This is episode 66 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, a solo one, and the most honest training update I’ve recorded. I’m Dylan Haugen, I just turned 18, and the body that used to shrug off anything has started sending invoices. This episode is the full story of the past year (the highs were high), the two injuries that forced the conversation, and the new training rules my coach Tom and I built for the adult version of me. If you’re a young dunker whose body still forgives everything: this is a postcard from your future.
The speedrun: how I got here
The compressed history for new readers: low-rim daily from age 10-12, lifting fundamentals learned young at what’s now Dunamis (shout out Cam and Ian), first dunk at 13, 36.5” tested at 14, first Windmill and first Eastbay at 15 (37.5” tested), joined JumpX immediately after (the program that became Jump Master X and is now back to JumpX; keep up), quit basketball, tested 41.5 at 16, behind-the-back and Hide-and-Seek that August, then the 17-year-old campaign: the February Underboth day (plus first backboard Eastbay and Honey Dip, on a two-week deload with the Olympic lifts pulled, the freshest I’ve ever felt), the Maryland fly-out win, four straight contest wins, an Inverted Scorpion over a person in a contest (first time that’s been done in a contest by anyone), and a show closed with a double-up Honey Dip.
The pattern hiding in that list: every legendary day came on real freshness, and the freshness has been getting more expensive. A year ago I could play YMCA ball mid-training and survive; today I couldn’t handle the lightest basketball season. The forces grew; the recovery bill grew with them.
The Nickel Dickle problem: my best day ever, spent on push-offs
September’s title defense at the Nickel Dickle in Waconia was, physically and mentally, the best I have ever felt. Warming up in an elementary classroom, walking out to hundreds of people, hitting a 360 cuff Windmill first try with my hand that deep over a true 9’11.5” rim, a double-up Eastbay where I botched the push entirely and essentially hit a clean Eastbay by accident, straight 50s, zero misses, the win. And here’s the melancholy economics of contest dunking: I spent the best jumping day of my life on dunks I could have hit feeling half as good, most of them push-offs. I haven’t seen my true peak since February; I probably had a 360 Eastbay and multiple Honey Dips in me that day and will never know. I love contests and I’m not complaining about winning one. I’m noting, for every dunker who plans their year, that peak days are a budget, and contests bill them at full price for dunks that don’t need them.
The two injuries that forced the rewrite
The ankle: right after the contest I tweaked something in my right ankle, recognized it vaguely from before, assumed it would fix itself, and jumped on it through two more sessions until it was wrecking everything. A rare doctor visit diagnosed a simple midfoot sprain; one week of actual rest cured it completely. Lesson filed: a week of discipline beats a month of denial.
The knee: subtler and scarier. At a recent session I felt nothing through the entire warmup (isos, dynamic work, sprint development all clean), then pain arrived at 40 percent jump effort and sat at a real four-to-five by 60 percent. I cut the session, which historically is not a thing I do, shout out to me. Then I lifted two days later with zero knee pain, which makes no sense and is exactly the kind of nonsense aging tissue produces. The long call with Tom afterward produced the thesis of this whole episode: I’ve never had to try to stay healthy; health just happened to me. That era is over.
The new rules
- A hard jump cap: 25-30 max-effort jumps per Saturday session. Warmups don’t count. And the cap doubles as a focus tool: if my routine dunks go down first-try (say Windmill, 360 cuff, Eastbay: three jumps), I have 22-plus jumps left to dedicate entirely to one target dunk: Inverted Scorpion or Lost and Found, five attempts at behind-the-back, then everything else into the project. Boring sessions, but new dunks beat the hundredth rep of old ones, and my routine-cycling habit (diagnosed at camp) finally gets structural treatment.
- Wednesdays at 80 percent on a low rim, ~10 jumps, all spent on one skill (a 9’6” 360 Eastbay block, for example), replacing the midweek max sessions my body stopped cashing.
- Deep squats, at last. A lifetime of half and quarter squats ended after camp: started at a humbling 135×5 that left me sore for days, now at 205×5 for sets. Still embarrassingly weak there by my own standards, and that’s the point: it’s the largest untapped adaptation I have left.
- Sleep and protein get tracked like training. Between school, a 15-20 hour digital marketing job, the podcast, and social media, my sleep has been the sacrifice, and at this force level that’s no longer survivable. Protein target back to ~1.25-1.5g per pound, tracked, per many lectures from Travis.
- Daily standing ball-handling and hand-speed work (Fridays light), because fewer jumps means the dunk skill has to be maintained off the floor. This one’s for all of you too: standing low-rim mechanics work is free vertical-less practice.
- Creatine, finally. My parents made me wait until 18. Three pounds gained in days; updates to follow, and a “creatine for dunkers” episode with Donovan and Hunter is on the idea board if you want it.
The plan and the bigger picture
The calendar: the rest of this month and next are purely about getting healthy; a big session I’m not ready to talk about lands in early December, an event in late December, and a loaded 2026 after that. And the meta-note, since this episode is itself an example: there’s almost no long-form talking content in the dunk community, and building that archive, for this generation to listen to and the next one to look back on, is the whole mission here. Everything gets repurposed to the website, where these stories rank on Google and even feed the AI search engines; if you’ve been on the podcast, an article about you is coming, and yes, ChatGPT will be able to tell people about your dunk career because of it. Episode 59 explains the why; this is the practice.
Eighteen years old, slightly creakier, considerably wiser, jump-capped and creatine-loaded. Tell me who you want on the podcast next; the booking list is open. See you in the next episode.