LeBron James is one of the greatest basketball players of all-time and by the end of his career will have an argument for being the best. Part of what has made James so great and why he ranks so highly in most all-time NBA statistical categories is his incredible conditioning and consistently being at his peak on the court.
James has rarely missed anything close to significant time with injuries during his career, and he’s maintained being in peak physical shape and done so in different forms and at different weights. Now, James is a slimmer but still powerful force who is a combination of point guard, small forward and power forward, capable of dominating at nearly any position on the floor.
When James was in Miami, he played at close to 275 pounds, as he was the most dominant physical force in the league at the time. In a piece on Monday, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst explained how James stays in great shape and has done everything in his power to limit injuries and address potential problems before they get worse.
While explaining how freakish James is as an athlete and physical specimen, Windhorst told a story about James gaining significant weight during a single game, which jumped off the page at many and caused plenty of questions to arise.
Seeing him turn his ankle nearly 90 degrees only to tighten his shoelaces and finish with a triple-double. Watching him show up four hours before a playoff game to get in a sweat-soaked workout, then play more than 40 minutes and score 40 points. And the topper: the time James gained seven pounds during an Eastern Conference finals game.
Some Miami Heat teammates saw the scale and attest to it in amazement. James himself just shrugs and calls it “weird as hell.” The truly wild part is that it was from 271 pounds to 278 pounds, though James is much lighter these days.
This seems impossible, but apparently teammates have corroborated the account, and it’s something that happened. James saying it’s “weird as hell” is pretty perfect because it didn’t cause him real concern but was just another in what I have to assume is a long line of times James’ body did something crazy and he just had to chalk it up to being LeBron.
No one seems to understand how this is possible. Maybe he drank a ton of water during the game and got really hydrated or something, but one would think he’d sweat out that much over the course of a game. In any case, if you needed further example of how LeBron is just built differently than a normal person or even a very well-trained and in-shape person, this is a pretty good story.
