March 1, 2000

An All-Star's Big Build-Up

Nomar Garciaparra’s unique offseason workout regimen with Mark Verstegen makes him bigger, stronger, faster

 

By Pete Williams
USA Today Baseball Weekly

TEMPE, Ariz. – Nomar Garciaparra is standing in the end zone of an artificial turf practice field at Arizona State University. It is a warm early morning in late January and Garciaparra is wearing a harness around his waist that is connected to an eight-foot cable that extends to a red metal sled holding 85 pounds of cast iron plates.

 

Lou Merloni, Garciaparra’s longtime workout partner and former Boston Red Sox teammate, makes sure the hookup is tight. Garciaparra looks 50 yards upfield. His eyes stop on the imposing figure with the flat-top haircut, wraparound sunglasses and crossed arms who looks like a younger Howie Long. For three weeks, Garciaparra has been subjecting himself to Mark Verstegen’s grueling training methods and he will continue to spend up to 10 hours daily with him until leaving for Florida and spring training in late February.

 

Verstegen gives the command and Garciaparra’s legs churn into action, pounding the turf and pulling the sled 60 yards downfield before stopping. Merloni unstraps the shortstop, connects the sled to his own belt, and hauls it back. Cody McKay and James Matan, minor leaguers for the A’s and Reds, respectively, switch off alongside them.

 

The sled drill is one of Verstegen’s easier routines this morning. At one point, he has the players up against a building, pushing the wall at a 45-degree angle with legs stretched backward, marching in place.

 

“Fire those glutes, release those hip flexors!” Verstegen yells. “Keep going. This is what’s going to get you out of the batter’s box, guys!”

 

Later, Verstegen and his three assistant “coaches” lay out mini-hurdles and the players spend 10 minutes running backwards and forwards over the hurdles, building acceleration and stride length which, in turn, improves speed. The players move quickly from drill to drill, with an occasional three-minute break for water.

 

One exercise looks like something out of American Gladiators. Verstegen lays out a half dozen contraptions, each designed to test balance. There’s a foam rollerboard, a giant rubber “physio-ball,” and a skateboard with just one wheel – in the middle. The players and Verstegen each take a balance device and form a circle, then hurl a Nerf basketball around, trying to knock each other to the ground.

 

Some of the drills seem, well, less-than-manly. At one point, Verstegen has them scissor-kick over high hurdles. The drill, which works the hip flexors, makes the players look like a chorus line of Rockettes. “I could put you guys in short skirts and sell tickets,” Verstegen says.

 

As they work, Verstegen explains to them what they’re doing, how proper form keeps their bodies operating within the kinetic chain, which builds core stability, which in turn gives them more functional strength.

 

Garciaparra and Merloni, who have spent parts of four previous offseasons with Verstegen, just nod. Unlike Verstegen, they do not have multiple degrees in exercise and sports sciences, but they too talk in this same strange physio-speak. Garciaparra has heard Verstegen talk about the importance of “hip separation” for so long, he’s put it to song.

 

“Gotta keep ‘em separated,” he hums between turns on the hurdles.

 

Garciaparra can speak in depth about hip separation. Or the importance of running on the balls of the feet, with the toes slightly up, in order to better transfer the impact of the ground through the body, creating greater acceleration. Or the difference between “linear versus lateral explosiveness.”

 

“I can quote it, regurgitate it, demonstrate it, but I can’t do all this on my own,” Garciaparra says during a break. “Mark can push you to levels you never thought were possible. People ask me how I’m able to do what I do, being such a small guy. Mark has taught me how to utilize everything I’ve got and to build upon it. I look at what I’ve accomplished and I know I owe him a lot.”

 

Like seemingly everyone else in baseball, Garciaparra lifts weights and takes protein supplements and creatine. But he says it’s Verstegen’s specialized training that has transformed him from a 155-pound minor leaguer who was thought to have little power potential and just average range defensively to an all-around shortstop who has taken his place alongside preordained stars Derek Jeter of the Yankees and Seattle’s Alex Rodriguez.

 

These days, Garciparra carries 191 pounds on a frame that seems shorter than the listed height of 6-feet, but it’s deceiving. He still looks long and lanky, like a 170-pounder, having built muscle but not bulk. Baseball people marvel that while Garciaparra has gained size and power in recent years, he’s also become quicker and improved his range.

 

“You tell someone you went from 155 pounds to 190 and they can’t believe it’s possible while maintaining the same flexibility, movement and smoothness,” Garciaparra says. “But it’s all functional lifting for functional movement. I wasn’t here to gain weight; it just kept coming on.”

 

Verstegen calls the process “innervation,” putting lean muscle mass on the body in a manner that’s consistent with performing baseball-related movements.

 

“The challenge with Nomar was that he was light and needed more power,” Verstegen says. “But as he increased power, he also needed to increase speed so that he had greater range. Everything we’ve done has been has been geared toward that. But we didn’t make him; we just supported him to help him achieve his goal.”

 

Verstegen, 30, is one of several performance gurus who specialize in providing complete training facilities under one roof. But even though he’s building a business, Verstegen goes to great lengths to deflect praise back to his clients.

 

The website for his new “Athletes Performance Institute” does not mention his training of Garciaparra, tennis star Mary Pierce or Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers. There is no indication that he worked last year with Tim Couch for weeks leading up to a private workout with the Cleveland Browns that would convince team officials to take him with the No.1 pick. Nor is there any mention of the dozens of football players Verstegen has helped in recent years before the NFL combines, boosting their draft stock.

 

Before arriving in Arizona last fall, Verstegen spent four years as the director of the International Performance Institute, an athletic training center at the Nick Bollettieri Sports Academy, which is owned by the International Management Group sports agency. It was a dream job, training elite athletes in multi-million dollar facilities in a palm tree-lined campus setting in Bradenton, Fla.

 

But the entrepreneurial bug bit and now Verstegen is overseeing the construction of a 30,000 square foot training center on the Arizona State campus that he will own and operate. For now, he, his four-person staff, and clients use the school’s facilities, but he has grand visions of opening the new building, where athletes can come to train and work on maximizing performance.

 

Only the committed need apply. Verstegen requires his clients to sign a document pledging “maximum effort” and holds himself to the same high standards. He rises each day before 5 a.m., checks email, then puts himself through 90 minutes of the same hellish routines he imposes on his athletes. At 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, he still looks like the walk-on linebacker he once was at Washington State. With his steely blue eyes and a rapid-fire, wise-cracking banter that would make Dennis Leary envious, he commands attention.

 

“You want to work out extra hard just to show him how much you respect how hard he’s working,” says Merloni, who will play this season in Japan. “Look at me. I was a middling guy in the minor leagues. I came here, increased my power, speed and endurance and made it to the majors. I credit it to what I’ve done here over the years.”

 

Verstegen and Garciaparra go back even further. Garciaparra had hit just three home runs in each of his first two seasons at Georgia Tech when he met Verstegen, then a graduate student, in the fall of 1993. Garciaparra weighed just 150 pounds at the time, but after working with Verstegen hit 16 home runs during his junior year.

 

In 1995, after his first full year in the minors, Garciaparra was exhausted. Realizing he’d never survive a 162-game season if he could not make it through a shorter minor league campaign, he called Verstegen, who had gone to work with at Bollettieri.

 

Verstegen examined Garciaparra as if he were a candidate to become a fighter pilot. He looked at Garciaparra’s past training history and injuries. He examined his diet and percentage of body fat. He measured power output by having Garciaparra throw different sizes of medicine balls. Searching for signs of muscle imbalance, he had Garciaparra perform a series of slow squats holding a broomstick over his head.

 

Verstegen found that while Garciaparra had exceptional coordination, he lacked power and speed. So Verstegen outlined a program that borrowed from track and field training. He showed Garciaparra how to accelerate forward and sideways from a standstill and how to change directions as efficiently as possible. He had Garciaparra scamper over hurdles and around cones at increasing speeds to improve agility.

 

Once Garciaparra mastered that, he strapped on a harness attached to a bungee cord and had to field a rapid-fire succession of tennis balls, baseballs and rubber balls, all the while trying to maintain balance and fighting the resistance. “You take that off,” Garciaparra says, “and you feel like you can fly.”

 

Garciaparra ended up taking up residence alongside the tennis players and stayed four months. The following season he hit 16 home runs in just 172 at-bats at Triple-A before making his Major League debut. In 1997, he won American League Rookie of the Year honors by belting 30 home runs, a feat that stunned baseball executives that scouted him at Georgia Tech. His teammates, amazed at his new-found agility and quickness at shortstop, dubbed him “Spider Man.”

 

Garciaparra spent six weeks with Verstegen the next two offseasons in Florida, then made plans to come to Arizona this year once Verstegen moved. Each year, Garciaparra tells his agent not to schedule anything during his training period and makes himself scarce to everyone but family and close friends.

 

“This is my time to get mentally and physically ready with no distractions,” Garciaparra says. “This is what I need to carry myself through the season. If things go bad, they go bad. But this way I know I’ve done everything I can to prepare myself.”

 

Garciaparra’s days with Verstegen begin at 8:30, when he arrives in the locker room used by the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals at Sun Devil Stadium. He weighs in, then opens his training binder, a detailed journal Verstegen provides each of his clients to log everything from performance goals to energy levels to quality of sleep.

 

The first page is the maximum effort pledge, which Garciaparra has dutifully signed. Then there are a series of self-evaluations. Garciaparra has rated himself high for acceleration, body composition, lateral speed, absolute speed and eye/hand coordination, but low for balance and flexibility.

 

On another page, Garciaparra has chronicled his recent injury history. There are spreadsheets detailing each day’s workout, a vast matrix of sets and reps and times.

 

In the adjacent room, Verstegen has an even more elaborate breakdown on his laptop computer. He is preparing an email to Jason Varitek, the Red Sox catcher whom Verstegen has known since their time at Georgia Tech. Varitek normally would be here, but has remained at home tending to his wife and newborn daughter.

 

Verstegen prides himself on details and there’s little he can’t provide an athlete. He videotapes many drills and has physical and massage therapists on hand after workouts. He coordinates meals and nutritional supplements and places a huge emphasis on “regeneraton,” spending two days a week on drills designed to stimulate muscle recovery.

 

Then there’s the House of Pain. That’s what his baseball clients dubbed his weight room at the Bollettieri Academy. These days, they lift in a more modest facility at Arizona State’s basketball arena, but Verstegen has adapted.

 

For Verstegen, the weight room is not just a place to pump iron. Some days, the athletes don’t touch the equipment at all. Instead, they perform “plyometrics,” a rigorous series of lunges, squats and jumps. Or they toss heavy medicine balls against a concrete wall.

 

When they do hit the weights, Verstegen adds to the degree of difficulty. Instead of lying on a bench to perform dumbbell curls, they lie on a rubber physio-ball three feet in diameter, thereby building balance as well as strength. Instead of resting between sets, they do flexibility exercises.

 

Then there’s the not-so-minor matter of hitting in a batting cage and throwing, which the players do separately. Garciaparra says there’s nothing that can totally simulate the muscle movements he performs for the first time in months during the opening days of spring training. But any soreness and strain seems trivial after six weeks with Verstegen.

 

“My friends think I come to Arizona for a vacation, but this is the toughest time of the year in terms of physical demands on your body,” Garciaparra says. “If I can get through this, I know I can get through the season.”

 

Garciaparra says he’s amazed at Verstegen’s ability to come up with new routines and keep the workouts fresh. Matan, a first baseman/outfielder who played at Class A Rockford of the Midwest League last season, mentioned during a break between drills that he saw a picture on the Internet of a guy lifting a 25-pound weight, essentially with his crotch.

 

“Better not let Mark hear you talking about that,” Garciaparra says. “That might end up being tomorrow’s workout.”

 

 

 

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