I feel like lower body needs to be more of a priority than your upper body. But that’s a must. So if you’re not doing any basketball, you have to be doing strength and conditioning. When I asked you what are you doing this summer? Your answer should be lifting first. When I say lifting, I’m talking about a lot of plyometrics. If you’re working with someone, make sure you go in there to lift or work on your body. That’s not only because you try to be an athlete but for your life. That is a must. That’s 80% of what needs to happen and then basketball. You should be saying ‘I do basketball and I go lift.’ Christian Humphrey-Rembert comes here at 6:30, he lifts at 9:30 every single day, and then he sleeps, rests, and does it again. It needs to be like an everyday thing, especially for athletes, it’s not even debatable. That’s why I always tell my high school kids they want to come in and just shoot the ball, but unfortunately, it doesn’t go like that. When they try to go inside and get bumped off they get upset. I asked them ‘Hey, have you been lifting?’ They said ‘no.’ ‘Hey, maybe you should start lifting,’”
Civici is passionate about helping young basketball players and wants to make sure they are doing everything they can to reach their goals.
“I think there’s a misunderstanding when it comes to lifting,” he said. “When you say lifting people think that you have to be a football player, only football players lift. Come on, if you ever watch the basketball game, and if you ever go to a basketball game they lift before, they lift after the game. Why are those guys lifting and you think that you’re not lifting? Because basketball players think that they don’t have to lift they just need to go and shoot the ball. They think that there’s not much of a physicality which is completely wrong to say. I mean you’re bumping all day and you’re hitting all day, you’re getting hit all day. It’s not only that, say your ankles and knees, do you know how many times they jump a game? Every single time when you jump you are putting stress on your knees and ankles. Why would you not actually get stronger in those areas so you can actually play how many games you’re trying to play, but you can lower the risk of injury and go there and be the kid that never gets injured. When you say lifting or strength and conditioning, parents say, ‘well he just plays basketball.’ Do you know how many times I’ve heard that? ‘He just plays basketball.’ Okay, yeah, that’s why he needs to lift. I mean, they pay I don’t know, like $3,000 for an AAU team for your kid to play four or five times a weekend putting all the stress on knees and ankles and not lifting. Next time I see him he gets injured, why? He just played play six games a weekend and what do you expect? Of course he’s gonna get injured if he doesn’t take care of his body. Why did Michael Jordan get a private trainer? Did the Chicago Bulls not have a strength and conditioning guy? Yeah, but why did he get Tim Grover? Why did Kobe want to train with Tim Grover? That’s the main reason. I just don’t understand why parents would pay that much money for those teams and not actually do the thing that needs to be done.”
PowerStrength not only helps athletes get stronger and more explosive but teaches the fundamentals of how to jump properly and land correctly.
Polakovich has some advice for future star athletes out there.
“The thing that I wish I would have figured out at a younger age, as much as I was in the weight room, is that you need to enjoy it,” he said. “I don’t think kids are in the weight room enough. I think part of that is because they’re going to a place where it’s made almost as a punishment. You might have a random football coach run weights at school, it’s not their fault, they don’t have any background in weights and so it almost seems like a punishment, ‘we just got to make this as hard as possible, as painful as possible and maybe you might get something out of it,’ whereas now I look at it and I’m lucky enough that this is work for me now, but even before then in college, high school, once I realized that how much I love basketball and how much this weightlifting will help me improve at basketball, I started to enjoy the weight room and enjoy the hard things and enjoy the process. And once you can start doing that it becomes fun in the weight room because you’ll start seeing those noticeable gains and then you start realizing how much it translates and at the end of the day you’ll just be better in the weight room and as a person for it once you start enjoying it.”
Polakovich is still writing his basketball story. He is working toward getting to the EuroLeague someday, or maybe even the NBA. He is one of the few who is getting to live out his dream, one that some believed in more than a decade ago.
“It’s different. I wouldn’t come to the same place (PowerStrength) for 12 years if it wasn’t what I thought was as close to perfect as it can be,” Polakovich said about PowerStrength. “The way things are handled here, it’s so professional. It’s groups of people but it feels like it’s one-on-one work. In almost every set, if you got your arm is a little bit off, they’ll correct you but not in a negative way where you’re getting screamed at, they lift you up. They make it so the lifts are hard, you’re tired, you’re working really hard, you’re gassed, but the trainers will build you up. So you kind of get beat down by the lifts and then you get built back up by the trainers. When I was younger too, you have a lot of doubt and everyone said ‘You’re never gonna earn a D1 scholarship, never gonna play professional basketball, but you come in here and I remember being 14 or 15, and any dream I had, anyone in the gym would tell you that if you work hard enough you can get there and I think that’s a very important thing, especially for high schoolers and kids that are just trying to make a dream come true that they might even be too embarrassed to say out loud. It helps a lot to have all that positive reinforcement from all these people here.”
GET STARTED AT POWERSTRENGTH
5th-12th grade athletes of all sports and abilities can sign up at PowerStrength – while spots remain. PowerStrength currently has 4 facilities in West Michigan – Alpine, Kentwood, Jenison, and Plainfield – with a 5th facility in Holland coming in late fall 2024!
Multiple training sessions are offered throughout the day and into the evening during the summer, specific training times vary by location.
Visit https://powerstrengthpro.com/athletes to learn more or click below to schedule your assessment and get started.