Inside the Shaolin monastery that helped build Victor Wembanyama (Ramona Shelburne, Jun 13, 2026, ESPN)
Throughout his time at the monastery, meditation had been the most difficult aspect for Wembanyama to embrace. It’s hard for someone 7-foot-4 to sit cross-legged at all, let alone silently for up to 90 minutes, without moving.
But he kept at it. Each night he slept in three single-size beds that had been pushed together to accommodate his frame. Each morning he rose at 4:30 to train. The monks would have him run through the forests near the monastery or along an uneven 200-meter hillside track, doing frog jumps, sprints and one-legged hops uphill and downhill to build his balance and stamina.
They taught him the Shaolin 13 Fist Form — one of the two basic forms of kung fu meant to teach efficient weight shifts, stability and striking principles.
Master Yan’an said he designed Wembanyama’s customized martial arts training to emphasize controlling his center of gravity, which would generate force from different positions and resist external forces, to mimic the double-teams and physical play he’d face from NBA opponents.
Several times a day Wembanyama meditated with 100 other monks, each session’s length determined by the length of the wick of incense that burned in the center of the room. Thirty minutes was doable. But sometimes the incense burned for 90 minutes, and it was agonizing for the then-21-year-old Wembanyama to sit that long.
“I knew he could do it,” Master Yan’an said. “Because when he trains, he always tries again and again until he is the best.”
Master Yan’an recognized then what the basketball world is recognizing now: that Victor Wembanyama has perhaps the most unprecedented set of skills and untapped potential anyone has ever seen, and that he requires a similarly unprecedented training regimen to realize it.
This is the story of how 34 generations of Shaolin warrior history trained a once-in-a-generation NBA superstar, one who looks poised to dominate for the rest of his nascent career.
