This is episode 55 of the Dunk Talk Podcast: the Florida session debrief. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona, and the session we announced two episodes ago happened, and it grew. What started as “I’ll be in Orlando for spring break, Isaiah lives there” became roughly seventeen dunkers in one gym: me, Hunter, Isaiah Rivera, Dom, RJ, Nate, Josh Ruble, Austin, Cam Hazzard, Vic, Adam, Jaylen, Davis, an auxiliary Josh or two, and a bonus Dylan. (Donovan was the one casualty; work wouldn’t release him.) The full session video and our reaction are both up; this is the story plus the training lessons hiding in it.
Two very different preparations
Mine: seven weeks without a deload, the Winona Underboth session as the peak, a proper deload the week before Florida… and then three consecutive Disney days at 10-plus miles of walking each, 30-plus miles banked on my legs, with isometrics as my only training input. Warming up, my legs had that untrained-for “tired but not sore” cardio fatigue. But the warmup jumps felt good, and our shared heuristic held again: if the warmups feel good, the session goes well. Caffeine, adrenaline, and a friendly rim covered the rest. My day ended with the Hide-and-Seek, the Underboth, and the Eastbay Elbow, the three dunks that put me in my own top-dunker-of-the-session argument (more on the rankings below).
Hunter’s: a genuinely useful horror story. The week before, he had one of the worst sessions of his life: 9 p.m. in a silent empty gym after two photography bookings, no caffeine, barely a Windmill. Classic environment failure, straight out of episode 42. For Florida he mini-deloaded, walked a mall for 45 minutes to undo a two-hour traffic jam in the legs, took caffeine for only the second time ever (a white Monster, ~150mg, no shakes this time), and warmed up on the side hoops, where a 50-70 percent effort jump already told him the truth: it was going to be a day.
Hunter’s session: the best Windmill of his life, an injury, and the Win off one foot
Hunter opened with punched two-handers, a monstrous one-hander, and then what he rates the best Windmill he has ever hit, ball bouncing back before he landed, the whole gym calling the big day early. Isaiah teased him about the “I’m going to jump bad” prediction from the week before. Then, on his first Underboth attempt, he hurt his posterior tibialis on the landing, two jumps later it confirmed itself, and his two-foot day was over right as it crested.
What happened next is why this episode is worth writing up. John suggested one foot. Hunter, whose knees normally veto one-foot landings, went straight into a punched one-hander, no pain. Back-rimmed a string of one-foot Eastbays and Windmills, then went for the Win, the dunk I’ve been pushing on him forever, which he’d attempted maybe five times in his life. Lost the first out of his hand. Top-rimmed the second by a quarter inch. Hit the third: his first-ever Win off one foot, to a gym that did not see it coming from a guy who never shows one-foot anything. He tried J Rich and a 180 Scoop after, felt knee pain arrive, and cut it like an adult. Had the injury not happened, he believes it was his highest jumping day ever, and the Vert Trainer was sitting right there. RJ used it instead and PR’d at 43-44; Adam tested a PR 40.
The shrinking rim (a transparency note)
The honesty section, because nobody else posting clips from this session has mentioned it: the rim measured 9’9” after the session, and photographic evidence shows it was higher at the start. The hoop lowered itself during the session under the punishment. I broke my own walk-in ritual (measure first, isos, dynamic warmup, jumps) because I didn’t want to be the rim-measurer guy at someone else’s session, and I regret it; we only caught the change because we measured after. Do with that information what you will when you watch the footage. The measuring-rims doctrine exists for exactly this reason, and the lesson is now permanent: measure before, every time, even when it’s socially awkward.
The tangent that became the best part: what a “bad session” is for
The conversation wandered somewhere valuable enough that we’re promising a full episode on it. The thesis: a bad jumping day is not a wasted session, it’s a different session. Hunter’s framing: when your routine dunks (the Eastbay that used to be a warmup) won’t go, the reflex is to declare the session terrible, when it’s actually the perfect day to work new things, because a new dunk, any new dunk, makes a session good. Even a humble one: Hunter has still never hit a Dwight Tap, and if he hit one on a bad day, that’s a win. My corollary: roughly 99 percent of dunkers have dunks available at their current vertical that they simply haven’t repped. My favorite proof is Justin Blanchard, called out with love: 6’3”, jumping 40-plus, whose bag was one-hander/two-hander/Windmill until I started forcing experiments on him, and who hit his first Eastbay yesterday while barely jumping higher than a year ago. The bounce was never the bottleneck. The reps were.
Session awards and what’s next
Top dunker of the session: Isaiah, unanimously. Second place dissolved into a three-way argument between me (Hide-and-Seek, Underboth, Eastbay Elbow), Austin (between-the-legs and an Inverter), and Josh (an elite behind-the-back and J Rich), with RJ’s punch-everything day in the conversation. I voted me. Hunter abstained suspiciously. Watch the session and adjudicate in the comments.
The bigger news: we’re talking with Isaiah about making Florida a recurring fixture rather than an annual accident: warm weather, good rims, half the community within driving distance, and everyone says yes to Florida. Between Vegas, this, and Dunk Camp in June, the mega-session is becoming an institution, which is exactly what we hoped when we started preaching group sessions. Next episode is a big one: Tom Barnes on his dunk journey and the founding of JumpX. Subscribe, leave the five stars, and go watch Hunter’s Win.