LUKA DONčIć KNOWS that you’re thinking he looks lean as heck now. That’s because he’s thinking the exact same thing.

It’s an early morning in July in a quiet town in Croatia, and the five-time NBA All-Star is alone on a private basketball court, working out with trainer Anže Maček, midway through a 90-minute session that blends weight training, agility work, and shooting drills. This is the first of the day’s two workouts for the Los Angeles Lakers star in what may be the most pivotal season of his career, and he’s doing it fasted, just as he’s done for much of the summer. At the moment, he’s driving to the basket, a thick resistance band strapped to his waist, pulling against him during every shot.

The workout consists of a series of circuits, each set up to include an on-court challenge (like those resistance band lay-ups) and an upper-body and lower-body exercise. The facility, which is located in the town where Dončić has vacationed every summer since he was a teen, didn’t have weights until earlier this month when he had dumbbells, barbells, weight plates, and med balls trucked in. Now, Dončić can do everything from trap-bar deadlifts to landmine overhead presses—and he works through sprints and jumps on an outdoor track too.

He moves swiftly from circuit to circuit, banging out hip stretches one moment, working through renegade rows the next. It’s a session with barely any breathers, which is fine. This version of Dončić doesn’t need them. This Luka is…different.

Boogie Exercises like the deadlift give Dončić extra glute strength to accelerate rapidly but also stop instantly on the court.

You see it in the way his Jordan Brand jersey hangs loose, and in the new hints of definition on his arms. You see it in the complete absence of fatigue he shows when going from heavy Romanian deadlifts to dumbbell bench presses to lateral bounds—one right after the other. And you see it in the way he smiles when he admits that he’s noticed his sleek silhouette in the mirror. He subtly nods to his reshaped delts during our Zoom interview. And as he splays out his long-limbed physique on the bleachers in the gym, he seems relaxed, calmly making eye contact. His arms look longer today than usual, perhaps because he’s just so downright skinny, a fact which now (finally!) he sheepishly acknowledges. “Just visually, I would say my whole body looks better,” he says.

And yes, somehow, in the world of sports, the way you look matters—even though it shouldn’t. From Nikola Jokić to Patrick Mahomes to Shaq, decades before all of them, we’ve seen loads of evidence that athletic dominance comes in all shapes and sizes. But ask anyone to pick out an athlete in a crowd, and they’ll almost always point to the dude with LeBron-size arms and Ronaldo-level abs.

“Just VISUALLY, I would say my whole BODY looks BETTER.”

Dončić, still just 26 years old, is unquestionably a topflight athlete (more on that soon). But he’s never quite looked the Greek god part. And somehow, that shortcoming too often has undercut his five All-NBA first team nods and his 82 career triple-doubles (already seventh all-time). Last August, critics blasted him for looking “fat” and “out of shape” during a charity game. The moment the Mavs traded him to the Lakers in February, rumors leaked that Dallas didn’t want to deal with his love of beer and hookah. Even this summer, the NBA web has chattered that Dončić is on Ozempic.

What the Luka haters have never seen is this: Dončić slogging through two-a-days in Croatia while sticking to a gluten-free, low-sugar diet that includes at least 250 grams of protein and one almond milk–fueled shake a day. They never knew that Dončić had quietly constructed a fitness team several years ago to help enhance his (very dangerous) natural gifts. And they never realized how much he committed to training and diet this summer.

Here’s the thing too: Even if you thought Luka Dončić had a dadbod, he was already a top-five NBA player. And after pushing hard this offseason, he can’t help but wonder how high he’ll level up. “If I stop now,” Dončić says of his effort to rebuild his body, “it was all for nothing.”

SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE THIS private workout in Croatia, Luka Dončić was in Madrid, standing in a lab on a force plate, a device that measures the amount of energy an athlete can drive into the ground. Typically, sports scientists use force plates to measure how quickly an athlete can jump and land. But Maček and Javier Barrio, Dončić’s physiotherapist, were watching for something else: Dončić’s balance.

It was mid-May, and Dončić was midway through a battery of tests designed to assess his current fitness level. Over the course of three days, he gave blood, urine, and stool samples, took a series of MRIs and ultrasounds, and worked through more physical tests. Those tests involved force plate work that recorded how his feet applied pressure into the ground. Very often, slow-motion cameras were recording his movement. All this data informed how he trained throughout the rest of the summer.

All Dončić wanted to do after this season ended was train, and he made that clear to his manager, Lara Beth Seager, on May 1, one day after the Lakers were ousted from the first round of the NBA playoffs. The loss was the nadir of Dončić’s worst NBA season. For all the criticism of Dončić’s body, until this past season, nobody could diss his body of work: He’d never played fewer than 60 games in a season, and just a year earlier, he’d powered the Mavs to the NBA Finals. No such luck in 2024. A calf injury knocked him out for all of January. Then Dallas sent him packing. Then came the 4-1 playoff series decimation at the hands of the Timberwolves. One day after that loss, Dončić texted Seager to start his offseason training program ASAP. “So every summer I try my best to work on different things,” he says. “Obviously, I’m very competitive. This summer was just a little bit different, you know. It kind of motivated me to be even better.”

Boogie Luka Dončić with trainer with Anže Maček in Croatia, July 17, 2025. His workouts often feature supersets that include an upper-body exercise, a lower-body move, and a basketball-specific drill.

The early postseason exit gave Dončić more than motivation. It granted him a full four months of rest. That’s allowed him to work in lockstep with what he calls Team Luka, a trio of wellness specialists—Barrio, Maček, and nutritionist Lucia Almendros—who he hired back in 2023, after the Mavs had missed the playoffs. Back then, he was a 24-year-old hunting for ways to take his game to the next level.

At the start of his NBA career, Dončić mostly received advice from Mavs trainers and nutritionists. During the offseasons, when he returned to Europe, the limited guidance left him flailing. And during the season, the vicious NBA travel schedules gave him little time to clean up his diet. “Especially in the NBA, you travel almost all the time,” he says. “You’re never home. And for me, you know, after the season, going back home, it’s a big thing, you know. I see my friends, my family, I see everybody. So it’s not easy for sure.”

He goes on. “When I came to the NBA, I was 18,” he says. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect those first four or five years. Then I said, ‘I need to do this.’”

“When I came to the NBA, I was 18. Honestly, I didn’t know WHAT TO EXPECT those first four or five years.”

In an instant, so many of Dončić’s past conditioning struggles start to make sense. On the court, he was an immediate fit in the NBA system; off it, he struggled to navigate NBA life. But since 2023, when Team Luka entered the picture, he has gradually gained stability. And this summer, he and the team have found another gear. Since June, Dončić has gone on an intermittent fasting plan designed to limit inflammation and help his body recover better. Six days a week, he chokes down two high-protein meals and one protein shake—and he doesn’t have that first meal until he’s crushed his 90-minute morning workout.

In the gym, his team has focused on footwork and deceleration. Dončić’s on-court superpower has never been raw speed; don’t expect to see him take on IShowspeed on Instagram anytime soon. But few athletes can change speeds like Luka, who can charge forward on a drive, only to stop abruptly while his defender is still flailing and settle in for an easy jumper. This requires Dončić’s muscles to swiftly contract and decelerate his body, creating what’s known as eccentric force.

Boogie Dončić working on his hops and speed.

“His eccentric force is very good,” Barrio says of Dončić. “And his strength is off the charts, really; he has really incredibly strong legs. Also, his center of gravity is really very low. So when he’s in his position, when he gets low in his stance, it’s very difficult to move him, you know?”

Such athletic gifts aren’t as immediately evident as a highlight-reel dunk from Shai-Gilgeous Alexander, or a god-level chasedown block from LeBron. Eccentric force doesn’t fill out a tank top or show up on a vertical-jump test. But it’s an unheralded key to the game. Dončić has always valued such stealthy abilities. “Not everything is jumping high,” he says. “I think I’m very athletic in other stuff. Balancing, controlling my body, what I do when I stop, slowing down.”

Oh, and he can jump. Lost in the narratives about his weight and conditioning is the fact that, as a 19-year-old at the 2018 NBA Scouting Combine, Luka delivered a 42-inch vertical leap. After a full offseason with Team Luka, he’s not sure that number is still the same. “This year, we didn’t measure the jumping yet,” he says. “But I think it’s a little bit higher.”

THE HARDEST PART of Luka’s offseason program came at the start. Shortly after the run of tests in May revealed that he was fully healthy, Barrio told him to quit playing basketball for a full month. “Just to avoid the basketball court for one month in this offseason,” Barrio says. “We let them put the ball away. We just were doing some other kinds of things.”

The goal: For the first time in years, Dončić would let his body recover completely from the constant pounding of basketball. The summer before, in 2024, Luka had found little time to breathe. Since the Mavs had made the NBA Finals, he’d played into mid-June. Then, just weeks later, he suited up for the Slovenian national team in an Olympic qualifying tournament, eventually losing to Greece in the semis.

This summer, Team Luka’s had three full months to rebuild Dončić. So they dared to eliminate court time—and he disagreed at first. But he quickly filled the time with a weights routine that helped him build total-body strength. And he eventually found a distraction playing pickleball and padel (think: pickleball meets squash), sometimes against friends, sometimes with Barrio and Maček. For Dončić, the new games were a blast from his childhood past, long before he fell in love with basketball. They challenged new muscles, relieving his knees, thanks to fewer vertical jumps, while strengthening adductors, glutes, and ankles with footwork. “At the beginning, it was hard,” he says. “I can’t be without basketball. But when I was a little kid, I played a lot of sports.” He channeled that era—and maintained his competitive fire. “There were a lot of angry moments, too, when we would lose,” he says. “But I didn’t lose much.”

Boogie Boogie

And he stayed hungry for hoops. By early June, Team Luka finally let Dončić hit the court, in what was supposed to be a 45-minute shootaround. Dončić nailed his first shot and worked out for an hour (before Barrio convinced him to rest). He immediately texted Seager three smiley faces. “I think that this summer, he sees the difference,” says Barrio, “and he’s really happy.”

Dončić has maintained that momentum throughout July as Maček and Barrio have focused more on honing his superpower—that ability to generate eccentric force from all angles. Maček trains that with those resistance band drills, which constantly force the guard off-center, pushing his ankles, calves, and quads to slow his landings. The moves sharpen that trademark Luka elusiveness while also keeping his joints safe when he lands or steps at odd angles.

Other drills have challenged Luka’s much-criticized conditioning. Midway through this session, Dončić heads onto the track, where Maček has set up a series of hurdles. Luka sprints through them repeatedly, going over them first, then around each obstacle. Then Maček wraps a miniband around Dončić’s ankles and pushes him to shuffle back and forth over a line, torching his glutes and firing up his lungs.

“Not everything is JUMPING HIGH. I think I’m very athletic in other stuff. BALANCING, CONTROLLING my body, what I do when I STOP, SLOWING DOWN.”

The well-rounded workout ends with Luka exactly where he always wants to be: taking jumpers on the court. He spends the last few minutes operating from the top of the key, catching the ball, dribbling and deking, then pulling up for jumpers, as if experimenting with his newer, slimmer body. He hasn’t played five-on-five yet this summer, he says, so he won’t know if he’s actually more explosive on the court until late August, when he suits up for Slovenia in EuroBasket qualifying tourney play. But he does know that he hasn’t felt this good in years. “My sleeping, my body, my everything…I felt more rested,” he says.

That’s why he plans to keep evolving this offseason formula—and maintain his renewed emphasis on fitness and conditioning. When he thinks back to his rookie year, he remembers seeing Mavs legend Dirk Nowitzki, then in his final season in Dallas, training hard. Dončić also saw the same qualities from two players he’s long admired, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, both of whom were known for their maniacal offseason training regimens—and their dominance late into their careers. “MJ and Kobe, you know, they really did a lot in their careers,” he says. “They sacrificed a lot.” Team Luka is expected to grow in the coming years, possibly adding a masseuse and a specialized shooting coach.

Luka’s hope is that all this work will help him stay dominant for the next decade to come, critics of his conditioning and weight be damned. “Obviously, be the best that I can be, take care of myself,” he says. “This year, with my team, I think we did a huge step. But this is just the start, you know. I need to keep going. Can’t stop.”

Boogie