Travis Reynolds Travis Reynolds

Tag: Dylan Haugen

  • 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.

  • 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.