Remaking Victor Wembanyama with meditation and Kung Fu

SAN ANTONIO – Something dawned on San Antonio Spurs wing Julian Champagnie as he watched his teammates taking turns trying to score on Victor Wembanyama, the team’s 7-foot-4 center.

One by one, they went at him, often having their shots blocked. But they got to catch their breath between attempts as they waited to go again, strategizing how they might get past him.

There was just one player in the drill who did not get a single break: Wembanyama.

The drill is simple: The center defends a one-on-one sequence against every player in the gym without a breather. Once he has taken everyone on, he sprints to the other end of the court and goes right back at it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone work out like that,” Champagnie said. “It’s crazy to see.”

After a blood clot ended his 2024-25 NBA season in February, Wembanyama lived life to the fullest this summer. The doctor visits, the games watching from the sideline: They all got to him. With basketball and his health taken away, he embarked on a path across the world to find himself.

When he returned, he went to work with a vengeance. “My training this summer, it was brutal,” he said.

Hence, the defensive drill from hell.

“This summer, I chose to do something much more violent,” Wembanyama said. “Maybe that takes away from some time I can spend on shooting the basketball, but it doesn’t matter. I wanted to get my body back.”

The former rookie of the year and 2023 No. 1 overall pick has physical gifts the likes of which we have never quite seen. Players of his size do not do the things he does. Wilt Chamberlain may be the only other player who ever owned the sky in this manner, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the only player who matched Wembanyama’s points, rebounds, assists and blocks per game from last season.

His game is still a mystery that he is solving while we all watch.

When Wembanyama entered the NBA, there were questions about how his body would hold up to the league’s physicality. He alleviated those concerns in his first two seasons, until his deep vein thrombosis brought an entirely different roadblock into the picture. For all the work he has done to maximize his career, this came out of nowhere.

He spent the spring going to hospitals, confronting the mortality of his career and even his life. After the clotting issues were relieved and he was cleared to travel again, he decided to get away from all the pain and frustration of his situation.

His journey to regain control started in China and Japan. He ventured to a Shaolin temple in Zhengzhou, China, to practice Chan meditation and Shaolin kung fu. It is a place to find one’s self, where you connect with cultures that center on the gratitude of life’s nuances. The smallest connections fortify the biggest understandings.

“It makes you understand lessons that nothing else could have made me understand,” he said.

Wembanyama explained how visiting China and Japan expanded his vision of the world and helped him better understand people. When his body and, therefore, his sense of mortality experienced a shock, it was important to redefine his sense of self and understanding of others.

“There’s also a big feeling that life isn’t forever and there are some experiences we’re going to miss on,” Wembanyama said. “It’s inevitable. But I’m going to miss on the least that I can. I want to experience the most, and this is something that I wanted to do.”

Wembanyama returned to the United States reinvigorated. He wanted to conquer his situation, and not just by working harder than before. China and Japan opened him to all sorts of new experiences around his game.

“For someone of his age, he is so intentional on the variety of ways that he tries to improve as a player and a person,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “It’s really something I’ve never witnessed or experienced in my time.”

Upon his return to Texas, Wembanyama visited Houston to explore NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the headquarters for the Axiom space station. At the Spurs’ media day last Monday, he fondly recalled his encounter with astronaut Peggy Whitson, explaining how she has spent the most cumulative time in space of any American and any woman, 695 days.

“Just like a kid, seeing the machines and the aircraft, everything that’s a replica of what’s actually in space or going to space, that was incredible,” he said.

When Wembanyama’s rehab progressed enough over the summer to return to game action, his curiosities led him to a teammate, Harrison Barnes. He wanted to join Barnes’ workouts in Los Angeles with trainer Noah LaRoche, who put them through a two-week session using the Constraints-Led Approach.

The CLA is a training method that replaces traditional drills with live-action training. It forced Wembanyama to do everything through a gamelike scenario. This trains the brain and body to seek out the optimal solution to each moment rather than fall back on scripted moves that are easier for the defense to predict.

“Vic is big on learning,” Champagnie said. “So anything that Noah would tell him, he’s picking up. He was trying to be better, do better.”

The approach trains players to find a shared understanding of principles of play, teaching permutations of actions that can correspond to other actions. The better players are at reading the game, the more easily they can find opportunities, known as affordances, to create advantages.

Ask Barnes about one particular affordance on a play, and he will spend the next minute rattling off a 10-step sequence that can flow from there. For example: If a player is standing on the left wing and a teammate drives the right wing, the left-wing player will eventually get the ball off a kick-out pass and drive toward the middle based on a convoluted set of defensive rotations they can anticipate.

Change one variable slightly in the defensive pattern, and Barnes can give you an entirely different solution. The CLA is not about learning the playbook, but learning the sport at its essence so that you are not constrained by the limitations of a scripted play.

By the second week, Wembanyama told LaRoche his body was beginning to understand the movements of the CLA. As he dropped his preconceived notions of how to play, his body began to find itself again.

“It was easy for him. He knew all the spots, he knew where to go,” Champagnie said. “It wasn’t as forced. Obviously, Vic is Vic, he’s a freak of nature. Some of those things you can’t teach. I think he just played well within the flow of the game. It just shows him a different way of playing the game while still being able to do what he does.”

For Champagnie, what stands out is the discipline. Wembanyama’s habits are intense and consistent every day. Waking up early, leaving late, coming back, leaving late again, doing two-a-days. Champagnie saw Wembanyama performing that routine five, six times a week.

Now that training camp has arrived, the impression Wembanyama left in Los Angeles is making an impact in San Antonio.

“At his age, it’s eye-opening to see somebody come in and demand excellence and demand greatness,” said Lindy Waters III, a Spurs newcomer. “He can’t do that without putting himself on that pedestal and making sure that nobody can come at him and say anything.”

He added, “It’s easy for him to demand that, and it makes me want to work harder.”

Now that the season is almost here, Wembanyama feels reinvigorated.

“I’m so much more under control and my conditioning has gotten so much better, but that comes at a price, and what I’ve done this summer is world-class,” he said. “Even in the field of professional sports, I don’t think many people have trained the way we’ve trained this summer.”

That’s why Johnson, who is entering his first full season as coach after filling in for Gregg Popovich following his stroke last season, is not afraid to say he wants the team “to be in the reflection of Victor.”

“I just really am in awe sometimes of just the levels that he goes,” Johnson said. “The things he thinks about that may be a small nuance, but he feels like, ‘If I can add this to my world being, mindset, whatever it may be.’ I know I wasn’t thinking like that at that age.”

What does Wembanyama see as his image for this team?

Defense, he said, is a nonnegotiable. “It’s not something you can’t do if you want to be a part of our team,” he said. “We’re going to hold each other accountable. We know the coaches are going to hold us accountable. It doesn’t matter your status, defense is nonnegotiable.”

There is a sense of awe and inspiration when teammates talk about Wembanyama’s work ethic and open-mindedness. At this point, they have seen him do every kind of dunk and block every hard-to-reach shot. There is not much he can do physically that will register more than a wow here or there.

But they are still trying to wrap their head around his dedication to getting better.

“It’s just cool to see,” Champagnie said. “He pushes himself every day, and he doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s going on his own path, and it’s inspiring.”

Of course, if that blood clot returns, that could be it for Wembanyama. Eleven-time All-Star Chris Bosh had to retire when it happened to him at age 32, and Wembanyama now knows there is only so much he can control.

“I can assure you, nobody has trained like I did this summer,” Wembanyama said. “And this is my best summer so far. I can tell the progress is just incredible. I feel better, I look stronger and the scale says I’m heavier. So everything is a green light.”

His body put him through a battle, but he is fighting back.