There are some things a trainer just can\u2019t control when it comes to his athlete. For Stefan Valdes, who has been Knicks star Josh Hart\u2019s trainer for six years, it\u2019s Mike and Ike\u2019s \u2014 and the occasional glass of wine.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, it\u2019s candy,\u201d Valdes said in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News, \u201cand you can say it\u2019s a quick, little source of carbohydrates, and you can use that stuff [as an athlete].\u201d<\/p>\n
Hart is indubitably a Mike and Ike\u2019s guy. It\u2019s his pre-game snack of choice, one of a few regular items home or away at his locker before tipoff of a Knicks game. Yet that tends to be the extent of what the basketball world sees: the moments before, after and during battle on an NBA court.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what you don\u2019t see are the things he does at home,\u201d said Valdes. \u201cYeah, he\u2019ll have his candy and his glass of wine here and there, but at the end of the day, everything in moderation. We have to enjoy ourselves when it comes to this stuff. Plus, I know Josh isn\u2019t having bad wine. He\u2019s having a cup of quality wine, and that makes him happy, and he shares with friends. So that environment of doing the right things is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hart has built a reputation on the court as the heartbeat of the reigning NBA champions, the energizer bunny, Swiss-army knife and glue-guy whose selflessness helped the Knicks end a 53-year championship drought in June.<\/p>\n
That production on the court wouldn\u2019t be possible without the championship habits he built at home.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo he\u2019s taking care of his body, he\u2019s improving everything from his performance standpoint. But most important is his resiliency from a mental standpoint, and then from a training standpoint, he works harder than every single guy,\u201d said Valdes. \u201cHe\u2019s the strongest guy we\u2019ve had in \u2014 I\u2019ve worked with him six years and not many guys have him beat.\u201d<\/p>\n
AN ENGINE BUILT FROM SCRATCH<\/p>\n
Hart is an NBA champion \u2014 and champions celebrate accordingly. For Hart, that meant a week soaking in the moment in the city, then a two-week family trip to Europe to \u201crelax and stay off of his feet,\u201d said Valdes.<\/p>\n
Then just like that, it\u2019s back to work: three weeks off, the rest of the year on for a player hoping to recover, refine and repair for another NBA championship push.<\/p>\n
Life with the Knicks has been uncharted territory for Hart, who didn\u2019t have a playoff appearance to his name before the trade sending him from the Portland Trail Blazers to join forces with Jalen Brunson and the Knicks. Part of that territory has been improving on an engine that failed him in previous stops in his career.<\/p>\n
Hart has appeared in a whopping 249 of a possible 271 regular season games since arriving in New York in February of 2023. But what Valdes called \u201cinjuries based more on capacity\u201d kept Hart in the 40-65-game range for a good chunk of his career prior.<\/p>\n
The solution? Rebuilding Hart\u2019s entire engine.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we did a lot of heavy, slow resistance work to rebuild that resiliency in his joints and his tendons and his ligaments and his muscles, and even gaining weight: muscle mass is lost a lot throughout a season. So if we put on a good muscle mass especially in his legs, that kind of supports him,\u201d he said. \u201cSome offseasons, this guy was weighing 230 pounds rock solid. He ends up playing more at the 218 mark. He\u2019s gonna lose it in training camp with so much cardio. But for us, it was rebuilding the entire foundation six years ago. Now, we don\u2019t do it as extreme as we used to with the heavy, slow eccentric work.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow it\u2019s more a variation of that, and we have other things that pop up. It\u2019s working on his hips, working on his back, his mobility and maintaining those previous victories that we did as far as building that capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n
ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a season-long joke between Valdes and Hart, who shot a career-high 41.2% from 3-point range with a splint on his right ring finger. Had Hart intentionally separated said finger from his hand years ago, according to his trainer, he would be a career 40% shooter from deep.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe should have done that years ago,\u201d Valdes said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
The same logic can be applied, of course, to Hart\u2019s minutes workload, which was slashed when Mike Brown took over as head coach when the Knicks fired Tom Thibodeau at the end of the 2024-25 season.<\/p>\n
Hart averaged 37.6 minutes in Thibodeau\u2019s final year as coach. He averaged just a tick over 30 minutes in Year 1 under Brown and publicly wondered whether the reduction in minutes meant he \u201cwas trash.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then came the upswing.<\/p>\n
A career year from behind the arc. The same undeniable impact in fewer minutes. It took some soul searching, sure, but the reduced workload ultimately brought forth the best version of the Knicks\u2019 star forward.<\/p>\n
Hart still averaged more than seven rebounds and close to five assists a night. He still ran rampant as a coast-to-coast threat off of a defensive rebound in transition.<\/p>\n
Under Brown, Hart did it for more intense spurts at a time. The results were staggering.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere everyone else struggles to go 100 percent, Josh can go 140 percent,\u201d Valdes told The News. \u201cI would say no matter how many minutes he plays, he\u2019s going to give you the same output \u2014 but he had fresher legs. So fresher legs allow his body to be more efficient. That\u2019s why he averaged 41 percent from 3 [this year] compared to 33 percent the year before when he was playing so many minutes. So you have fresher legs. You\u2019re taking just as many shots, but you\u2019re making more because you have less fatigue.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow that we have 140 percent that he can push, we can maybe [this summer] now get to 150-160 percent where everyone else is capped at 100 percent capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n
THE SECRET WEAPON<\/p>\n
No, it\u2019s not Mike and Ike\u2019s, though Hart\u2019s ability to convert sugar into energy \u2014 and not body fat \u2014 surely falls in the superpower category. It\u2019s not the wine cellar in the basement, either.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the pillow. The two-in-one Blueair purifier and humidifier his trainer swears by. The red-light therapy, sauna, and yes, the diet. Hart burns calories so fast playing basketball that candy couldn\u2019t possibly move the needle on the scale. The Knicks star forward isn\u2019t counting calories. His chef works with the Knicks\u2019 dietician to handle that for him.<\/p>\n
This is where most fans can mirror the lifestyle of an NBA champion: because champions have championship habits, and the best habit for a player like Hart is prioritizing rest and recovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a big wellness guy. So his habits are: he sleeps,\u201d Valdes said with a laugh. \u201cHe has a purifier, he has a humidifier. So that kind of sets the stage. Then he does his red-light therapy. He does his sauna. He eats the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hart does soft tissue work every single day. He stretches and uses his Normatec boots as part of his routine. For the fans at home who want to adopt championship habits, Valdes says small steps can yield tremendous results.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe small little things people can do? The home environment is huge, having a water filtration system, and just making sure you\u2019re doing all the right things and taking those victories so the victories can stack up,\u201d said Valdes. \u201cSo maybe one little thing is not a big deal, but when you stack them all together, you\u2019re making this huge change in your overall wellness, recovery and ability to perform at the next level.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Valdes and Hart, rest falls squarely into the \u201ccontrollable\u201d bucket. There are back-to-backs, long travel stretches and emotional swings over the course of an 82-game regular season. Hart prioritizes quality sleep wherever and however he can get it.<\/p>\n
\u201cControl what you can control. The small things that I tell people: improve your environment at home \u2014 making sure the shades are dark, it\u2019s pitch-black, you\u2019re avoiding blue light from your phone, you\u2019re setting that purifier to kind of get you to sleep, and that\u2019s decreasing the pollutants around you, so therefore, you have less of a chance of getting sick,\u201d said Valdes. \u201cAnd then your body\u2019s able to get into a deeper sleep quicker and more efficiently. At the end of the day, you can sleep 10-12 hours, but are you getting good quality sleep? That\u2019s different. This guy, he\u2019s got an Oura ring, he\u2019s got a Whoop, he has all the tools at hand to track his sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are some things a trainer just can\u2019t control when it comes to his athlete. For Stefan Valdes,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":989528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[40],"tags":[25423,69359,8606,1260,396829,1079,62,396828,83722,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-989527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-candy","tag-josh-hart","tag-knicks","tag-nba","tag-pillow","tag-sleep","tag-sports","tag-stefan-valdes","tag-trainer","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117061457444615242","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/989528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}