"why don't you give him a call?"

Kobe says, "Well tell me about Grover."

And he goes, "Man, Grover really, really knows his stuff,"

but he goes, "But he's the biggest asshole

"you will ever meet."

One of the nicest things Michael's ever said to me,

because he didn't call me a asshole,

he called me the asshole.

Well if you're gonna strive for something,

never strive to be a.

A is a part of a group, the, you stand out.

[upbeat music]

Tim Grover, company is Attack Athletics,

title is Sports Enhancement Specialist.

Kobe Bryant's trainer from 2007 to 2012.

I've always admired Kobe when I was training Michael.

Everyone said he's the next one,

so I've always kind of watched him,

and saw him coming in and out of the United Center,

and so forth.

But in 2007, he actually called Michael,

and said, "Hey listen, my knees are absolutely killing me."

Because Kobe had came into the league when he was 17,

so he had had a lot of miles on his legs already.

People forget about that, that he came in

at such a young age,

and was playing at a very young age.

So, he goes, "You think you could help me out?"

I said, "I don't think I can help you out,

"I know I can help you out."

And he goes, "I'll see you tomorrow."

[upbeat music]

Once I got the medical history,

I talked to a bunch of individuals

that had been doing work with Kobe,

kind of getting what his regimen was,

what he was doing, how often he'd workout,

so once I got the resources put together,

I flew out to LA, sat down with him.

We started to go through the regimen

and the problem with his knees were,

he was basically doing too much.

This is a common problem that's happened now.

You have so many experts involved.

You have your trainer, you have your massage therapist,

you have your muscle activation guy.

Everybody's pulling everybody

in all these different directions,

because everybody wants the credit for the client.

You gotta get everybody on the same page.

If I need an individual to shorten

a certain group of muscles, or leave them alone,

and lengthen others, and then you're seeing something,

and you're doing the complete opposite,

that's never gonna benefit the athlete,

so when I came in, I told Kobe, I said,

"If I'm gonna do this, I have to be the person in charge."

I said, "You can continue to work with everybody,"

but I said, "I have to be in charge,

"I have to know everything that's happening,"

and then once we got everybody on the same page,

we actually decreased the amount of workload he was doing,

and cause Kobe is another one of the persons

that his biggest obsession was

to have more championships than Michael.

You know, if you were to ask him

when he was gonna retire, he would say,

"After number seven."

He didn't say, he never bought it in years,

because Michael had won six, so his goal was seven.

One of the biggest differences

between the two is, Michael always knew when it was enough,

and he would listen to you.

You know, if you told him that's it, that's it.

With Kobe, to him, that's it meant,

that's it for that moment,

but three hours later I can start back up again,

and he never really got out of that mentality,

which I don't blame him,

because that's what made him successful.

It's hard to understand that sometimes you need

to do less to get more.

So I get everybody in the room.

We pool all the information together,

and I don't come in and say, "I'm right."

Let's everybody understand what's going on,

and figure out how to cure this ailment.

Just like basketball is a team sport,

getting an individual healthy is a team sport.

[upbeat music]

When I started with Kobe, what did I have to do?

We had to rebuild the whole foundation again.

We had this super athlete,

who had all the beautiful things,

had the expensive kitchen,

had all the great appliances, had the cars,

but the foundation of the house wasn't taken care of.

What is foundation?

Foundation is solid cement.

It's solid brick.

You build foundation by lifting weights.

The fastest, quickest way to get an athlete stronger,

is through moving metal.

How can you have a sport now,

when you have so much more technology,

you have so much more resources,

less contact, and the, more injuries.

It's mind boggling to me.

It's because everything is rubber bands,

everything is resistance, everything is cable.

There's teams now in the NBA

that don't even have a weight room.

You still have to move iron.

It's the one greatest form of injury prevention,

because you do a compound movement,

it sends the muscles, and the electric stimulus

that goes into the body,

that cannot be duplicated by cables,

it cannot be duplicated by body work,

it cannot be duplicated by medicine balls,

and there's all the studies that are out there to prove it.

But, everyone gets back into sport specific.

It doesn't look good.

All right, it's too simplistic.

It is very simplistic, but,

you're building the foundation.

And this is nothing new.

This goes back to when they built the pyramids.

If you start adding pulleys and cables,

it's not true resistance.

When you play basketball, you play football,

you play baseball, you play soccer,

whatever you play, when you get hit,

when you jump, when you land,

there's no pulleys, there's no cables.

Your body weight is the meta.

You have to learn how to explode with it,

and you also need to learn how to land with it,

and how to stop it, and that's what metal does.

It teaches you to lift it,

but it also teaches you to put it down.

Accelerate and de accelerate.

With Kobe, everything was acceleration.

He had a Ferrari and a Lamborghini acceleration,

and he had a sub car performance brakes in it.

Here everyone talks about, you know,

well how fast can a person go

from one end to the court to the other?

Well I wanna know how quickly a person can go

from one end to the other,

and stop on a certain particular point.

I need you to be able to de accelerate,

so what he had, he had a major imbalance

between the muscles that accelerated,

and the muscles that de accelerated,

and that was causing the issues on his knees.

So what we had to do was,

for all your years, you've been shortening muscles,

because that's what most training does.

It's a contraction of a muscle.

So we put a whole new regimen into his program,

where everything was lengthening of the muscle,

to lengthen, lengthen, lengthen.

So there's three types of contractions that you have.

You have the isometric contraction,

which is static, where the contraction doesn't move.

You have the concentric contraction,

which is a shortening of the muscle,

and you have the eccentric contraction,

which is the lengthening of the muscle.

We totally took the concentric phase

out of his training, totally.

Very difficult to do because the way

to overload a muscle through an eccentric phase,

you're stronger on a lengthening of a muscle

than you are on a shortening of a muscle.

Let's take a simple leg press movement.

Most people when they do it,

you have the weights setup, and you push out,

and you bring the weight back.

I wouldn't allow him to push out.

We would literally have two or three of us,

we would push the weight out,

have him place his feet on there,

and just have him come bring the weight back slowly.

We were able to create a more of a space

in between his knees, so there was less friction there,

so if you had less friction,

the chondromalacia, and the different,

the tendonitis and the stuff that was happening on his knees

was starting to get alleviated.

We were able to identify all that

with the rest of his team, and everybody started

to work on concentrating on lengthening everything,

and lengthening is so much more painful than shortening,

but the one thing you know about Kobe,

this guy's pain tolerance was off the charts.

[upbeat music]

People always say, you should have posted more

of Kobe's workouts on social media.

I said, "If I posted Kobe's workouts on social media,

"we'd literally be posting something four times a day."

That's how focused he was in his pursuit of excellence,

and his pursuit of championships.

Kobe was like, everyone said you won the championships

because of Shaq, but when Shaw was traded to Miami,

Kobe wanted to prove that he could win not one championship,

he could win multiple championships without Shaq,

and that's when I was there.

Kobe wanted that pressure,

so he knew he had to become more effective,

he had to get his teammates involved.

Kobe was as hard on his teammates as Michael was.

He was just as hard, and as competitive, in practice.

Everybody watched films of the current players.

Kobe would tell these guys to get film

of players going way back.

Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Pete Maravich.

He goes, "I wanna see what those guys did

"to be successful."

A lot of people don't know this,

is Kobe knew four or five languages very fluently.

I'm talking about fluently.

Obviously English, Italian, Spanish,

and I know he had started working on like Mandarin.

I mean those aren't easy languages.

I mean, I'm talking about fluent,

like he could have a conversation

with individuals in those languages.

Pau Gasol was one of his teammates, the Spaniard,

so they would communicate on the court in Spanish,

so the other team wouldn't know

what they were talking about.

And the reason he ended up learning Mandarin so well,

is because he saw the explosion in China basketball

before everybody else did.

So he goes, "How can I endear myself

"to this culture even more?"

He says, "Yeah okay, a lot of players just go over there,

"but what if I can give a press conference

"in their language?"

You know, the greats, they show up early, they stay late.

There's times where you'll see Kobe

and the athletic trainer throw a towel over the finger,

yank it back, and go right back in the game,

because Kobe doesn't wanna miss that time.

Same thing with his shoulder,

when he's had it dislocated shoulder.

They just, you pop it right back into place.

The last play when he tore his achilles,