Travis Reynolds Travis Reynolds

Author: Travis Reynolds

  • Why All Dunkers Should Make Long-Form Content

    Why All Dunkers Should Make Long-Form Content

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina, and this is the episode of the Dunk Talk Podcast I care about most. Dylan Haugen and I have both been making long-form content basically our whole careers, and on episode 69 we finally laid out the full case for it. The show’s article version lives at why dunkers should make long-form content. Here’s my side of the argument.

    Dunkers Watch Dunk Videos. Let Us Watch Yours

    When dunkers meet up, we watch dunk videos. When Ben, Finn, Hunter, CJ, and I all ended up at Dylan’s place in October 2025, dunk YouTube ran on the TV the entire time. That’s the test most short-form content fails. You cannot put a 15 second reel with a trending sound on the TV and watch it with your friends. If Isaiah posts a session, everyone watches. If Kilganon posts anything, everyone watches. The appetite for real sessions is there. The supply isn’t.

    What the 2020 Dunk Community Had

    Before Reels and TikTok took over, people posted carousel dumps and full sessions: misses, makes, new dunks they were chasing, attempts, training context. You saw what everyone was going for and how their training looked. When someone hit a milestone, you knew, because you had been following the whole build-up.

    “The dunk community was just so connected back then. People were just always hyping each other up 24/7 no matter what time of the day it was.”

    Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #69

    Now the algorithm decides which posts you see, context gets stripped for trends, and keeping up with individual dunkers is nearly impossible. It stops feeling like a dunk community and starts feeling like content creators who happen to share a niche. Strangers, basically.

    My Behind the Back Race With Tom Barnes

    Here’s what that connection actually does. Back in the carousel era, Tom Barnes and I were in a race to land our first Behind the Back. Because we both posted our attempts and progress, the entire community was invested. People DMed me constantly, people DMed Tom, everyone knew the context. When I made it first and posted it, Nathan George woke up in the middle of the night in the UK, saw it, got hyped, liked it, and went back to bed. That’s a community. Tom went on to found JumpX, and his whole story is in his Dunk Talk episode. The program he built is at JumpX, which Dylan trains on today.

    Competition like that makes everyone better. It’s also just more fun. If people can see what you’re close to, someone at your level can take inspiration and push you back.

    The Isaiah Rivera Case Study

    I’ve followed Isaiah Rivera since basically his first dunk. One of the main reasons the community loves him is that his entire journey is posted. The ups, the downs, the grinds for specific dunks, the bad sessions. Watching all of it is like building a relationship with somebody without ever interacting with them. Then think about why his training business works. There are guys with bigger verticals, and none of them have his reach, because nobody watched them become who they are. People don’t buy from whoever is technically the best. They buy from who they feel connected to. Dylan’s episode on how Isaiah became the highest jumper in the world covers the athletic side of that same story.

    You Can Do Both

    To be clear, I’m not telling anyone to stop making short-form. I post plenty of it, and it grows your following. The point is that it costs almost nothing to also post the long version. You’re already filming. You’re already editing clips. Change the aspect ratio, put the session in order, and upload it. Dylan has a whole tutorial on converting horizontal to vertical with keyframes in CapCut, and he runs something like 20 to 30 raw dunk videos a month across his own channel and the Minnesota Dunk Squad channel. If he can do that, you can post your most recent session.

    And YouTube is the one platform that actually pays me every month. If you’re going to be posting anyway, you might as well be building the asset that compounds.

    Document Everything, Even the Bad Days

    I post almost every session, including the poor jumping days, and I have for the past two or three years. Bad sessions build the good ones. You can see me missing dunks that I make later, and that context is the whole story. Ten years from now, when we look back at this era of dunking, the dunkers who documented will be the ones people can actually watch. The rest will be a scroll through somebody’s reels tab, half a second per dunk, no context.

    It’s also free storage. Before I organized my footage, YouTube was my archive. Every session, findable, in order.

    Start This Week

    Film your next session in horizontal, or just set up a second phone. Put the dunks in order, title it something simple, and post it. You don’t need talking segments, you don’t need fancy editing, and you don’t need to be one of the best in the world. I promise dunkers will watch it, because I’m one of them and I search for new sessions constantly. My own journey only reads the way it does because it got documented while it happened. You can trace the whole thing in my dunk journey story, right down to the seven weeks I spent dunking left-handed.

    The full conversation is in the video above. I’m @TravisDunks on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Post your sessions. I’ll watch them.

  • What Breaking My Finger Taught Me About My Off-Hand

    What Breaking My Finger Taught Me About My Off-Hand

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a pro dunker from North Carolina. On episode 54 of the Dunk Talk Podcast with Dylan Haugen, we broke down the freak injury that took my right hand away for seven weeks, and what I did with that time instead of sitting around. The show’s version is at why your off-hand is critical for dunking success. Here’s mine.

    Getting the Black Band First

    Some context from earlier that year: I earned the black band from The Dunk Camp, which means landing the full set of elite dunks in a single session. It took week after week of trying those dunks every session, finding the problem in one, tweaking my technique, and coming back. The most technical one for me was the 360 Behind the Back. The weirdest was the off-the-backboard Eastbay, because I never do backboard dunks.

    Getting the band was cool, but the real prize was consistency. All of those dunks are engraved in my head now. The process taught me what to look for any time I’m trying to improve any dunk. That mattered a lot for what came next.

    A Freak Injury on a Push-Off Dunk

    The injury itself was honestly a freak thing. I was learning push-off dunks, and I had my guy standing too far away. Instead of dunking straight down, I had to throw the ball hard toward the back of the rim, and while it rattled around it snapped straight into my finger. Bent it backward, damaged the tissue, knocked the joint slightly out of position. Not technically a dislocation, but close enough to earn a splint.

    Seven weeks. Splint on, finger straight, right hand basically useless. If you’re doing Dubble Ups, learn from me and put your guy closer than you think he needs to be.

    Starting Over With My Left Hand

    My goal stayed the same through the whole injury: be the best dunker I can be. Take my right hand away and the math is simple. That leaves my left. And the difference between my hands was embarrassing. With my right I had the black band. With my left I was struggling to make basic one-handers, purely from a lack of coordination.

    I decided this needed to happen at some point in my career anyway. If I call myself a pro and an event comes up where my right hand is hurt, “I can’t dunk today” is not an acceptable answer. So I went all in on the left. Low rim almost every day. I even taught myself to shoot a basketball left-handed, because if I can’t control the ball at all with that hand, how am I supposed to learn dunks with it?

    “Week one was ugly.”

    Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54

    That’s not false modesty. Jordan Kilganon was in town and got to watch me take five attempts to make a basic left-handed Windmill. When the best dunker alive is standing there watching you fumble one-handers, you find out real fast how honest your training has been.

    How I Low-Rim for Real Transfer

    The mistake I see with most low rim work is that people don’t recreate how the dunk actually feels in the air. The whole point is building muscle memory that transfers straight from the ground to the jump. So whatever the dunk is, I replicate the exact feeling. If I’m working a self-bounce Windmill, I bounce the ball, do the full arm swing, and grab it exactly like I would in the air. And I finish as hard as I possibly can. If you slow down at the rim to guide it in softly, you’re training a different dunk than the one you’ll attempt in a session.

    For the left hand specifically, my main drill was throwing the ball off the backboard to myself like a slingshot and dunking it as hard as I could. My misses always came from losing control at the last second, so I trained staying on top of the ball and finishing. And I did the palming drills constantly, because being able to control the ball through the whole motion is what most dunks actually require.

    “The ultimate rule is reps. Just do a million reps and do a million more reps.”

    Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54

    Week One vs Week Seven

    By the end of the seven weeks, the left hand still wasn’t beautiful, but it was real. I hit my first lefty Eastbay in a session that felt like a genuine breakthrough. I punched a lefty Windmill straight down. The Scorpion took a couple of tries. I made serious progress on the reverse 360 Windmill, which is probably the best dunk I can do left-handed, and one I want to keep building even now that my right hand is back.

    The difference between week one and week seven wasn’t talent showing up. It was the coordination finally feeling like mine. Dillan McCarthy jokes around by hanging off the rim by his elbow for a minute straight, and honestly the principle is the same one I used: expose the hand to the stress until the stress stops mattering. His story is wild in its own right, and Dylan covered it in the episode on his 50 inch vertical.

    The Comeback Session

    When the splint came off and I finally dunked right-handed again, I expected rust. Instead I warmed up with a 360 Windmill off a short approach that felt insane, tried a 360 Eastbay, and destroyed it on the second attempt. Off the dribble. By far my best 360 ever, in my first session back. Part of that is the weight I lost during the recovery, down about seven pounds to my strongest-ever power to weight ratio. Part of it is that the work never actually stopped.

    If You’re Hurt Right Now

    A lot of people message me worried that an injury means they’ll come back and not be themselves anymore. I’ve never seen it happen that way, not for me and not for the pros I know.

    “The muscle memory is not going to go anywhere during your injury. The years that you have spent working on that muscle memory is not going to go away just because you got injured.”

    Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54

    Find the thing you can still work on, work it like it matters, and come back better. That’s not a slogan, it’s literally what the seven weeks were. The longer version of how injuries shaped my whole career is in my dunk journey story, and the reason all of this got documented in the first place is in why all dunkers should make long-form content.

    I’m @TravisDunks on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok if you want to see the left hand keep improving.

  • My Dunk Journey: From Overweight Kid to Pro Dunker

    My Dunk Journey: From Overweight Kid to Pro Dunker

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. Episode 21 of the Dunk Talk Podcast with Dylan Haugen and Hunter Castona was the first time I told my whole story in one place: the chubby kid years, the 40 pound cut, the ten months it took to land one dunk, and the injuries that shaped how I train now. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s own write-up is over on the Dunk Talk episode article. Dylan also wrote a feature on my journey from his side of the mic. This is the short version in my own words.

    A Chubby Kid Who Got Bit by Jumping

    I grew up playing a handful of sports without being great at any of them. Some basketball, some flag football. Honestly, I was a chubby, overweight kid. The moment that changed everything was around 11 or 12, watching a classmate touch something on a hoop that I couldn’t. That flipped a switch. I stopped caring about being good at any one sport and started caring about how high I could get off the ground.

    The summer of 2014 is when pro dunking really entered my world. I saw Jonathan Clark’s 360 Elbow at an LA Fitness and my whole framework for what was physically possible shifted. Around that same time I started following Isaiah Rivera, basically from his very first dunk, and tracked his progression in real time. Years later Dylan and Hunter did a whole episode on how Isaiah became the highest jumper in the world, and I can say I watched almost every step of it happen live.

    First Dunk at 15, Then a Long Plateau

    I got my first dunk on a 10 foot rim in April 2018, at 15 years old. Then I plateaued hard. For about a year and a half I was a one-hander and two-hander dunker only. No Windmills, no trick dunks. The reason was simple: I was jumping every single day with no structured training, no real warmup, and about 210 pounds of bodyweight crushing my knees.

    By the end of 2019 my knees gave out. Textbook jumper’s knee. That low point turned into the inflection point of my whole career, because it pushed me to join THP, Isaiah’s training program, for treatment and training in one place.

    THP and the 40 Pound Cut

    THP gave me two things I had never had: real lifting consistency and structured load management. I went from 210 pounds at the end of 2019 to 170 by June 2020. Forty pounds in about six months, from cleaning up my diet and actually training instead of just jumping. That cut alone added real inches to my vertical, and it got me out of jumper’s knee at the same time.

    Once the weight was off and the strength base was in place, the trick bag started to open. Windmills, Tomahawks, and then the dunk that became my thing.

    Ten Months for One Dunk

    The Behind the Back is the dunk I’m most known for. Half the comments on my videos are some version of “the Behind the Back.” What people don’t always see is what it cost. I worked that dunk from January 2020 to October 2020, every single session, on a low rim every day, and landed it after ten months of dedicated work. It was the “this is real” moment of my career.

    That grind taught me the lesson I go back to constantly: the dunk you want is on the other side of a rep count most people won’t do. It’s the same approach that later got me through the Dunk Camp black band set, which I talk about in my article on off-hand training and the finger injury.

    The North Carolina Dunk Squad

    My home crew is the North Carolina Dunk Squad. Ben has been my best friend since we were 3 years old, and we started dunking together in 2014. Obi is our 6’6″ guy I met through Instagram. Dan Gross is about an hour and a half from me, and Sam comes in from the Raleigh area when scheduling works. We rotate between my YMCA, the blue gym, and High Point University’s practice facility when school is out.

    The High Point gym is where I hit my Eastbay Elbow, on a flimsy rim the school eventually had to replace because Dan and I kept destroying it. It’s also where Jordan Kilganon and Isaiah came down during COVID for one of the most legendary North Carolina sessions ever recorded.

    The Back Injury That Changed My Training

    The hard injury I carry now is my back. It came from lifting, not dunking. An accumulation of bad barbell technique in my first couple of years of training caught up with me, and the result is that I can’t squat with a barbell on my back anymore. Every leg session has to be designed around that: Smith machine squats, hex bar deadlifts, machine variations.

    I also manage quad tendinopathy that flares when I overload, and I stay careful with my Achilles. So I don’t jump every day anymore. I run one or two real sessions a week, plus standing low rim technique work in between. That’s the practice that unlocked the Behind the Back in the first place, and it’s what I come back to whenever I’m ramping up from a flare.

    “I’ve been injured for six months at a time before with a back injury. I just went through seven weeks of this, and every single time I come out of it stronger, because it’s not the end of the world.”

    Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54

    Why I Measure Every Rim

    I’m probably the dunker most people associate with rim height precision. I use a laser measurer for almost every session in my home gym and post the exact height in my captions, down to fractions of an inch. It’s not about proving anything. It’s data hygiene. If my vertical is trending up or down week over week, I want to know the rim height isn’t the variable. Dylan and Mason Baker have their own take on it in the rim measuring debate episode, and mine is simply: be honest in your captions, and know your numbers.

    What I’m Chasing

    The list right now: the Behind the Back over a person, a contest-ready Eastbay Elbow, and staying healthy enough to keep dunking at this level through my mid twenties. That last one is the underrated goal. Everything I learned about training through injury is in the story of my seven weeks dunking left-handed, and everything I believe about documenting the journey is in why all dunkers should make long-form content.

    The full conversation is in the video above. If you want the rest of the story as it happens, I’m @TravisDunks on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and there’s more about me on the About page.